hour, or midnight, I was to drop to the roof of the highest cylinder in Ar, slay the daughter of the Ubar, and carry away her body and the Home Stone, discarding the former in the swamp country north of Ar and carrying the latter home to Ko-ro-ba. The girl, Sana, whom I carried on the saddle before me, would dress in the heavy robes and veils of the Ubar's daughter and return in her place to the interior of the cylinder. Presumably, it would be at least a matter of minutes before her identity was discovered, and, before that, she would take the poison provided by the Council.
Two girls were supposed to die that I might have time to escape with the Home Stone before the alarm could be given. In my heart I knew I would not carry out this plan. Abruptly I changed course, drawing on the four-strap, guiding my tarn toward the blue, shimmering wave of a mountain range in the distance. The girl before me groaned and shook herself, her hands, unsteady, going to the slave hood, which was buckled over her head.
I helped her unbuckle the hood and felt delighted at the sudden flash of her long blond hair streaking out beside my cheek. I placed the hood in the saddle pack, admiring her, not only her beauty but even more that she did not. seem frightened. Surely there was enough to frighten any girl — the height at which she found herself, the savage mount on which she rode, the prospect of the terrible fate that she believed to await her at our journey's end. But she was, of course, a girl of mountainous Thentis, famed for its fierce taro flocks. Such a girl would not frighten easily.
She didn't turn to look at me, but she examined her wrists, rubbing them gently. The marks of the original restraining straps, which I had removed, were just visible.
'You unbound me,' she said. 'And you removed my hood — why?'
'I thought you would be more comfortable,' I replied.
'You treat a slave with unexpected consideration,' she said. 'Thank you.'
'You're not — frightened?' I asked, stumbling on the words, feeling stupid. 'I mean — about the tarn. You must have ridden taros before. I was frightened my first time.'
The girl looked back at me, puzzled. 'Women are seldom permitted to ride on the backs of tarns,' she said. 'In the carrying baskets, but not as a warrior rides.' She paused, and the wind whistled past, a steady sound mingling with the rhythmical stroke of the tarn's beating wings. 'You said you were frightened — when you first rode a taro,' she said.
'I was,' I laughed, recalling the excitement and the sense of danger.
'Why do you tell a slave that you were frightened?' she asked.
'I don't know,' I replied. 'But I was'
She turned her head away again and looked, unseeing, at the head of the great tarn as he plowed the wind.
'I did ride once before on the back of a tarn,' she said bitterly, 'to Ar, bound across the saddle, before I was sold in the Street of Brands.'
It was not easy to talk on the back of the great taro, with the wind, and, besides, though I wanted to communicate with the girl, I felt I could not.
She was looking at the horizon, and suddenly her body tensed. 'This is not the way to Ar,' she cried.
'I know,' I said.
'What are you doing?' She turned bodily in the straps, looking at me, her eyes wide. 'Where are you going, Master?'
The word 'Master,' though it had come appropriately enough from the girl, who was, legally at least, my property, startled me.
'Don't call me Master,' I said.
'But you are my Master,' she said.
I took from my tunic the key my father had given me, the key to Sana 's collar. I reached to the lock behind her neck, inserted the key and turned it, springing open the mechanism. I jerked the collar away from her throat and threw it and the key from the tarn's back and watched them fly downward in a long, graceful parabola.
'You are free,' I said. 'And we are going to Thentis.
She sat before me, stunned, her hands unbelievingly at her throat. 'Why?' she asked. 'Why?'
What could I tell her? That I had come from another world, that I was determined that all the ways of Gor should not be mine, or that I had cared for her, somehow, so helpless in her condition — that she had moved me to regard her not as an instrumentality of mine or of the Council, but as a girl, young, rich with life, not to be sacrificed in the games of statecraft?
'I have my reasons for freeing you,' I said, 'but I am not sure that you would understand them,' and I added, under my breath, to myself, that I was not altogether sure I understood them myself.
'My father,' she said, 'and my brothers will reward you.'
'No,' I said.
'If you wish, they are bound in honor to grant me to you, without bride price.'
'The ride to Thentis will be long,' I said.
She replied proudly, 'My bride price would be a hundred tarns.'
I whistled softly to myself — my ex-slave would have come high. On a Warrior's allowance I would not have been able to afford her.
'If you wish to land,' said Sana, apparently determined to see me compensated in some fashion, 'I will serve your pleasure.'
It occurred to me that there was at least one reply which she, bred in the honor codes of Gor, should under stand, one reply that should silence her. 'Would you diminish the worth of my gift to you?' I asked, feigning anger.
She thought for a moment and then gently kissed me on the lips. 'No, Tarl Cabot of Ko-ro-ba,' she said, 'but you well know that I could do nothing that would diminish the worth of your gift to me. Tarl Cabot, I care for you.'
I realized that she had spoken to me as a free woman, using my name. I put my arms around her, sheltering her as well as I could from the swift, chilling blast of the wind. Then I thought to myself, a hundred tarns indeed! Forty perhaps, because she was a beauty. For a hundred tarns one might have the daughter of an Administrator, for a thousand perhaps even the daughter of the Ubar of Ar! A thousand tarns would make a formidable addition to the cavalry force of a Gorean warlord. Sana, collar or no, had the infuriating, endearing vanity of the young and beautiful of her sea.
On a tower of Thentis I left her, kissing her, removing from my neck her clinging hands. She was crying, with all the incomprehensible absurdity of the female kind. I hauled the tarn aloft, waving back at the small figure still wearing the diagonally striped livery of the slave. Her white arm was lifted, and her blond hair was swept behind her on the windy roof of the cylinder. I turned the tare toward Ar.
As I crossed the Vosk, that mighty river, some forty pasangs in width, which hurtles past the frontiers of Ar to pour into the Tamber Gulf, I realized that I was at last within the borders of the Empire of Ar. Sana had insisted that I keep the pellet of poison which the Council had given her to spare her from the otherwise inevitable tortures that would follow the disclosure of her identity in the cylinders of Ar. However, I took the pellet from my tunic and dropped it into the wide waters of the Vosk. It constituted a temptation to which I had no inclination to succumb. If death was easy, I might seek life less strenuously. There would come times when, in my weakness, I would regret my decision.
It took three days to reach the environs of the city of Ar. Shortly after crossing the Vosk, I had descended and made camp, thereafter traveling only at night. During the day I freed my tarn, to allow him to feed as he would. They are diurnal hunters and eat only what they catch themselves, usually one of the fleet Gorean antelopes or a wild bull, taken on the run and lifted in the monstrous talons to a high place, where it is torn to pieces and devoured. Needless to say, tares are a threat to any living matter that is luckless enough to fall within the shadow of their wings, even human beings.
During the first day, sheltered in the occasional knots of trees that dot the border plains of Ar, I slept, fed on my rations, and practiced with my weapons, trying to keep my muscles vital in spite of the stiffness that attends prolonged periods on tarnback. But I was bored. At first even the countryside was depressing, for the men of Ar, as a military policy, had devastated an area of some two or three hundred pasangs on their borders, cutting down fruit trees, filling wells, and salting the fertile areas. Ar had, for most practical purposes, surrounded itself with an
