Tal Goreans,

Greetings visitors,

Welcome once again to the Booknotes column, in which I drag myself away from my pre-Christmas preparations to guide the reader once more through the pages of “Hunters of Gor”. Bosk has been having his share of hard times on his expedition to rescue his lost Free Companion, Talena the daughter of Ubar Marlenus, and they have not got any easier at the last count. Thanks to Marlenus, he has been freed from the toils of Verna and her Panther Girls, and he has gone stumping off contemplating the height of his dudgeon, only to find when he was about to rejoin his pirate crew that neither they nor the ship are there. This is enough to drive a man to drink, or else to drastic action, and we had better see which option Bosk is about to plump for, although the alert reader will no doubt recall that, when last seen, Bosk had no strong waters at his disposal, and this may offer something of a clue.

Chapter Thirteen

Bosk’s first course of action, after digesting this latest reverse, is to reflect that he may have a chance to surprise some of the malefactors revisiting the scene of the crime; and so it proves. Their nominal advantage in numbers is not sufficient to overcome a longbowman of Bosk’s prowess, and their naïvete in the face of this weapon’s devastating rate of fire and Bosk’s workmanlike accuracy proves instantly fatal. Only the leader of this gang comes close enough to bandy words with Bosk, and knowing who it is whom he faces, he prefers to take his chances with the sharks and tharlarion in the river. This is another of these second-best choices, for at least Bosk would not have eaten him alive.

Bosk now has his guesses as to what has happened here confirmed by the slaves previously in the possession of the men of Tyros. This involves a spot of interrogation of the type sometimes cited as evidence of how the Gorean mindset condones the abuse of women, in that one of the slaves gets dangled in the water as shark-bait and is made to speak on pain of being fed to the creature. On the other hand, it should be noted that not one hair of her head is harmed, nor one drop of her blood spilled, whereas men normally suffer rather harsher treatment.

To bring the reader up to date with the plot: these are paga slaves thrown in as a free gift by the tavernkeeper Hesius of Laura, who was hired by Captain Sarus of Tyros to connive in the capture of Bosk’s crew by feeding them drugged wine. It was a simple plan and utterly successful, and now his crew and ship have both been spirited away. But Bosk alone was not the target of these men, and they have their sights on the biggest game of all: Marlenus. Initially puzzled that they would attempt such dangerous quarry as Marlenus and his hand-picked bodyguard with only a three-to-two advantage in numbers, Bosk deduces that they must have Panther allies, specifically the band of Hura, supposedly Marlenus’s hirelings, and this is confirmed for him when he puts the question to one of the paga slaves, an Earth girl called Ilene. Since she was slow with the information, Bosk resolves to punish her by selling her in Port Kar.

Chapter Fourteen

Making what haste he can, Bosk is still too late to prevent this plan being executed, and he arrives at Marlenus’s camp to find out that it has been completely successful. Marlenus’s boast, that he can take any city behind whose walls he could get one tarn of gold, has rebounded on his own head, and he has been dealt with in the same manner. Knowing where the captives are to be taken, and guessing that the Panthers will want to enjoy the usual fruits of their triumph, Bosk is confident of overtaking them, and he sets off in pursuit.

That night he catches up with the raiders, and while he is waiting for his moment to strike, he treats his plundered paga slaves to a tasty supper of raw urt. Ilene, being a mere Earth girl, nearly chokes on this and, inevitably, begs for special treatment. She doesn’t know our Bosk very well, of course.

Having put the slave girls out of harm’s way, or at any rate where any harm they come to will not inconvenience him, Bosk makes his way to the edge of the Tyrosian camp in time to watch the Panther revels begin. This time it is Marlenus who is the main attraction, and he is staked out and forced to wait helplessly as the branding iron reaches white heat and the sexual arousal of Hura and her girls does something similar. Watching him, Bosk broods upon a thousand unintentional slights and the envy he undoubtedly feels towards this Gorean Übermensch. It is, perhaps, hardly Marlenus’s fault that up until now he has proven Bosk’s better with almost embarrassing ease at anything the pair of them should have set their minds to, and it is something less than noble of Bosk to resent it as he does; but, though we can’t help feeling it petty of him, we should need to be made of fine metal indeed to have stood in his shoes and not been sorely tempted to let Hura and her girls have their way with Marlenus.

At all events, as the Panther dance reaches its climax and we may reasonably assume that the Panthers themselves are desperately in need of one, Hura gives the order for Marlenus to be branded slave, and Bosk enjoys a smile at the fate of his - rival? Enemy? It’s hard to make either such label fit Marlenus. Say only “one for whom Bosk feels a profound envy” - before, in a dramatically-appropriate fashion, he shoots down the man wielding the branding iron just in time to save Marlenus from his fate.

Chapter Fifteen

Even Bosk needs to reduce the numbers of the enemy to something approaching a reasonable level before he can even consider a direct assault, and in the meantime he must employ strategy. Thus it is we see him hunting for Panthers, using the unworthy Ilene as bait. This gives him occasion both to muse on the lack of sisterly fellow-feeling Panthers have to slave girls, and to despise Ilene’s deficiencies in athleticism and woodcraft. However, she carries out her assigned task in a manner that, if less than satisfactory, at least answers Bosk’s need for the present, and soon he has a respectable number of Panther captives. His aim, of course, is to strike at the morale of the Panthers and hence deprive the men of Tyros of their wood-wise allies.

Soon a pecking order is being established as Bosk gives Panther clothing to his captured paga slaves (but not Ilene) and one of these shows herself able and willing to keep order among the slaves, and is made “first girl”. (Ah, don’t get me started about on-line customs again...) Using the disguised slaves, Bosk effects more captures, of Panthers guarding the Tyrosian camp itself, and soon has nearly doubled his catch.

After a night’s rest, Bosk chains up his captured Panthers in a “coffle”, using some slave chains that the fleeing Tyrosians have been only too glad to leave behind them, and then takes up the pursuit of his foes. One of the Panthers is momentarily under the impression that she and her kind are too good to do a man’s fetching and carrying for him, but she is quickly disabused of this notion. Bosk’s business for the day is quite simple. Using some plundered arrows, he polishes off a dozen or so men of the Tyrosian rearguard, with the straightforward intent of rendering this duty as unattractive as possible; and having accomplished this, he returns to his own camp.

That night, the Earth girl Ilene makes a foolish and thoroughly unsuccessful attempt to induce Bosk to treat her with the respect an Earth man is meant to show to an Earth woman (not for the first time, this is a slightly parochial use of the term “Earth” to give the name of a whole planet to the culture of, say, about two hundred million people, but we know what Norman means, and he commits no greater solecism than many of his countrymen). She should have chosen her hero better. Captain Kirk, John Carter, Elwin Ransom (usually just known by his surname: he is the hero of C. S. Lewis’s “Out of the Silent Planet”) and most others of their kidney would have spared no effort to return her safely to the world of her birth, and so might Tarl Cabot once upon a time, but she is not about to get a tarsk-bit’s worth of change out of our beloved Bosk. Sir Galahad he ain’t.

But by the time rosy-fingered dawn begins to peep through the leaves of the northern forests, Bosk’s uncompromising sexual domination of her has worked its usual magic and she is gagging for seconds and thirds, which he graciously sees fit to grant her. However, he is still resolved to sell her in Port Kar, and reckons that he has made good progress on improving her price; and when she foolishly begs him to sell the red-haired first girl in her stead, he makes Ilene go to her, confess her wheedling, and demand punishment.

Seeing the red-head performing her duties ably and willingly, Bosk rewards her with a name, Vinca, which she was formerly called and liked; and as for Ilene, he formally revokes her name and then fixes “Ilene” on her as a slave name. She gets the reference: Once a master chose to deprive her of a name, she had no name of her own, and the name she has now is only a temporary one, even though it happens to be spelled and pronounced the same as her old one.

Chapter Sixteen

Intent not only on poetic justice but on bringing about the downfall of the men of Tyros in the most expeditious fashion, Bosk is able to serve both ends at once by laying his hands on Mira, already twice a traitress, first to Verna and then to Marlenus. This is only the latest step in a well-planned and successful campaign to date, in which he has first induced the Tyrosians to flee and then seen to it that their flight will not be faster than is convenient for him. Now he sneaks into Mira’s sleeping shelter, abducts her, and with the willing and able help of Vinca disguised as a rival Panther Girl and a spot of Gorean abuse of women (see above; this time it’s a sleen) he induces Mira to carry out yet a third betrayal.

He has been by no means idle on his own account; more than forty Tyrosians have choked out their life around the shaft of one of Bosk’s arrows, and the psychological war is to all intents and purposes won. But before his final assault, whenever that should become necessary, Bosk is determined to reduce the odds still further, and he is best able to do this by hoisting Hura’s Panther Girls on the same petard that he and his pirate crew have been so ignominiously hoist upon. Mira is given a supply of drugged wine and some orders concerning its use, on pain of unspeakable punishments should she fail of her task. And before she goes to carry out this task, she wordlessly begs Bosk for some of that uncompromising stuff he has been handing out to less deserving girls in this story; and he accommodates her.

And now, as Bosk prepares to bring affairs to their climax, as he reduces further and further Sarus’s authority over his command, and as Ilene becomes a more helplessly and perfectly submitted slave girl, and as Hura’s Panther Girls draw near to a closer acquaintance with soporific substances, this crusty Scribe feels the mellowing influence of the season reaching out to him with whispers of undrugged wine and over-indulgence in succulent meats, and I take my leave of you with an abundance of good wishes for the festive season that you will have to view as retroactive by the time you read these words, and hope that you will have enjoyed a splendid Yuletide and a New Year full of promise; and I steer this somewhat out-of-control sentence towards a conclusion with a promise of my own that I shall see you in a month’s time with the conclusion of Bosk’s Rambo-like adventures, in the closing chapters of Volume Eight of the Chronicles of Counter-Earth, “Hunters of Gor”.

I wish you well,

Socrates