Tal Goreans,
Greetings visitors,

Welcome once again to the Booknotes column. Tarl’s quest for the lost Shield-Ring, the ancient Kur artifact that conveys the miraculous power of invisibility via the usual medium of quasi-scientific double-talk, has led him to Gor’s “Dark Continent” in pursuit of Shaba the Geographer. He has caught up with Shaba and, in the guise of an agent of Kurii, has negotiated the handover of the ring in exchange for a fake, supposedly to be delivered to the Sardar, and some currency or promissory notes. However, such enterprises are fraught with peril of deceit and double-dealing, and we had better find out if this promises to be any different; wherefore let us turn for a third time to Explorers of Gor.

Chapter Fourteen

Tarl returns to his temporary lodgings bringing with him the blonde barbarian, whom he proceeds to deflower in uncompromising albeit not ungentle fashion. She is embarrassed at being made to perform in front of Sasi, the former thief and she-urt whom Tarl picked up earlier in the story, but perform she does, for we know already that Tarl is pretty clued up where female sexual response is concerned. Under Tarl’s instruction she comes to understand something of what it means to be a Gorean slave girl, and she is by no means repelled by this, even though she finds it frightening.

Later Tarl prepares to be about his business, and he leaves Sasi in charge of overseeing the blonde barbarian in case he should be delayed overlong. Realizing that he is about to be gone and may never return, Sasi humbly requests the privilege of some gentle loving, and Tarl obliges.

Chapter Fifteen

Taking his good old time about getting there, Tarl makes his way to the appointed rendezvous with Shaba and Msaliti. Careful negotiations ensue, at the end of which Shaba demonstrates that it is not easy to deal with a duplicitous individual in possession of an invisibility device, and in spite of all Tarl’s vigilance he finds himself minus both the true Shield-Ring, the fake he previously possessed, and the negotiable bonds he was meant to hand over in exchange for the Ring. Msaliti doesn’t plan to take this lying down, and neither does Tarl; but as Tarl quits their meeting-place, he finds himself under arrest, on the orders of Msaliti. Now that Tarl is rendered harmless and about to be literally sold down the river, Msaliti has no objection to revealing his true importance. He is the high wazir of Bila Huruma, the great “Ubar of the Interior,” who among other things needs slaves for his vast civil engineering project, a canal linking the Lakes Ushindi and Ngao.

Chapter Sixteen

So it happens that yet again Tarl finds himself enslaved, as in the silver mines of Tharna (Outlaw) and several other occasions. He accepts this with all the equanimity he can and concentrates on survival, winning the friendship of one Ayari, thief of Schendi. This worthy is able to provide Tarl with some news, including the name of Bila Huruma’s greatest foe, a local chieftain called Kisu. Tarl, Ayari and one of their chain-fellows discuss Kisu’s prospects in war against Bila Huruma, and scarcely have they ceased doing so than there is a great noise and tumult as a war prisoner is brought down the canal on a barge. It is that same Kisu, and so we can conclude that Bila Huruma is not going to be overthrown any time soon.

Chapter Seventeen

The seasoned reader will have heard me complain before about the author’s occasional sharp jumps in perspective and time that leave us with the sense that he has forgotten to fill in the blanks, or has jumped us forward to the interesting part and will go back when he’s ready to explain what the Hades has happened in the interim. This is another of those times. We rejoin Tarl in the company of Msaliti, who explains that Shaba has spent the proceeds of his crime on outfitting a huge expedition to the deep jungle, and that he is now in the very courts of Bila Huruma. Tarl is to be presented as a foreign ambassador, as excuse for admission to the same courts, and while there he can seize the opportunity to slay Shaba, which will permit the recovery of the ring. Msaliti intends to hand it over to Kurii, with which Tarl agrees, in his assumed identity as an agent of the same; and besides, since the alternative is to be returned to the slave-chain in the canal, Tarl has little choice but to comply.

Chapter Eighteen

Tarl gets to see Bila Huruma commending his armed men and hearing cases at law. The black Ubar’s justice is fair in its fashion but extremely harsh, with the usual ration of cruel and unusual punishments by which Goreans tend to preclude the possibility of repeat offences. It is not all bad though; a thieving boy who had earlier been known to be seeking work is given employment in the Ubar’s own grounds, and a soldier convicted of murder is given leave to commit honourable and mercifully swift suicide. Interestingly, a quarrelling couple are both punished, he to be humiliated in women’s dress and she to serve a spell in a penal brothel, which suggests that it is well for Gorean domestic differences to be settled within the household rather than troubling the official eye of the law.

Kisu the rebel is sentenced to those chains from which Tarl was lately freed, and it is then the turn of Tarl to be introduced to the Ubar. He passes up the opportunity to attack Shaba out of hand, which supposedly would lead to his instant arrest and then freedom by the connivance of Msaliti. Instead he sticks to his disguise as an ambassador from the white lands, which ensures that Msaliti cannot after all return him summarily to the canal, and tells Msaliti that he has an alternative plan for dealing with Shaba, as he does not trust Msaliti to stick to the terms of the original arrangement. He will enter Shaba’s quarters after dark and conclude the affair quietly. Lacking much of an alternative, it is Msaliti’s turn to comply with Tarl’s wishes.

Chapter Nineteen

Msaliti directs Tarl to what are ostensibly the quarters of Shaba, but when Tarl enters the darkened chambers, matters quickly go awry. The quarters are not Shaba’s but Bila Huruma’s, and it is no more of a good idea to be caught sneaking around the black Ubar’s quarters with a drawn weapon than the reader might suppose it to be. For what it is worth Bila Huruma was not in danger. It turns out that his bed is surrounded by a snake pit, and no ordinary snakes but Gor’s dreadful osts, whose poison kills agonisingly in seconds - as may be seen from the body of the askari even now adorning the floor of the pit.

Tarl deduces that this was indeed a set-up in which Msaliti sought to have Bila Huruma murdered and frame Tarl for the crime. Bila Huruma initially takes Tarl for an assassin, but after some questioning decides that he may merely have been a thief, for which reason he gives Tarl a gold chain either in lieu of his assassin’s hire or as a reward for his cheek, and then sentences him to the canal in either case. Tarl is escorted away, leaving behind him the dread Ubar and his terrible guardians, and reflects as he goes on what we would express in the succinct proverb “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.”

Chapter Twenty

So it is back to the chain for Tarl, wearing the unusual adornment of a gold chain, which attracts the covetous attention of an askari; but on learning that the chain was a gift from Bila Huruma, the askari loses all interest in it. Opportunely, a barge happens by bearing a pair of white slave girls, one of whom is the blonde barbarian, picked up in short order in Schendi. She has news of Sasi, who is still in Schendi, but Tarl is obliged to watch her taken away, a gift for a woman Bila Huruma apparently intends to marry, Tende the daughter of Aibu.

Once the girls have been taken on their way and the excitement has died down, Tarl passes the word that he wishes to speak to Kisu, who is nearby on the chain; but Kisu is too snobbish to speak to a commoner and a white one at that. With little difficulty Tarl goads Kisu into fighting him, and beats him reasonably easily although Kisu is a strong man, and reiterates his desire to talk. Unfortunately, he receives only the same answer a second time.

Chapter Twenty-one

Some indefinite time later Tarl hears an expedition pass quietly up the canal by night. He sees Shaba at the head of one of the boats, and he is quietly furious; but there is nothing he can do for now.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Tarl is puzzled that Shaba should have passed quietly by night with only a few boats, when he had a hundred or so at his disposal, and he surmises that Shaba may now be in bad odour at Bila Huruma’s court. He is further puzzled, if this is so, that there is no pursuit from Bila Huruma, and he begins to think more urgently of escape. Kisu, though, whose cooperation Tarl apparently needs, is still indisposed to talk to him.

Chapter Twenty-Three

The slave chain in general, and Kisu in particular, enjoy the favour of a visit from Tende, who has the blonde barbarian Janice Prentiss in attendance and also one Mwoga, the wazir of Tende’s father. Mwoga and Kisu exchange compliments, as men will when one considers the other a traitor and the second considers the first a fool and an enemy of the empire. Kisu is implacable in his opposition to Bila Huruma, however hopeless, while Mwoga is more than willing to swim with the tide and advance his own fortunes thereby. He gets rather the better of their war of words and leaves Kisu fuming and fretting behind, also with a scornful lash of Tende’s whip across his face, which Tarl speculates will tend somewhat to soften Kisu’s mood towards him.

Sure enough, Kisu swallows his arrogant pride, and after no more than a mild taste of crow he is chatting away to Tarl like an old friend. Tarl has an escape plan, but it calls for a man as phenomenally strong as he himself is to achieve it. Shut in their wooden cage at night, they are able to escape by using the very chain that binds them as a crude saw. Tarl in his usual fashion, as at Tharna and often since, devises escape for all of his fellows, and soon they are getting their chains struck off. Most of the escapees have business of their own to attend to, but Tarl wants to be off eastward in pursuit of Shaba, and Kisu wants to go the same way for his own reasons.

Soon Tarl, Ayari and Kisu catch up with Tende and Mwoga, and dispose of the only two armed guards they thought to bring. Mwoga, seeing the way the wind is blowing, is not slow to make his escape, which leaves Tende to the tender mercies of Kisu; and the chapter closes just as she catches sight of the man she lately whipped in the face and spurned.

And on that note we can leave our heroes, in pursuit of Shaba and in possession of some lovely slaves. But what will become of the thieving geographer, and what his night flight was all about, and what Bila Huruma means to do about this, and whether Tarl ever will get his hands on either the Shield-Ring or Shaba’s treacherous neck (or Msaliti’s, for that matter), remains to be seen. Wherefore I invite the reader to be sure to rejoin us in a month’s time, when we take a fourth look at Explorers of Gor!

I wish you well,

Socrates