Some wisps of dust swirled past like animals sniffing about the feet of the bodies. A door on one of the sheds, its lock broken, swung loose on its hinges, banging in the wind.
I walked across the compound and picked up a helmet which lay half hidden in the litter. Its straps were broken but they could be knotted together. i wondered if it had been noticed by the slaves.
I had sought equipment, but I had found only a scabbard and a damaged helmet, and soon the tarnsmen of Tharna would arrive. Using the Warrior" s Pace, a slow jog that can be prolonged for hours, I left the Compound of the Mines.
I had only reached the shelter of a line of trees when I saw, some thousand yards behind me, descending on the Compound of the Mines, like clouds of wasps, the tarnsmen of Tharna.
It was in the vicinity of the Pillar of Exchanges, three days later, that I found the tarn. I had seen its shadow and feared it was wild, and had prepared to sell my life dearly, but the great beast, my own plumed giant, who may have haunted the Pillar of Exchanges for weeks, settled on the plains no more than thirty yards from me, its great wings shaking, and stalked to my side.
It was for this reason that I had returned to the Pillar, hoping that perhaps the monster might linger in its vicinity. There was good hunting nearby, and the ridges where I had carried the Tatrix afforded shelter for its nest.
When it approached me and extended its head, I wondered if what I had dared not hope might be true, that the bird might have been waiting for me to return.
He offered no resistance, he showed no anger, when I leaped to his back and cried, as before, "One-strap!" at which signal, with a shrill cry and a mighty spring, those gigantic wings cracked like whips and beat their way aloft in the glory of flight.
As we passed over the Pillar of Exchanges I remembered that it was there I had been betrayed by she who was once Tatrix of Tharna. I wondered what had been her fate. I wondered too at her treachery, her strange hatred of me, for somehow it seemed not to fit well with the lonely girl on the ledge, who had stood quietly gazing at the field of talenders while a warrior had gorged himself on the kill of his tarn. Then, again, my memory blackened with fury at the thought of her imperious gesture, that insolent command, "Seize him!"
Whatever her fate, I insisted to myself that it would have been richly deserved. Yet I found myself hoping that perhaps she had not been destroyed. I wondered what vengeance would have satisfied the hatred borne to Lara, the Tatrix, by Dorna the Proud. I guessed unhappily that she might have had Lara hurled into a pit of osts or watched her boil alive in the foul oil of tharlarions. Perhaps she would have been thrown naked into the clutches of the insidious leech plants of Gor or have had her fed to the giant urts in the dungeons beneath her own palace. I knew the hatred of men is but a feeble thing compared to the hatred of women, and I wondered how much it would take to slake the thirst for vengeance of such a woman as Dorna the Proud. What would have been enough to satisfy her?
It was now the month of the vernal equinox on Gor, called En" Kara, or the First Kara. The full expression is En" Kara- Lar-Torvis, which means, rather literally, The First Turning of the Central Fire. Lar-Torvis is a Gorean expression for the sun. More commonly, though never in the context of time, the sun is referred to a Tor-tu-Gor, or Light Upon the Home Stone. The month of the autumnal equinox is called fully Se" Kara-Lar-Torvis, but usually simply Se" Kara, The Second Kara, or the Second Turning. As might be expected there are related expressions for the months of the solstices, En" Var-Lar-Torvis and Se" Var-Lar- Torvis, or, again rather literally, The First Resting and the Second Resting of the Central Fire. These however, like the other expressions, usually occur in speech only as En" Var and Se" Var, or The First Resting and The Second Resting. Chronology, incidentally, is the despair of scholars on Gor, for each city keeps track of time by virtue of its own Administrator Lists; for example, a year is referred to as the Second Year when so-and-so was Administrator of the City. One might think that some stability would be provided by the Initiates who must keep a caldendar of their feasts and observances, but the Initiates of one city do not always celebrate the same feast on the same day as do those of another city. If the High Initiate of Ar should ever succeed in extending his hegemony over the High Initiates of rival cities, a hegemony which he claims he possesses already incidentally, a unified calendar might be introduced. But so far there has been no military victory of Ar over other cities and, accordingly, free of the sword, the Initiates of each city regard themselves as supreme within their own walls. There are, however, some factors which tend to reduce the hopelessness of the situation. One is the fairs at the Sardar Mountains, which occur four times a year and are numbered chronologically. The other is that sometimes cities are willing to add, in their records, beside their own dating, the dating of Ar, which is Gor" s greatest city.
Chronology in Ar is figured, happily enough, not from its Administrator Lists, but from its mythical foundings by the first man on Gor, a hero whom the Priest-Kings are said to have formed from the mud of the earth and the blood of tarns. Times is reckoned "Constanta Ar", or "from the founding of Ar." The year, according to the calendar of Ar, if it is of interest, is 10,117. Actually I would suppose that Ar may not be a third of that age. Its Home Stone, however, which I have seen, attests to a considerable antiquity.
Some four days after I had recovered the tarn, we sighted in the distance the Sardar Mountains. Had I possessed a Gorean compass, its needle would have pointed invariably to those mountains, as though to indicate the home of the Priest- Kings. Before the mountains, in a panorama of silk and flags, I saw the pavilions of the Fair of En" Kara, or the Fair of the First Turning.
I wheeled the tarm in the sky, not wanting to approach more closely yet. I looked upon those mountains which I now saw for the first time. A chill not of the high winds which buffeted me on tarnback now crept into my body. The mountains of the Sardar were not such a vast, magnificent range as the rugged scarlet crags of the Voltai, that almost impenetrable mountains vastness in which I had once been the prisoner of the outlaw Ubar, Marlenus of Ar, ambitious and warlike father of the fierce and beautiful Talena, she whom I loved, whom I had carried on tarnback to ko-ro-ba years before to be my Free Companion. No, the Sardar Range was not the superb natural wilderness that was the Voltai. Its peaks did not scorn the plains below. Its heights did not taunt the sky nor, in the cold of the night, defy the stars. In it would not be heard the cry of tarns and the roar of larls. It was inferior to the Voltai in both dimension and grandeur. Yet when I looked upon it, more than the gloriously savage, larl-haunted Voltai, I feared it.
I took the tarn closer.
The mountains before me were black, except for the high peaks and passes, which showed white patches and threads of cold, gleaming snow. I looked for the green of vegetation on the lower slopes and saw none. In the Sardar Range nothing grew.
There seemed to be a menace, and intangible fearful effect about those angular shapes in the distance. I took the tarn as high as I could, until his wings beat frantically against the thin air, but could see nothing in the Sardar Mountains that might be the habitation of Priest-Kings. I wondered — an eerie suspicion that suddenly swept through me — if the Sardar Mountains might actually be empty — if there might be nothing, simply nothing but the wind and the snow in those gloomy mountains, and if me worshipped, unknowingly, nothing. What of the interminable prayers of the Initiates, the sacrifices, the observances, the rituals, the innumerable shrines, altars and temples to the Priest- Kings? Could it be that the smoke of the burning sacrifices, the fragrance of the incense, the mumbling of the Initiates, their prostrations and grovellings were all addressed to nothing but the empty peaks of the Sardar, to the snow, and the cold and the wind that howled among those black crags?