Perhaps it was my wild, almost demented laughter that attracted the tare. I saw him coming, making his silent strike with the sun at his back, his talons extended like hooks. Savagely those vast talons struck and closed on my body, forcing the frame for an instant beneath the water, then the tam was beating the air angrily with his wings, struggling to lift his prey, and suddenly both myself and the heavy frame were pulled free from the water. The sudden weight of the frame swinging against my roped wrists and ankles, while the talons of the bird gripped my body, almost tore me apart. Then, mercifully, the ropes, not meant to sustain the weight of the heavy frame, broke loose, and the tam triumphantly climbed skyward, still clutching me in his wild talons.
I would have a few moments more of life, the same brief reprieve nature grants the mouse carried by the hawk to its nest; then on some barren crag my body would be torn to pieces by the beast whose prey I was. The taro, a brown tarn with a black crest like most wild tarns, streaked for that vague, distant smudge I knew marked the escarpments of some mountain wilderness. The Vosk became a broad, glimmering ribbon in the distance.
Far below, I could see that the burned, dead Margin of Desolation was dotted here and there with patches of green, where some handfuls of seed had blindly asserted themselves, reclaiming something of that devastated country for life and growth. Near one of the green stretches I saw what I first thought was a shadow, but as the tarn passed, it scattered into a scampering flock of tiny creatures, probably the small, three-toed mammals called qualae, dun-colored and with a stiff brushy mane of black hair.
As nearly as I could determine, we did not pass over or near the great highway that ran to the Vosk. Had we done so, I might have seen the war horde of Pa-Kur on its way to Ar, with its marching columns, its lines of tharlarion riders, its foraging cavalries of tarnsmen, its supply wagons and pack animals. And somewhere in that vast array, among the flags and the booming of tam drums, would have been the girl who had betrayed me.
As well as I could, I opened and closed my hands and moved my feet, trying to restore in them some semblance of feeling. The flight of the tam was serene, and I, grateful to be free at last of the painful Frame of Humiliation, found myself, strangely enough, almost reconciled to the savage but swift fate I knew awaited me.
But suddenly the flight of the tam became much more rapid and then in another minute almost erratic and frenzied. He was fleeing! I twisted about in his claws, and my heart seemed to jerk spasmodically in my breast. My hair froze as I heard the shrill, angry cry of another taro; he was an enormous creature as sable as the helmet of Pa-Kur, his wings beating like whips, bearing down relentlessly on my captor. My bird swerved dizzily, and the great assailant's talons passed harmlessly Then he attacked again, and my bird swerved again, but the attacking tarn had allowed for the maneuver, compensating for it an instant before my own bird turned, with the result that it met my bird in full collision.
I was conscious in that mad, terrible instant of the flash of steel-shod talons at the breast of my bird, and then my bird shook as though seized with a convulsion and opened his talons. I began to drop toward the wastes below. In that wild instant I saw my bird beginning to fall, flopping downward, and saw his attacker wheeling in my direction. Falling, I twisted madly, unsupported in the air, a wordless cry of anguish in my throat, and watched in horror as the ground seemed to rush upward to meet me. But I never reached it, for the attacking bird had swooped to intercept me and seized me in his beak much as one gull might seize a fish dropped. by another. The beak, curved like an instrument of war, slit with its narrow nostrils, closed on my body, and I was once more the prize of a tarn.
Soon my swift captor had reached his mountains, and the vague, distant smudge that I had seen had become a lonely, frightening, inaccessible wilderness of reddish cliffs. High on a sunlit mountain ledge, the sable tam dropped me to the sticks and brush of its nest and set one steel shod taloned foot across my body, to hold me steady as the great beak did its work. As the beak reached down for me, I managed to get one leg between it and my body and kicked it back, cursing wildly.
The sound of my voice had an unusual effect on the bird. He tilted his head to one side quizzically. I shouted at him again and again. And then, fool that I was, half demented with hunger and terror, I only then realized that the tarn was none other than my own! I shoved on the steel-shod foot that pressed me into the sticks of the nest, uttering my command with ringing authority. The bird lifted his foot and backed away, still uncertain as to what to do. I sprang to my feet, standing well within the reach of his beak, showing no fear. I slapped his beak affectionately, as if we were in a tarn cot, and shoved my hands into his neck feathers, the area where the tam can't preen, as the tarn keepers do when searching for parasites.
I withdrew some of the lice, the size of marbles, which tend to infest wild tams, and slapped them roughly into the mouth of the tarn, wiping them off on his tongue. I did this again and again, and the tam stretched out his neck. The saddle and reins of the tam were no longer. on the bird and had undoubtedly rotted off or had been rubbed from his back by scraping against the rock escarpment backing its nest ledge. After a few minutes of my ministrations the taro, satisfied, spread his wings and took flight, to continue the search for food which had been interrupted. Apparently, in his limited fashion, he no longer conceived of me as being in the immediate category of the edible. That he might soon change his mind, particularly if he found nothing on the plains below, was only too obvious. I cursed because I had lost the" tarp-goad in the quicksands of Ar's swamp forest. I examined the ledge for some means of escape, but the cliffs above and below were almost smooth.
Suddenly a great shadow covered the ledge. My tarn. j had returned. I looked up and, to my horror, saw that it was not my tarn. It was another tarp, a wild tarn. He lit on the ledge, snapping his beak. This time I had none of the careful conditioning of the tam keepers working in my favor.
I frantically looked about for a weapon, and then, hardly believing my eyes, I saw, woven roughly into the nest sticks, the remains of my harness and saddle. I seized my spear from the saddle sheath and turned. The beast had waited a moment too long; he had been too confident' of his trapped quarry. As he stalked forward, oblivious of the spear, I hurled the broad-headed weapon deep into his breast. His legs gave way, and his body, wings outspread, sank to the granite flooring of the ledge. Head jerking and eyes glassy, the bird twitched and trembled uncontrollably — a cluster of spasmodic reflexes. He had died the instant the spear had entered his heart. I withdrew the weapon and, using it as a lever, rolled the twitching body to the brink of the ledge and sent it flopping to the depths below.
I returned to the nest and salvaged what I could of the tarn harness and saddle. The crossbow and longbow, with their respective missiles, were nowhere in evidence. The shield was also gone. With the spear blade I cut into the locked saddle pack. It contained, as I'd known it would, the Home Stone of Ar. It was unimpressive, small, flat, and of a dull brown color. Carved on it, crudely, was a single letter in an archaic Gorean script, that single letter which, in the old spelling, would have been the name of the city. At the time the stone was carved, Ar, in all probability, had been one of dozens of inconspicuous villages on the plains of Gor.
Impatiently I set the stone aside. The pack also contained, and more importantly from my point of view, the balance of my supplies, intended for the home flight to Ko-ro-ba. The first thing I did was unseal one of the two water flasks and open the dried rations. And there on that windy ledge, in that abode of the tarn, I ate the meal that satisfied me as no other had ever done, though it consisted only of some mouthfuls of water, some stale biscuits, and a wrapper of dried meat.