fled away. The sleen returned to its kill. As I fled I sometimes startled small animals, and once a herd of Tabuk. I tried, in the moonlight, to run in the same direction, to find my way from the forest, somehow. I feared I would run in circles. The prevailing northern winds, carrying rain and moisture, had coated the northern sides of the high trees with vertical belts of moss, extending some twenty or thirty feet up the trunk. By means of this device I continued, generally, to run southward. I hoped I might find a stream, and follow it to the Laurius. As I ran through the darkness, I suddenly saw, before me, some fifty or sixty yards away, four pairs of blazing eyes, a pride of forest panthers. I pretended not to see them and, heart pounding, turned to one side, walking through the trees. At this time, at night, I knew they would be hunting. Our eyes had not met. I had the strange feeling that they had seen me, and knew that I had seen them, as I had seen them, and sensed that they had seen me. But our eyes had not directly met. We had not, so to speak, signaled to one another that we were aware of one another. The forest panther is a proud beast, but, too, he does not care to be distracted in his hunting. We had not confronted one another. I only hoped that I might not be what they were hunting. I was not. They turned aside into the darkness, padding away. I nearly fainted. I felt so helpless. I pulled at my bound wrists, but they were uncompromisingly secured behind my back.
Then, to my joy, I felt a drop of rain on my naked body, and then another. And then, suddenly, with the abruptness of the storms of the Gorean north, the cold rains, in icy sheets, began to pelt downwards. In the forest, tied, bound, in the icy rain, I threw back my head and laughed. I was overjoyed. The rain would wipe out my trail! I might escape the beast! I doubted that even a sleen, Gor's most perfect hunter, could follow my trail after such a downpour. I laughed, and laughed, and then, crouching, hid in some brush, trying to protect myself from the rain.
After some two hours the rain stopped and I crawled out from the brush and again continued my way southward.
I no longer feared pursuit, but I was now more aware that I had been of my predicament in the forest itself. I tried to run through the binding fiber that held my wrists, rubbing it against the trunk of a fallen tree, but I could not loosed it, or rub through it. Gorean binding fiber is not made to be so easily removed from a girl's wrists. After an hour I was bound as securely as before.
I decided I had better keep moving.
I felt helpless, vulnerable and futile. I was like an animal without hands, a four-footed animal, save that I had no hide to protect me, but only the softness of my flesh, and I did not have the delicate senses, the smell and the hearing of such animals to protect me, and I did not have their swiftness, the fleetness of their flight. I was ripe quarry.
I pulled at my wrists, helplessly.
I fled southward.
I was hungry.
At bushes I stopped and nibbled at berries.
Then, shortly before noon, I stumbled onto a small stream, which could only be a tributary of the Laurius.
I flung myself down on the pebbles of its shore and lapped the fresh water, slaking my thirst.
Then, rising, I entered the stream, feeling its cold waters on my ankles, and waded downstream. I wished to take this further precaution against leaving a trail behind me, a stain of odor on a twig, a dampness of perspiration on a leaf.
I followed the stream for an Ahn, sometimes stopping to lift my head to overhanging branches, to nibble at hanging fruit.
Then the stream joined a larger stream, and I followed that further. I had little doubt that this larger stream would join the Laurius.
As I waded in the water, bound, I asked myself if I should try to make my way to the Laurius, and thence to Laura. There I would be fed. There, too, I would be re-enslaved. I asked myself if I should not rather try to find a hut in the forest, where there might be a slave girl, who would unbind me, and give me food. She surely would not want her master to see me, for I was beautiful. Then I was frightened, for what if the girl would slay me, or sell me herself secretly, to hunters, or give me to panther girls, who would make me their slave, or sell me. They might even return me to the man and the beast in the hut, for more arrowpoints!
I did not know what to do. I was in misery.
Also, recalling that I had been sold for only one hundred arrowpoints, for some reason, irritated me. It made me furious. Surely I was worth much more. As girls went, I was valuable. I should have brought pieces of gold! Not arrowpoints! In my anger I did not notice the man, standing back in the brush, near the shore of the stream.
Suddenly a leather loop fell about my neck. I was startled, and turned. It drew tight. I was snared.
Bound, naked, helpless as a Tabuk, I was snared.
He drew me toward him.
I was pulled from the edge of the stream, where I had waded. I felt the pebbles of the shore under my feet, and then grass, and then, whether from hunger, or exhaustion, or fear, everything went black, and I fainted.
I awakened sometime later. I was being carried in a man's arms. I wore his shirt. It was longer than a common female slave tunic. The sleeves were rolled back. It was warm. My hands were no longer cruelly bound behind my back. A loop of binding fiber had been tied about my belly and knotted in back. My hands were confined in front of me by slave bracelets. The binding fiber, in its center, had been knotted about the chain of the bracelets, so that my hands were held close to my belly. The loose ends of the binding fiber had then been knotted together behind my back, so that I could not reach the knot. The bracelets were not tight, but I could not slip them. I did not care.
'You are awake, El-in-or,' he said.
It was one of Targo's guards, he who had guarded me at the physician's. 'Yes, Master,' I said.
'We though that we had lost you.'
'I was stolen by panther girls,' I said. 'They sold me to a man. There was a beast. He fled. I escaped.' I was conscious of the strength of his arms. They frightened me. 'I am still white silk,' I told him.
'I know,' he said.
I reddened.
'Fortunately for you,' he said.
I looked down.
Suddenly he dropped me.
'You are awake,' he said. 'You can walk.'
Sitting on the grass, in pain, displeased, I looked up at him.
'No, I cannot walk, I said. 'I cannot even stand.'
He tied up the shirt in the back, sticking it into the binding fiber. He then went and cut a switch.
When he returned I was on my feet.
'Good,' he said. He pulled down the shirt and threw away the switch. I walked before him.
'Targo had already left Laura,' he said. 'We will join him across the river, at the night's camp.'
We walked on.
'If you had left Laura with Targo,' he said, 'you might have seen Marlenus of Ar.'
I gasped. I had heard of the great Ubar.
'In Laura?' I asked.
'Sometimes he comes north, with some hundred tarnsmen, for the hunting in the forests,' said the guard.
'What does he hunt?' I asked.
'Sleen, panthers, women,' said the guard.
'Oh,' I said.
'He hunts for a week or two,' said the guard, 'and then returns to Ar.' He pushed me ahead with the flat of his foot. I had been dallying. 'The duties of a Ubar,' said he, 'are pressing, and Marlenus looks forward to his hunting.' 'I see,' I said.
'When he is finished he sends his catch back by caravan,' he said.
'Oh,' I said. We walked on.
'Is he after anything in particular?' I asked.
'Yes,' said the guard, 'Verna, an outlaw girl.'
I stopped.
'Do not turn around,' he said.
I was irritated. I knew him, and he liked me, but he was my captor. He had not given me permission to face him. In his shirt, I pulled at the slave bracelets, tied against my belly with the binding fiber.
'It was Verna and her band who captured me,' I said.
'It is said she is beautiful,' said the guard. 'Is it true?'
'Ask,' I said, 'the men at the camp, whom she captured and bound, when she stole me.'
His fist was in my hair, bending my head back. 'Yes,' I said, 'she is beautiful. She is very beautiful!'
He released me.
'Marlenus will capture her,' he said, 'and send her in a cage to Ar.' 'Oh?' I asked, archly.
'Yes,' he said, from behind me. I felt his hands on my shoulders.
I was not displeased that Marlenus was hunting Verna, and her girls. I hoped that he would capture her, and them, and strip them, and put the blazing iron to their bodies, and lock them in collars, and whip them, and make them slave girls!
'Any woman,' he said.
'I am white silk,' I whispered. I pulled against his hands, and he released me. I hurried on.
I continued to walk ahead of him, in his shirt, my wrists confined before my body.
'Stop,' he said.
I did.
He came behind me and, lifting the shirt some inches, tucked it into the binding fiber that was knotted about my waist. He wanted to see more of my legs.
