Could I, Tarl Cabot, a human and mortal, find this object and, as Priest-Kings now wished, return it to the SardarA return it to the hidden courts of Priest-Kings that it might there fulfill its unique and irreplaceable role in the destiny of this barbaric world, Gor, our Counter-Earth?
I did not know.
What is this object?
One might speak of it as many things, the subject of secret, violent intrigues; the source of vast strifes beneath the Sardar, strifes unknown to the men of Gor; the concealed, precious, hidden hope of an incredible and ancient race; a simple germ; a bit of living tissue; the dormant potentiality of a people's rebirth, the seed of godsAan eggAthe last and only egg of Priest-Kings.
But why was it I who came?
Why not Priest-Kings in their ships and power, with their fierce weapons and fantastic devices?
Priest-Kings cannot stand the sun.
They are not as men and men, seeing them, would fear them.Men would not believe they were Priest-Kings. Men con- ceive Priest-Kings as they conceive themselves.
The object the egg might be destroyed before it could be delivered to them.
It might already have been destroyed.
Only that the egg was the egg of Priest-Kings gave me occasion to suspect, to hope, that somehow within that mys- terious, presumably ovoid sphere, if it still entwisted, quiescent but latent, there might be life.
And if I should find the object, why should I not myself destroy it, and destroy thereby the race of Priest-Kings, giving this world to my own kind, to men, to do with as they pleased, unrestricted by the laws and decrees of Priest-Kings that so limited their development, their technology? Once I had spoken to a Priest-King of these things. He had said to me, 'Man is a larl to man; if we permitted him, he would be so to Priest-Kings as well.'
'But man must be free,' I had said.
'Freedom without reason is suicide,' had said the Priest King, adding, 'Man is not yet rational.'
But I would not destroy the egg, not only because it contained life, but because it was important to my friend, whose name was Misk and is elsewhere spoken of; much of the life of that brave creature was devoted to the dream of a new life for Priest-Kings, a new stock, a new beginning; a readiness to relinquish his place in an old world to prepare a mansion for the new; to have and love a child, so to speak, for Misk, who is a Priest-King, neither male nor female, yet can love.
I recalled a windy night in the shadow of the Sardar when we had spoken of strange things, and I had left him and come down the hill, and had asked the leader of those with whom I had traveled the way to the Land of the Wagon Peoples.
I had found it.
The dust rolled nearer, the ground seemed more to move than ever.
I pressed on.
Perhaps if I were successful I might save my race, by preserving the Priest-Kings that might shelter them from the annihilation that might otherwise be achieved if uncontrolled technological development were too soon permitted them; perhaps in time man would grow rational, and reason and love and tolerance would wax in him and he and Priest-Kings might together turn their senses to the stars.
But I knew that more than anything I was doing this for Misk, who was my friend.
The consequences of my act, if I were successful, were too complex and fearful to calculate, the factors involved being so numerous and obscure.
If it turned out badly, what I did, I would have no defense other than that I did what I did for my friend for him and for his brave kind, once hated enemies, whom I had learned to know and respect.
There is no loss of honor in failing to achieve such a task, I told myself. It is worthy of a warrior of the caste of Warriors, a swordsman of the high city of Ko-ro-ba, the Towers of the Morning.
Tal, I might say, in greeting, I am Tart Cabot of Ko-ro-ba; I bring no credentials, no proofs; I come from the Priest-Kings; I would like to have the object which was brought to you from them; they would now like it back; Thank you; farewell.
I laughed.
I would say little or nothing.
The object might not even be with the Wagon Peoples any longer.
And there were four Wagon Peoples, the Paravaci, the Kataii, the Kassars, and the dreaded Tuchuks.
Who knew with which people the object might have been placed?
Perhaps it had been hidden away and forgotten?
Perhaps it was now a sacred object, little understood, but revered and it would be sacrilege to think of it, blasphemy to speak its Barge, a cruel and slow death even to cast one's eyes upon it.
And if I should manage to seize it, how could I carry it away?I had no tarn, one of Gor's fierce saddlebirds; I had not even the monstrous high tharlarion, used as the mounts of shock cavalry by the warriors of some cities.
I was afoot, on the treeless southern plains of Gor, on the Plains of Turia, in the Land of the Wagon Peoples. The Wagon Peoples, it is said, slay strangers.
The words for stranger and enemy in Gorean are the same.
I would advance openly.
If I were found on the plains near the camps or the bosk herds I knew I would be scented out and slain by the do- mesticated, nocturnal herd sleen, used as shepherds and sentinels by the Wagon Peoples, released from their cages with the falling of darkness.
These animals, trained prairie sleen, move rapidly and silently, attacking upon no other provocation than trespass on what they have decided is their territory. They respond only to the voice of their master, and when he is killed pr dies, his animals are slain and eaten.
There would be no question of night spying on the Wagon Peoples.
I knew they spoke a dialect of Gorean, and I hoped I would be able to understand them.
If I could not I must die as befitted a swordsman of Ko-ro-ba.
I hoped that I would be granted death in battle, if death it must be. The Wagon Peoples, of all those on Gor that I know, are the only ones that have a clan of torturers, trained as carefully as scribes or physicians, in the arts of detaining life.
Some of these men have achieved fortune and fame in various Gorean cities, for their services to Initiates and Ubars, and others with an interest in the arts of detection and persuasion. For some reason they have all worn hoods. It is said they remove the hood only when the sentence is death, so that it is only condemned men who have seen whatever it is that lies beneath the hood.
I was surprised at the distance I had been from the herds, for though I had seen the rolling dust clearly, and had felt and did feel the shaking of the earth, betraying the passage of those monstrous herds, I had not yet come to them. But now I could hear, carried on the wind blowing toward distant Turia, the bellowing of the basks. The dust was now heavy like nightfall in the air. The grass and the earth seemed to quake beneath my tread.
I passed fields that were burning, and burning huts of peasants, the smoking shells of Sa-Tarna granaries, the shat- tered, slatted coops for vulos, the broken walls of keeps for the small, long-haired domestic verr, less belligerent and sizeable than the wild verr of the Voltai Ranges.
Then for the first time, against the horizon, a jagged line, humped and rolling like thundering waters, seemed to rise alive from the prairie, vast, extensive, a huge arc, churning and pounding from one corner of the sky to the other, the herds of the Wagon Peoples, encircling, raising dust into the sky like fire, like hoofed glaciers of fur and horn moving in shaggy floods across the grass, toward me.
And then I saw the first of the outriders, moving toward me, swiftly yet not seeming to hurry. I saw the slender line of his light lance against the sky, strapped across his back. I could see he carried a small, round, leather shield, glossy, black, lacquered; he wore a conical, fur-rimmed iron helmet, a net of colored chains depending from the helmet protecting his face, leaving only holes for the eyes. He wore a quilted jacket and under this a leather jerkin; the jacket was trimmed with fur and had a fur collar; his boots were made of hide and also trimmed with fur; he had a wide, five-buckled belt. I could not see his face because of the net of chain that hung before it. I also noted, about his throat, now lowered, there was a soft leather wind scarf which might, when the helmet veil was lifted be drawn over the mouth and nose, against the wind and dust of his ride.
He was very erect in the saddle. His lance remained on his back, but he carried in his right hand the small, powerful horn bow of the Wagon Peoples and attached to his saddle was a lacquered, narrow, rectangular quiver containing as many as forty arrows. On the saddle there also hung, on one side, a coiled rope of braided boskbide and, on the other, a long, three-weighted bole of the sort used in hunting tumits and men; in the saddle itself on the right side, indicating the rider must be right-handed, were the seven sheaths for the almost legendary quivas, the balanced saddleknives of the prairie. It was said a youth of the Wagon Peoples was taught the bow, the quiva and the lance before their parents would consent to give him a name, for names are precious among the Wagon Peoples, as among Goreans in general, and they are not to be wasted on someone who is likely to die, one who cannot well handle the weapons of the hunt and war. Until the youth has mastered the bow, the quiva and the lance he is simply known as the first, or the second, and so on, son of such and such a father.
The Wagon Peoples war among themselves, but once in every two hands of years, there is a time of gathering of the peoples, and this, I had learned, was that time. In the thinking of the Wagon Peoples it is called the Omen Year, though the Omen Year is actually a season, rather than a year, which occupies a part of two of their regular years, for the Wagon Peoples calculate the year from the Season of Snows to the Season of Snows; Turians, incidentally, figure the year from summer solstice to summer solstice; Goreans generally, on the other hand, figure the year from vernal equinox to vernal equinox, their new year beginning, like nature's, with the spring; the Omen Year, or season, lasts several months, and consists of three phases, called the Passing of Turia, which takes place in the fad; the Wintering, which takes place north of Turia and commonly south of the Cartius, the equator of course lying to the north in this hemisphere; and the Return to Curia, in the spring, or, as the Wagon Peoples say, in the Season of Little Grass. It is near Turia, in the spring, that the Omen Year is completed, when the omens are taken usually over several days by hundreds of harus- pexes, mostly readers of bask blood and verr livers, to determine if they are favorable for a choosing of a Ubar San, a One Ubar, a Ubar who would be High Ubar, a Ubar of an the Wagons, a Ubar of all the Peoples, one who could lead them as one people.{2}
A consequence of the chronological conventions of the Wagon Peoples, of course, is that their years tend to vary in length, but this fact, which might bother us, does not bother them, any more than the fact that some men and some animals live longer than others; the women of the Wagon Peoples, incidentally, keep a calendar based on the phases of Gor's largest moon, but this is a calendar of fifteen moons, named for the fifteen varieties of bask, and functions independently of the tallying of years by snows; for example, the Moon of the Brown Bosk may at one time occur in the winter, at another time, years later, in the summer; this calendar is kept by a set of colored
