Tal, Goreans,

Greetings, visitors,

Welcome once again to the Booknotes column. In our first dip into “Hunters of Gor” we saw Bosk venture North to the forests where, as he has been told, his long-lost love Talena is in the keeping of the Panther woman, Verna. We left him in Lydius, attending to rest, recreation and further preparations, and he briefly re-acquainted himself with another old flame, Elizabeth Cardwell, now living as a paga slave under the name of Tana. Somewhat to her dismay, he did not affably pay her purchase price out of small change, free her from her shameful lot, and restore her to her previous position as his co-adventurer and mattress pounder, but merely let her know that she had made her bed and could lie on it, and also told her current owner that she had been short-changing him up to now.

We rejoin Bosk as he stands on the deck of his ship and takes his leave of Lydius…

Chapter Five

Bosk has a new slave for his collection, the thief Tina, lately reduced to bondage for her crimes, and she is fighting the bit although, of course, not such as to cause Bosk very much inconvenience. Indeed, she has little prospect of seriously inconveniencing him, what with being out in the wilds where she can take her choice of the wilderness, and its Panther Girls who despise all slaves and would gladly recapture and sell her, or the very city where she was made slave. As for Bosk’s latest henchman, Rim, once a captive of Panthers himself, he is coming along very nicely with his new slave Cara, and he happens to notice something in the slave market that he thinks will interest Bosk.

There in a cage, and none too happy about it, is that same Sheera who only a few chapters ago was boasting of her ability to enslave men and sell them when she tires of them, herself caught and enslaved by the outlaw Arn. (We met him at the start of Chapter Two and I omitted to give his name, which was remiss of me.) Of course Bosk is interested in buying her. Not only is she an exquisitely beautiful female but she is also no friend of Verna, whom Bosk is urgently seeking, and of course it muchly pleases his sensibilities that a female with pretensions to being the Mistress of male slaves should fall into his hands for an object lesson in biological realities. After a short bargaining session, in which Sheera seems enraged not only at the prospect of being sold but at the insultingly low price Bosk is offering for her, she is his for a pittance.

His new purchase in tow, Bosk returns to his ship, performs an oblation to the Priest-Kings, and is off on the next stage of his grand adventure. Naturally his Tesephone is not the only traffic on the waters. There is, for instance, a large galley from Tyros leaving harbour at the same time.

Chapter Six

Of course Bosk must keep us informed as to the current status of his newly-acquired slaves. Tina has the run of the ship and would dearly like to flee to freedom, but Bosk not unkindly points out that, even if she could get past the sharks and so on in the water, there is nowhere for her to run to. As for Sheera, she is being kept in solitary confinement below decks on bread and water, and it’s only a scant few days before Bosk is ordering her to his arms. She makes a token protest, but our Bosk knows his work very well, and soon he is clapping his collar on a dreamy, post-coital Sheera, and she is confessing herself slave.

That detail attended to, Bosk returns to serious matters - locating the camp of Verna and effecting the release of Talena. He is not slow to appreciate the problems inherent in hunting down Gor’s most renowned Panther Girl on her own turf. That may be all very well for Marlenus, who is well known to be hunting for Verna once again, having previously captured her and had her freed by the daring Rask of Treve as a slight to Marlenus. Bosk however has a less direct approach in mind. It will be quite enough for him to make peaceful contact with Verna and her band and offer to trade. After all, Bosk is a merchant these days. He has the ideal intermediary in the shape of Sheera, who knows Verna’s movements well enough to arrange to fall into her hands if she is released in the forest - and will be strongly motivated to, given that she will be in slave chains and unable to fend for herself; and, which is the more useful, Verna will be delighted to return her former enemy to shameful slavery, and so the plan won’t even cost him Sheera.

Of course, Verna may refuse to trade, Bosk reasons, in which case it will be time for Plan B. But they do not need to worry themselves overmuch about that for now, nor about the Rhoda, ship of Tyros, which is also heading up-river, possibly intent on some mischief concerning Marlenus.

Having prepared Sheera for her part in this, ignoring her feeble protests, Bosk gets on with a spot of fletching, the while he dreams of power and status and suitably lofty companionships. He has consigned Tana (the former Elizabeth Cardwell) and Telima (now fled to the marshes) to the waste-bin of history. In any case, the one is only a barbarian slave and the other a low-caste female, and neither warrants mentioning in the same breath as the daughter of a Ubar, certainly not to a man who is entertaining ambitious thoughts of empire.

As evening falls, Sheera is allowed to flee; and by midnight, her mission accomplished, Bosk’s camp is surrounded by Panthers. They treat him and his men with utmost caution, but they do negotiate, at least. To his annoyance, he does not get to meet Verna, but only a girl called Mira, though she is a member of Verna’s band. Making matters worse, Mira neither agrees to take money for Talena nor even owns up to possessing her. Bosk is obliged to conclude the interview with no success whatever, not to mention having to swallow the arrogance of Mira’s remarks about what satisfactory slaves his men would make. Angrily, Bosk resolves to adopt Plan B.

But first there is an interlude featuring Tina the thief, who has immediately reverted to her larcenous ways despite the fact that this is an extremely grave offence for a slave. Bosk promptly forces her to return all the goods she has stolen, but he realized earlier that a wench with her skills might come in handy and he grants her leave to continue to steal, on condition that she return whatever she succeeds in stealing.

She obliges, on Bosk’s command, with a demonstration of the thief’s art as after-dinner entertainment, and he then entertains himself further with Sheera, who is now being taught skills more generally suitable to a slave and who, like it or not, is finding herself responding to her new station.

Chapter Seven

Having resolved upon Plan B, Bosk is of course carrying out the dangerous part himself. We know that he is clever, resourceful and brave, and he evidently has some knowledge of woodcraft, and he has taken himself off into the forests, bow in hand, to do some scouting. Perhaps understandably after all these years of separation, he is busily counting his vulos before they are hatched, looking forward to his reunion with Talena, to the renewing of their companionship, and to the advancement in his power and fortunes that will certainly accrue. Also, since the Panthers have been an annoyance to him, he is happily anticipating the near future in which they will be rounded up and undergoing the same introduction to slavery that Sheera is presently experiencing.

Meanwhile his crew have been given some time off to disport themselves with some paga slaves he has had shipped up the river for them, with free wine thrown in by their supplier, one Hesius. But Bosk doesn’t need help on this chore, and the more he is alone with his thoughts, the more pleasantly diverting he finds them. He is also thinking about Marlenus, who when Tarl Cabot (as he then was) last saw him, banished him from Ar on pain of death; and it strikes Bosk that it would be no bad thing for him to pre-empt Marlenus’s capture of Verna and rescue of Talena.

However, Bosk is not so far gone in reverie that he neglects his business, and soon he encounters a Panther Girl, and the two of them stalk each other in the woods for a little while before Bosk emerges the victor. To his surprise, his captive, who is called Grenna, is nothing to do with Verna at all, but one of the companions of Hura, a powerful rival who has brought a hundred followers to claim Verna’s range. Since she can’t help him, Bosk secures her for now and continues with his mission.

He soon finds Verna’s camp, then returns, first to fetch Grenna, and then to return to his own camp, to prepare for the coming assault.

Chapter Eight

Having formed and discarded several alternative plans, Bosk is intent on a nice straightforward and confusion-free approach: he and ten men will attack the Panther camp at dawn, armed with sleen nets, and take the girls captive that way. He has no objection to conceding the Panthers favourable odds, and it is only because Arn and some friends arrived opportunely that Bosk even bothers with as many as ten men. These are, after all, only women he is after, and he doesn’t expect very stern resistance when the Panthers don’t have the advantage of ambush.

Surprisingly, the camp proves to be empty. This brings the current plan to an abrupt halt, and Bosk and his merry band have to decide what to do next. Waiting until the next day to execute the original plan is one option, though not free of drawbacks; but Arn has an alternative suggestion, which sounds both efficacious and appealing to their sense of irony. They will conceal themselves within the camp and wait for Verna’s return, when they can pounce on the unsuspecting Panthers in what they doubtless viewed as the security of their own home. The tedium of waiting can be relieved to some extent by the half-dozen bottles of vintage wine the Panthers have carelessly left lying around.

Did anyone’s short hairs go up at that last sentence?

Of course Bosk is not such a fool as to allow his men to get drunk, but he has no objection to letting them share one bottle between the ten of them, himself included; no-one ever got sloshed on one mouthful of Ka-la-na, even if it is all the way from Ar. But - and this is truly astonishing, considering how Elinor Brinton nearly murdered him at the climax of the previous book - it doesn’t occur to him until much too late that there might be something in the wine. Scarcely has he got the last swallow down his throat than he curses himself and all of them for foolishness, but by then the damage is done. Naturally the wine was not left there out of generosity. One after another, Arn and Bosk last of all, the men fall drugged to the ground, there to be captured by the returning Panthers.

This denouement is hardly surprising in view of the hubris Bosk has been exhibiting in the last few chapters, and for what will follow, when Bosk does indeed get to meet Verna at last, and for the latest developments in Marlenus’s own hunting, and for what the mysterious Rhoda is up to, we shall have to wait until next month, and another slice of the eighth book in the Gorean cycle.

I wish you well,

Socrates