Tal Goreans,

Greetings visitors,

Welcome once again to the Booknotes column. We here continue our journey through "Raiders of Gor". Tarl Cabot is in a fix and no mistake. He has been in fixes before, many of which have been rather more life-threatening than his current one, but perhaps none quite so hateful to him. Having had the ill fortune to blunder into the clutches of the inhospitable Rence Growers of the Vosk Delta while on his way to Port Kar, and too much ennui to either fight his way clear or talk his way out of the situation he found himself in - as we would surely have expected our hero to do based on his form to date - he could see no way to avoid summary execution but to beg for his life and volunteer for slavery. This has earned him contempt from all sides; from the Rencer chief, Ho-Hak; from his new mistress, whose name we have yet to learn; and not least from himself. We shall see how he is getting on without delay.

Chapter Four - The Hut

Tarl, now named Bosk after the huge, shaggy and rather stupid Gorean bovine, is hard at work cutting rence, with no clothing to his name except a rence-vine collar. This is a very poor slave collar by Gorean standards, but the rencers have little opportunity to practice smithcraft and a vine collar will do for now given that it is death to remove it. His anguish is amplified by the fact that his mistress is, of course, extremely beautiful, and he daren't exhibit even an involuntary reaction to this.

Naturally his mistress is unable to work her will on him by main force, but help is only a whistle away and Tarl knows that he could not survive in the marshes even if he overpowered her and escaped. And besides, his spirit is so crushed by his submission to slavery that he has no urge to escape, and he torments himself with the thought that all of his pride and honour to date has been shown up for a hollow sham.

He learns that a great many rence islands - which are woven platforms of the universal rence reed - are gathered together for a festival and a council, the latter at Ho-Hak's bidding in pursuit of political unity and some measure of defence against the predatory slavers of Port Kar; but his mistress knows her people for a clannish, independent and above all hidebound sort, unlikely to countenance change. But when he dares to ask a question about a golden armlet she wears, he is pettishly ordered to silence.

At the end of a long day's work he is returned to her hut, hand-fed and subjected to some more taunting and torment, made to look on his mistress nude but forbidden to touch her, and beaten again when once more he is unable to suppress the "gallant reflex". Finally she deigns to tell Tarl her name: Telima. After lights out she plays a game of will-she-won't-she to torment him some more, and part of his misery is caused by his yearning to be granted a kind word or gesture and the fear of rejection should he beg for such, before she nicknames him "Pretty Slave" and informs him that she will now teach him the fate of such, and uses him as her sex toy. From his reaction, this does not seem to be a voyage of erotic discovery he was eager to embark on, nor one that he much enjoys.

Chapter Five - Festival

Tarl is to be put up at stake for the young women at festival to compete for. This doesn't mean that Tarl gets to sit around on his behind all day; there is plenty of grunt labour to be done and a big, strong male slave is just what's needed for that kind of job. Once that is done, he is tied to the pole and the girls enjoy taunting him for a while, then turn their attention to the other entertainments of the day. Around noon he is shown some unexpected kindness by a small boy, who feeds him a half-eaten rence cake, the only food anyone has brought him. This earns the boy Tarl's thanks but a scold from his mother.

The day is spent in play and contests, and also in debate; but Tarl doesn't get to hear the council. He does, however, see one of the delegates, who is the man who wanted Tarl tortured in the previous instalment and who probably bears him a petty grudge over having been unable to string Tarl's longbow. Tarl wonders briefly why this individual is wearing a white scarf, but he is too wrapped up in his own miseries to care much.

In mid-afternoon Telima returns with the other girls to tell him that he has been won, but not who his new mistress is. Before he gets to find out he will have the added humiliation of serving all of the girls at the feast, and woe betide him if he fails to show his new mistress deference enough.

When the night falls the feast gets under way in earnest, and Tarl, who has had plenty of work to do in preparing it, now has plenty more work to do in serving it. Once everyone has had their fill of food and drink, music and dancing begins, chiefly the dance of the young women in front of the young men. In this dance Telima takes much of the lead, and Tarl has a first-class view of the proceedings from his place at the pole, from which he will be awarded to the girl who has won him. After Tarl has been taunted some more and spat on by the young women, these begin to pair off with the young men in what is obviously a mass courtship session, featuring a spot of mock capture with the consent of the young women. It turns out that Telima has won the contests and still owns him, and she unbinds him and orders him to her hut.

Once there, Telima orders Tarl, after a few preliminaries, to serve her pleasure; and Tarl refuses. Plainly two whole days of slavery have been as much as he can stomach, and he is now willing to defy her wishes and stand the consequences. This is an act of courage for which he will subsequently give himself no credit whatsoever; but it becomes irrelevant almost as soon as he has committed it, for even as Telima digests the implications of Tarl's defiance, there is a cry of alarm from outside: "Slavers!"

Chapter Six - Slavers

The massed rencers defend themselves from the attack of the slavers with all the organisation of a burst anthill. Formidable as they may be when confronted with a single traveller with no hostile intent, the rencers are utterly clueless when it comes to repelling a determined assault - it probably doesn't help that they are all stuffed to the gills with food and drink - and, so far from the principle of "Women and children first", the watchword on this occasion is "Every man for himself and the Kurii take the hindmost". (Oops, getting ahead of myself here. It will be three more books before we hear that name mentioned.)

The white-scarfed rencer is plainly hand-in-glove with this whole undertaking, standing shoulder to shoulder with an officer in charge of the attack and brazenly flaunting the purse of money for which he has doubtless sold his fellow-rencers into bondage. We haven't been told his name up to now, but Telima knows it: Henrak.

Not as a loyal kajirus but as a man who has a rather clearer idea of which of the two of them is the master, Tarl steers Telima in pursuit of safety. He finds girl after girl, including his former tormentors, in the clutches of the slavers; Ho-Hak, alone of all the rencers, fighting like a champion but to no avail against the overwhelming numbers of the slavers; and the little boy who was earlier kind to him, now running for his life. Suddenly they are spotted by Henrak, who wants Telima for himself. They become separated as warriors are set on them, but Tarl is determined to rescue her. As soon as a warrior of Port Kar crosses his path, Tarl is armed again, he fights his way clear, finds Telima, cuts her free, and makes good his escape hidden with her amid a pile of rence reeds on a drifting raft.

Chapter Seven - I Will Hunt

Even with a plundered sword in his hand, Tarl is powerless against such a horde as the slavers have mustered, and he is forced to skulk in the marshes as they complete their raid, herding captives and loading loot aboard a series of barges. Once all is loaded and it is daylight, they begin to row slowly away, the traitor Henrak in their midst. When they have gone, Tarl strips himself of the garland of flowers he was made to wear. He orders Telima to free him, which she does, and he easily foils her attempt to kill him. He has now noticed that she has a slave brand on her leg, and so was once slave, whether she be free now or not; and he guesses that she was known as "Pretty Slave", the nickname she so spitefully hissed at him a day and a half ago. But he does not intend to enslave her. He plans to find himself supplies enough to resume his journey to Port Kar and forget this whole sorry episode as soon as possible. She can go free and find a new home in the marshes with another rencer community for all he cares. In response to Telima's question, Tarl gives his name as "Bosk", the slave name she gave him; and he goes by no other name for a long time, and I shall call him such until further notice.

What sways him from his intended course is that, as Telima is performing the rencer burial ceremony for all the slain she can find, returning their bodies to the marsh whence they came, and he helps her, they find the dead body of the little boy who was kind to him. The sight of the murdered boy, identified by Telima as Eechius, touches something in Bosk, and he calls for his weapons, especially the great bow.

Chapter Eight - What Occurred in the Marshes

Telima hurriedly builds a rence boat in which they can pursue the slow-moving barges, while Bosk checks over his weapons. He has no fewer than seventy arrows for his bow and he will surely need every single one of them to account for the Port Kar slavers. Soon he catches up with the barges, which are navigating the marshes with difficulty, and he begins his guerrilla attack upon them. He chooses his targets with care, striking where he will inflict the maximum nuisance and confusion; and at the short ranges at which he is able to operate in the concealment of the tall reeds, he is able to drive his arrows right through his targets, leaving them slain by no obvious weapon at all. This all contributes towards the delaying of the slave barges, which is exactly as he designed.

By night he continues his stealthy attack on the barges, wearing down both their manpower and their morale. He carries on for more or less as long as he feels like, until he decides that he needs a rest; but this is not before he has accounted for a good many more slavers, and also induced them to fight each other in the darkness. All this, as he tells himself before settling down to a much-needed sleep, for the sake of a little boy; and as for himself, the proud, brave, honourable warrior he once thought himself no longer exists.

On the morrow he finds, to Telima's surprise but not to his, that in the teeth of some sixty-plus percent casualties from an invisible enemy, the slavers have withdrawn by punt, leaving the barges and all aboard them behind. He methodically checks all the barges for any remaining enemy, finds none, gleans all the arrows he can, and binds Telima hand and foot. But she is quite irrepressible, in her way, finding fault with his blunt statement that he hates rencers - for he has just done much to rescue them from the men of Port Kar - and, on hearing his terse retort that he has done all this for the sake of one child, points out that there is at least one more on board that needs freeing and caring for. And in response to her nagging, he attends to this matter.

He is de facto Ubar of all he surveys, but the sight does not much comfort him. He does, however, on impulse, select a couple of companions from among the oar-slaves; a fisherman of Cos, and a peasant from near Ar, whom he frees. They are called Clitus and Thurnock respectively. However, the author will make comparatively little use of them, after presenting us with a potentially interesting duo.

Bosk is still an emotional basket case. He could easily slay all of the rencers in revenge for enslaving and humiliating him - and teaching him a lesson about himself that he would sooner not have learned - or he could sell them in Port Kar, but Ho-Hak does not think that Bosk will do either, not after showing himself the kind of man who would fight a hundred with only a girl to help him. He shows no fear, and frankly admits that this is not because he is particularly brave but that he is sure that Bosk will not harm him; and when he learns that the revenge and rescue mission was all on account of Eechius, he is moved to tears of gratitude, though we are not yet told why.

Bosk's only reaction is to be shamed by Ho-Hak's calm courage and to be gripped by the conviction that everyone whom he ever loved or respected would despise him now if they knew "the truth" about him. His current attitude is well expressed by something that the theologian C. S. Lewis put into the mouth of George MacDonald in "The Great Divorce":

"Ye see it easily enough in a spoiled child that would sooner miss its play and its supper than say it was sorry and be friends. Ye call it the Sulks. But in adult life it has a hundred fine names - Achilles' wrath and Corolianus' grandeur, Revenge and Injured Merit and Self-Respect and Tragic Greatness and Proper Pride."

In short, having had his self-image marred, Bosk is determined to wallow in self-loathing in a manner hardly equalled in literature by any save Thomas Covenant, with less dictionary-swallowing but more semicolons, and he will not be denied this by anyone's gainsaying, even those who praise the mighty feat he has just accomplished. He and his two new companions each select themselves a girl apiece from the enslaved rencers, but Bosk's slave will not be Telima, who is following him around making smart-mouthed remarks that are actually complimentary in their way, reminding him of his earlier threats to enslave or slay them all in a manner that plainly says: You aren't fooling me. However hard you bluster, I know that you are not despicable enough to do such a thing - which Bosk, for the reasons already discussed, is pointedly ignoring. Instead he selects another beautiful slave, Midice. She and Telima hiss and spit at each other a little as to which of them is the lovelier, and Telima, not now bound or collared, makes a nuisance of herself until Bosk enslaves her anew as the fourth girl in their little party, a lowly kettle and mat girl.

This chapter ends on an exit line that would prompt me to treat it as a natural break point even had I not waffled enough to fill up space for the current issue. Bosk promises Telima a hard life, since he has decided he is now of Port Kar; but she responds with the question "Are we not both of Port Kar?" and, in view of her treatment of him, Bosk cannot but agree, to which she responds "Then, Master, let us go to our city."

And it is there we shall rejoin them in a month's time as we discover what progress Bosk will make towards coming to terms with himself, and how he will make out in the city so often dubbed "squalid, malignant" Port Kar, in our third helping of Volume Six of the Chronicles of Counter-Earth, "Raiders of Gor".

I wish you well,

Socrates