'Do not fear, lovely slave girl,' I said. 'This is not Earth. This is Gor. On Gor you, in bondage, will be given no alternative other than to fulfill the deepest and most profound needs of your sex.'
'Yes, Master. Yes, Master,' she said.
Red hunters were turning their sleds about. 'Look!' said Imnak. I saw that the sleen was lifting its paws, water dripping from them.
'It is only hot air,' I said, 'hugging the ice, low, from the destruction of the complex.'
'No,' said Imnak, 'there!'
He pointed far off. There, steam rolled upward from the water.
I saw piles of layered pack ice slipping into the water.
'See the ice,' he said. 'The water is boiling!'
Suddenly, near us, a lead, a great crack in the ice, broke open.
I looked back to the complex. Smoke billowed upward. In the upper atmosphere, it had now spread out, broadly, like an umbrella opened in the thin air. The mushroom-shaped cloud was disconcertingly familiar. A nuclear device, or a nuclear-type device, it seemed, had been involved in the destruction of the complex.
I watched the great mountain of ice, which had been the sheathing of the complex, slip downward into the sea.
'The water there is boiling!' cried Imnak. 'Nothing could live in it,' I said.
'The beast is dead,' he said.
'Perhaps,' I said.
'You saw the face in the sky,' he said.
'The mechanism to project that image,' I said, 'could have been preset.'
'The beast is dead,' said Imnak. 'If it did not die in the rooms and halls, surely it died, scalded or drowned, in the surrounding waters.'
'Nothing could live there,' said a hunter.
'The beast is dead,' said Imnak.
'Perhaps,' I said. 'I do not know.'
The ice beneath our feet began to buckle and groan.
'Hurry!' cried Imnak.
I took one last look at the distant, churning, steaming waters, erupting and boiling, where the polar sea, as though offended and startled, hissing in indignation, recoiled from the fiery touch of a mechanism contrived paradoxically by the wit of rational creatures.
The Priest-Kings have set limits to the devices of men upon this world. They favor the spear and the bow, the sword and the steel of the knife. But Kurii lived not under their ordinances. I wondered from what shaggy Prometheus, long ago, Kurii had accepted fire. I wondered at what it might mean, fire kindled in the paw of a beast.
'Hurry!' cried Imnak. 'Hurry!'
Nature transcended is perhaps nature outraged.
'Hurry!' cried Imnak. He shook my shoulder. 'The beast is dead!' he cried. 'Hurry!'
I recalled the chamber of Zarendargar, and two glasses, drained of paga. dashed against a wall of steel.
I lifted my hand to the rolling, steaming waters in the distance, beneath the high, spreading cloud.
'Hurry!' cried Imnak.
I turned the sled about, and cracked the whip over the head of the sleen. 'On!' I cried. 'On!'
The sleen, clawing and scratching at the ice, threw its weight against the harness.
The ice split behind me, and my foot, protected in Its sleenskin boot, splashed in water, and I thrust the sled up and onto solid ice, and, crying out at the sleen, cracking the whip, sped away.
38
I Shall Return To The South
I gently closed the door of the feasting house. I did not think my departure would be noticed.
Inside the people of Imnak's camp disported themselves. There was much boiled meat and stew. Inside there was laughter and song. Outside a gentle snow had begun to. fall. I could hear the noises of pleasure from within the low, half-buried feasting house. I looked out to the shore of the polar sea, that northern extending branch of Thassa. The stars were bright in the moonlit sky.
I made my way to the sleds.
Inside the feasting house Imnak was singing. This pleased me. No longer was he intimidated by the mountain which had once seemed to rear before him. No longer did he fear to sing, for now the mountain welcomed him. 'No one knows from where songs come,' as the People say. But now songs had come to Imnak. He was no longer lonely of songs. They welled from within him, like the surfacing of the great Hunjer whale, like the dawning of the sun after the long night, like the bursting of the tundra into flower, the tiny white and yellow flowers emerging from their snowy cocoon-like buds.
In the feasting house Imnak sang. Poalu was there, too. I checked the harness on the snow sleen on my sled.
'I am not greater than the mountain,' said Imnak, 'and yet the mountain cannot sing without me. It is only through me, and others, too, that the mountain can see, and can sing. Only through me can the mountain know how beautiful it is. I must tell the mountain of its beauty. Songs come from me now, telling me their names and stories. One is glad that they come. One is pleased. to be a friend of songs. No one can climb to the top of the mountain. One climbs a little higher than another, but that is all. It is enough for a hunter, one small and frail, to stand on the lower slopes and sing. No one climbs much higher than another, and no one can truly speak the glory and beauty of the mountain. It is enough to stand on the lower slopes and sing. Who could ask more from life than the opportunity to stand for a time on the slope of the mountain and sing?'
The harness on the snow sleen was secure. The beast was restless.
There were some eight sleds there. Ram and Drusus had their sleds, and, besides mine, there were the sleds of five hunters, men who would accompany us south, across Ax Glacier. Tied by the neck to the left-hand, rear upright of Ram's sled, clad in furs, was Tina. Tied by the necks to the left-hand, rear upright of the sled of Drusus, clad in furs, were the two beauties he had selected and chained in the complex of the Kurii. Various girls were tied similarly to the sleds of the hunters who would accompany us. They were girls from the complex, some of whom had been free women, who would be taken south as trade goods. Tied to the left-hand, rear upright of my own sled, too, was a coffie line. On it, neck-secured, were six girls. It was a double coffle line; the last girl is placed on it first; the double line is knotted about her neck and then the two strands are taken forward; the fifth girl was next neck-knotted into the line and the two strands taken forward again, and so on; when the first girl is put in the coffle, the two strands are then taken forward again and knotted about the left-hand, rear upright of the sled; this way the only free ends of the bond, by means of which it might be untied, knotted together, fall at the left hand of the driver, and are easily within his view. This is a useful coffie tie when the girls' hands are not tied behind their backs. We wanted their hands free to help with the sled, when it became necessary to haul or push it over rough ground or through heaps of ice or broken snow.
The coffle line looped up to the neck of the first girl. She was Arlene; the second was Audrey; the third was Barbara; Constance was fourth; Belinda was fifth; she who had been the Lady Rosa was sixth. They were all clad in furs. The snow blew gently about them.
I went to the rear of the coffle line and took the last girl on the line gently in my arms. I put my lips, gently to hers. They were cool, in the cold night. Yet beneath mine they yielded, as a slave's. Already had she who had been the Lady Rosa learned much. There is a difference between the kiss of the free woman and the kiss of the slave girl; the slave girl yields to her master; the difference is unmistakable. It is said that he whose lips have never touched those of a slave girl does not know, truly, what it is to hold a woman in his arms.
'What shall I call you?' I asked. 'Rosita? Pepita?'
