Rebels of Gor (40 page)

“Sometimes things do not turn out as one expects,” said the shogun.

“Spare her,” I said.

“My plans were jeopardized,” said the shogun.

“Pity her,” I said.

“I am shogun,” he said.

“Did you not think she was haughty, and arrogant?” asked Lord Akio of me.

“That can be taken from a woman,” I said.

“How?” asked Lord Akio.

“By the collar, and the whip,” I said.

“Do not leave,” said the shogun.

“Proceed,” said one of the two Ashigaru on the platform to the distraught criminal on the narrow wooden path, “lest the shogun become impatient.”

Sumomo was then twice jabbed in the back, to urge her forward.

“Will you live one Ihn or several?” inquired one of the Ashigaru on the platform. “Dally, and you will be struck from the board.”

“No!” cried more than one man in the crowd. I suspected they had wagered on the matter, that the end of the board would be reached.

The other Ashigaru was looking down, toward us, presumably waiting to see if a small movement by the shogun, a nod, a lifted hand, a dismissive gesture, would signal that the criminal would be dislodged, to plunge to the pool below. To be sure, it was unlikely the shogun would do this, as it might too soon bring the business to its conclusion, prematurely terminating the tension, anticipation, and suspense which, one gathers, add much to the pleasures of the spectacle. In any event, the shogun remained attentive, but quiescent.

The second Ashigaru then, glaive in hand, returned his attention to the plight of the criminal.

“Move,” he told her.

Sumomo, half bent over, with great care, bound, blindfolded, barefoot, hort by hort, feeling ahead of her with each step, bit by bit, moved toward the end of the board. I supposed the board was rough to her bare feet. Those feet, I supposed, soft, smooth, and delicate, prior to her journey to the stadium, had encountered no surface harsher or more rugged than the floor of a bath or the polished, lacquered boards of a lady’s chamber. As she was moving, so carefully, so tentatively, so slowly, I was sure she would be able to detect the end of the board, when reached, wherever it might be. Then, as the crowd cried out, one foot was half off the width of the board. The board bent. Her body was unsteady. I feared she would tumble to the side, falling to the pool. “Fall!” cried a fellow. It was not difficult to suppose the nature of the wager he had made. Then, as the crowd cried out, she righted herself. “No,” said the fellow, dismally, he who had called out. Yet, surely, his wager was not yet lost. I could almost sense Sumomo trembling, and trying to breathe, teetering on the narrow, unstable support which held her from the pool far below, that bending, narrow, unsteady bridge lacking a farther shore. She wavered. She had no clear sense of where she was. She had apparently moved too close to the edge of the board. I supposed, assuming she had been psychologically capable of registering such things, even in a state of presumed terror and stress, she would have had a sense of the board’s width before her blindfolding. Similarly, she might be reasonably assured that the Ashigaru on the platform would have made certain that her precarious journey would be well begun. On the other hand, it is extremely unlikely that one, bound, and blindfolded, in traversing such a board, foot by foot, could keep to an undeviating, centered, linear path.

“Move!” ordered the first Ashigaru on the platform.

She moved a hort forward.

“Straighten your body!” he said.

“Move,” said the second Ashigaru.

“How long is the board?” asked the first. “Are you near its end? Perhaps, perhaps not. Are there two steps remaining, are there five? Move. Do not fear. You will know when you reach the end of the board. It is easy to tell. You will step into nothing! Then you will fall, and, after a time, bathe with your friends below. Have no fear! They will welcome you! Let us not keep them waiting. Move! Move!”

Sumomo was now at the end of the board.

I decided not to watch.

“Move!” said the first Ashigaru.

“Now!” said the second.

I looked away, up, at the blue sky, the white clouds. On the high walls, encircling the stands, fluttered the narrow, rectangular banners of Lord Yamada, marked with the strange script, vertically aligned, of the Pani syllabary in which, though I could not read the script, were transcribed the phonemes of intelligible Gorean. The same phonemes, obviously, can be transcribed by means of an indefinite number of scripts. I recalled the flowing, lovely script of the Tahari, in which the phonemes of Gorean were also meticulously transcribed. The banners were a brave sight.

I supposed the day was pleasant enough, as Lord Akio had suggested; it was neither too warm nor too cold, and the sky was a bright, an unblemished, cloudless blue. Too, as noted, there was a slight, refreshing breeze.

But wait, the sky, I noted, was not unblemished. There was, high above, a dot, something moving.

“Ho!” I cried. I rose to my feet, looking upward. I pointed. “Beware!” I cried. “Do not move!” I cried to Sumomo. “Do not move!”

“Move!” cried one of the Ashigaru on the platform to Sumomo.

“Do not move!” I cried.

Beside me, Lord Akio, the shogun, and nearby officers, rose up, ignoring what might be the compromise to their dignity, following my gaze.

“It is an assassin!” cried Lord Akio, snapping open his war fan to shield the shogun.

“No!” I said. “It is a tarnsman, out for sport, out for chain luck!”

The shogun, angrily, thrust aside the war fan.

“What is chain luck?” inquired Lord Akio.

“See!” cried an officer. “It is diving!”

The bird was not diving, not from the ambush of the sun, as it might strike the unsuspecting tabuk, commonly breaking its back, but, wings spread was engaged in a soaring descent.

It was approaching rapidly.

The tarn is very beautiful in flight. It is little wonder that men will risk their lives to join such fellows in the sky.

Many in the crowd, now, were aware of the disturbance, the impending arrival of an uninvited guest. I did not doubt but what the brave, displayed, fluttering banners of Lord Yamada had well proclaimed the venue of the afternoon’s fearful proceedings.

“Summon Tyrtaios!” called the shogun. “He must be in the saddle within Ehn!”

Haruki, I thought, wildly, had not failed! The tiny message, fastened to the left foot of the vulo, held in its flight against its belly, half hidden in its plumage, days ago, had made its way to the cot in the holding of Temmu!

Suddenly the vast shadow of the mighty bird darkened the stands, and put in flickering, tumultuous shade the disquiet waters of the wide pool, for the tarnsman had pulled the bird up short, and, wings beating, holding its place, the bird shuddered, and hovered but yards below the high board.

“Jump, slave!” screamed Tajima.

Surely he knew she was not a slave!

Crying out in confusion, and misery, Sumomo, obedient, bound and blindfolded, leaped from the board’s edge into nothing, and plummeted downward, the skirt of her sheetlike garment torn high about her thighs, and was caught in the arms of Tajima, who threw her on her belly to the saddle apron and wheeled the tarn to the right, and upward, and, as two glaives, hurled from the platform, passed him, one below, and one to the left, spun the bird about and streaked from the stadium.

Consternation reigned below.

“Tyrtaios to the saddle!” cried the shogun.

Tajima, I noted, had addressed the hapless criminal as “slave,” had addressed her by this lowest and most degraded of appellations, so utterly and keenly meaningful to a woman, and it was under this demeaning designation that she had unhesitantly responded, obedient to his command.

I smiled to myself.

She had obeyed under the designation, “slave.” She had obeyed as immediately and unquestioningly as a new purchase, entered into the domicile of her master.

Did she realize what she had done?

Did she even know, in her helplessness, who had issued the command? Surely it could not be the loathed Tajima, for whom she entertained only contempt.

I watched the tarn climb and depart, and, soon, it was little more than a dot in the sky.

Many were now crowding out of the stadium.

Sumomo, I now realized, though I was not surprised, had lovely legs. This had been clear enough in her leap downward, in which the light garment in which she had been placed, lifted, had billowed about her, trailing her leaping body. Too, when Tajima had put her to her belly, flinging her to the saddle apron before him, holding her in place with his left hand, while grasping the tarn reins in his right hand, he had apparently given little thought to the modesty due to a shogun’s daughter. So high on her thighs was the disarranged garment that she might have been a scarcely clad slave, briefly tunicked, taken from a high bridge, awaiting her turning to her back.

Yes, I thought, Sumomo might bring a good price off a slave block.

“What is chain luck?” asked Lord Akio.

“That,” I said, pointing to the sky, and the departing tarn, now scarcely visible, with its rider and prisoner.

“I do not understand,” said Lord Akio.

“One of the first missions of a young tarnsman,” I said, “is to capture a young woman from an enemy city, one with an alien Home Stone. She is taken home and collared. At his victory feast she dances, and serves him, he first, of all present. She then serves others, as his slave. That night, chained to her master’s couch, she is taught her collar. She may thereafter be kept as a personal slave, or given away, or sold. It is up to her master.”

“It is done thus on the continent?” asked Lord Akio.

“Such things are not unprecedented,” I said.

“This is not the continent,” said Lord Akio.

“Tajima,” I said, “is familiar with the ways of the continent.”

“Sumomo,” he said, “is a free woman.”

“But what if she should be collared?” I said.

“Unthinkable,” he said.

“But, if so?” I said.

“Then she is worthless,” he said, “only a slave.”

“Precisely,” I said.

I considered the bared legs of Sumomo. By now, I suspected she was on her back, stretched over the saddle apron, buckled in place, wrists and ankles.

“Most regrettable,” said Lord Akio.

“Many do not find it so,” I said.

“I do not understand,” he said.

“It is nothing,” I said.

On the continent, free women, in public, particularly those of the upper castes, are muchly concealed. There are the robes of concealment, the veils, the gloves, the slippers, and such. If a free woman had been as much exposed as Sumomo, she might, in her humiliation, repudiate her compromised, outraged freedom, and seek the collar, regarding herself as now worthy of no more. In the high cities, free women are not permitted in paga taverns. If one is found within the precincts, she is often stripped and put out, into the street. Then, commonly, she begs to be admitted once more, then to know the iron and be fastened in the collar. It is difficult to know about women. Why do some undertake perilous journeys, wander outside guarded walls, frequent lonely streets in poor districts, insult strangers, as though it might be done with impunity, walk the high bridges unescorted in the moonlight, and such? This is sometimes spoken of as “courting the collar.” It is almost as though they wished to find themselves at the feet of a master.

There were few left now in the stands.

I was uneasy that Tajima had taken the tarn so high into the sky, and flown north.

Surely those of Lord Yamada, Tyrtaios, and, I thought, one other, for he had two tarns at his disposal, might soon be aflight. Those birds would be rested. Tajima’s tarn might have been aflight for an Ahn or more, I did not know, and it was carrying two.

I would have kept the tarn low, for that reduces sightings, and would not have struck out directly north, which suggests a narrow route which might be swiftly determined and followed. It would have been better, I supposed, to go a different direction, and then another, and another, and then, possibly, approach the holding of Temmu, or the tarn encampment, if one wished, from the east, west, or even north. This considerably enlarges the territory which would have to be considered by pursuers, and there would be aflight, at least as far as I knew, at most two.

How soon, I wondered, might Tyrtaios, and perhaps another, be asaddle. Surely Tajima must have considered the possibility of pursuit. I feared he would be an unlikely match for the dangerously skilled Tyrtaios, who, I was confident, was of the black caste, trained in tenacity and guile. The entitlements appertaining to the black dagger are not bestowed lightly. One earns one’s position in the black ranks by slaying one’s competitors.

I must move swiftly.

The masked Ashigaru, Lord Yamada’s secret death squad, the ten who had been waiting at the foot of the platform, and the two who had taken Sumomo to its perilous height, had now departed the stadium.

I must move swiftly, indeed.

Haruki had risked much for me.