Tal Goreans,
Greetings visitors,

Welcome once again to the Booknotes column. This month we continue looking at "Priest-Kings of Gor". Tarl has made his way to the Sardar on his quest to pick a bone or two with the mysterious and powerful masters of the Counter-Earth, and after surviving a close encounter with a pair of larls, he has met and been interviewed by Parp, a little pipe-smoking man who is not at all what Tarl was expecting. We last saw him seated on a throne under the moonlit sky, laughing defiance at the Priest-Kings. What will happen next? Read on…

Chapter Five

Tarl awakens in much humbler surroundings. He is on a sleeping platform and being cared for by a blue-eyed blonde girl. This is a slave named Vika. Except for an unusually hi-tech wash-basin and garbage disposal unit, this is a rather severe cell and quite simple. Vika, though she wears a slave-collar with serial number 708, has a proud demeanour; but she soon informs Tarl that she is a Chamber Slave, forbidden to leave the room despite its open doorway. When Tarl, laughing at this meaningless restriction, begins to carry her out of the cell, Vika fights him hysterically; Tarl desists when he notices a set of sensors by the doorway. She tells of coming to the Sardar, thinking to beguile the Priest-Kings with her admittedly great beauty and make herself the Ubara of Gor. Instead she was enslaved and brain-scanned, and she has seen the power of the sensors demonstrated. The Priest-Kings – for there are indeed many of them, and when Tarl mentions Parp Vika’s sadly-spoken comment is "Ah, yes, Parp" – sent a disobedient slave through such a doorway as punishment; "it was like knives and fire". Vika, we learn, has been thus imprisoned for nine years.

On learning that the Priest-Kings brought him here asleep (and when Tarl mentions Parp again, Vika laughs) and that he has been asleep for fifteen Ahn, or eighteen Earth hours, Tarl tells Vika that he intends to make use of her. But this is Tarl in his early and idealistic days, and all that he means is that she is to cook him a meal. There is a brief battle of wills over how Vika is to wear her hair, but once Tarl has dealt with her defiance, Vika gets on with it.

Chapter Six

There is good food available; it is unrefrigerated but shrink-wrapped and, judging by its shelf-life, evidently sterilised in some manner. Vika prepares him bosk steak, Sullage, Sa-tarna bread, Ta grapes and water, affording the author an opportunity to introduce us to these staples of Gorean cuisine. Vika obediently takes no food for herself but kneels in attendance on Tarl while he eats. Kneeling is the usual posture of women whether slave or free, but the details vary. In conversation Vika mentions that she is hungry, which embarrasses Tarl for his neglect of her needs; although his Caste codes would have him treat a slave girl precisely as a rightless animal, Tarl is stricken with guilt at failing to accord her the respect and consideration he has been taught to lavish on women. However, when he explains that his inconsiderateness was only an oversight, and he did not intend to discipline her, Vika snootily informs him that he is a fool, and hence kisses her hopes of dinner goodbye.

Getting ready to leave the room, Tarl washes and dresses. Vika warns him that leaving the room is forbidden, and when the gong strikes, she adds that this is when "they" walk. Establishing that she is talking about the Priest-Kings, Tarl declares that he is not afraid of Parp, to which Vika replies, "He is not a Priest-King." Come now, is anyone surprised to learn this?

Chapter Seven

Now Tarl goes looking for the Priest-Kings, leaving a frightened Vika behind him. He passes many empty chambers like Vika’s, and also two that are occupied, although these girls are not, in Tarl’s opinion, as beautiful as Vika. He is moved to guess at her caste, narrowing it down to a choice between the Builders and the Physicians to judge by her high-caste speech – which is a cue for another brief digression on "The Language", Gorean. Thinking about Vika causes Tarl to speculate whether it might have been her task to subdue him; he senses that she has broken men before, and wonders how many.

Tarl finds his way back to the domed throne-hall, but it is empty. He begins to sense that he is being followed, but when he tries to outwait his stalker he gives up in exasperation after a nerve-wracking hour or so; it occurs to him that a Priest-King might possess quite inhuman reserves of patience. However, though his increasingly furious searching and pursuing is not rewarded with a single sight or sound of a Priest-King, it is eventually rewarded by something quite unexpected; a scent, a completely alien odour, and with that Tarl rests content and returns to his cell.

Chapter Eight

There he finds Vika still awake, and she is offended by his accusation that she has been helping herself to food in his absence. Elated by the partial success of his expedition, Tarl sets about freeing Vika from confinement. He locates a spy-camera hidden in an energy-bulb housing and smashes it, and then destroys the door sensors. In doing this he sustains a slight graze and we learn that Vika is of the Physicians (so Tarl wins his each-way bet) and hails from Treve. This, Tarl knows, is a mountain city sustained entirely by plundering food and supplies from the surrounding countryside, this work being done by the vast army of tarnsmen that Treve maintains. Only Ar, Thentis and Ko-ro-ba of the nearby cities were exempt from these depradations, Ar on account of a great battle fought a hundred years ago, Thentis because of that city’s own air-power, and Ko-ro-ba thanks to the cleverness of Tarl’s father.

Tarl wonders if all the women of that bandit city are as beautiful as Vika, and he also admits to her that he thought she might have been a bred Pleasure Slave. This doesn’t please her greatly, but he doesn’t press the issue for now, instead persuading her to leave the room via the now-unguarded doorway; and as luck would have it, the instruments he has destroyed are indeed the ones that would otherwise have killed Vika, and she survives the exit before falling in a faint. He lays her on the couch to recover, and smiles in anticipation of what the Priest-Kings will do now he has kicked the hornets’ nest.

Chapter Nine

While waiting for the Priest-Kings, Tarl kind-heartedly lets Vika rest on the couch, sharing it with him; this is an honour not normally accorded to slave girls, and sometimes even withheld from Free Companions:

"According to the Gorean way of looking at things a taste of the slave ring is thought to be occasionally beneficial to all women"

Vika professes gratitude for her liberation, and admits that Tarl was partly right about her breeding; she was born free, but of a mother who was indeed a Pleasure Slave, indeed a Passion Slave. Vika appears contemptuous of both her parents, her mother for being only an animal and her father firstly for loving her mother and then for being fool enough to follow Vika to the Sardar to rescue her. He was, Vika tells Tarl, a pompous little fool, and afraid even of the cry of a larl.

Putting aside the painful subject of her slave mother and her weakling father, Vika returns to her subject; her love for Tarl. She is filled with jealous rage on learning that he loves another woman, and taunts him with the thought that Talena is probably either a slave or dead by now. Volunteering to make Tarl forget Talena, Vika sets out to practise slave-girl wiles on him; but Tarl smells again the alien scent he detected earlier, and even as she informs him that she is going to make him her slave, Tarl angrily casts her from him. He says that he has seen through her plan to entrap him, no doubt on the orders of Priest-Kings; and he turns, sword drawn, to confront the creature that now presents itself at the entrance to the chamber, a giant golden insectoid.

It is a huge creature; only a yard wide, but eighteen feet tall, and this with only its forequarters vertical; it is six-legged, but its forelegs are not used for walking. This creature, via a device that translates its own scent-based communication into human speech, announces its identity: "Lo Sardar" – "I am a Priest-King". Tarl, unfazed by this, and indeed having expected it, announces his own name and city in response.

The Priest-King is not disposed to chat; it summons Tarl to follow it, and he, leaving behind the worthless, no-account, treacherous slave girl, does so… but where, and with what consequences, we shall not discover until next time.