Tal Goreans,

Greetings visitors,

Welcome once again to the Booknotes column. For many months now we have been following the adventures of Tarl Cabot, but at this point in "Raiders of Gor", no such person exists any longer; he who was Tarl Cabot is now going by the name of "Bosk". This name was given to him by his mistress during his brief term of slavery, and he now stubbornly refuses to go by any other. Deeming that he has lost all honour, all self-respect and all claim to the respect of those he has known and loved, Bosk has abandoned his former service of the Priest-Kings and has resumed his interrupted journey to squalid, malignant Port Kar, there to become a true son of that soulless city. We rejoin him, his two boon companions Thurnock the Peasant and Clitus the Fisher, and their four slave girls, one of whom is Telima, Bosk's erstwhile mistress, shortly after they have arrived there.

Chapter Nine - Port Kar

Bosk goes in search of a paga tavern so that he can get good and drunk, where his path is crossed by one Surbus, a pirate who is doing his best to push back the boundaries of cruelty and wickedness. This is quite a feat to attempt in Port Kar, but according to reputation Surbus is no novice at the art. Bosk's revulsion at the sight of this man is matched only by another attack of self-loathing, and he reflects on the coarse but unpretentious quasi-honour of Port Kar:

"There is more honesty in Port Kar, I thought, than in all the cities of Gor... Here [men] knew, and would acknowledge, the dark truths of human life, that, in the end, there was only gold, and power, and the bodies of women, and the steel of weapons."

Let the reader understand, lest he think to find here the kernel and substance of Gorean philosophy, that Bosk was severely broken-hearted at the time.

Surbus proceeds to set about using a slave girl cruelly, and (most unusually for a kajira) she seeks the protection of the other clients, including Bosk, who ignores her pleas as being none of his business. This is, of course, as clear an indication as one could ask for how much our hero has been shattered by his experience in the marshes; for only a book ago, at a similarly early stage in the story, he was risking his life against four Warriors to save the life of an ugly hunchback, and passing by on the other side never has been the way of our good Samaritan. He is congratulated by the other clients on his discretion, given that Surbus is one of Port Kar's finest swordsmen.

He gets some more paga down his neck and muses upon the nature of the city he is now to call home. It is a wild, woolly, anarchic place, the only city on Gor to be substantially slave-built, the only one to boast five Ubars simultaneously, and, considering its virtual unapproachability by land and the fact that the only nations likely to be able to mount a challenge to her naval power (Cos and Tyros) would have next to no interest in doing so, perhaps the most unconquerable.

At long last he gets around to answering a question that may have been troubling the reader for a good hundred pages (I well remember that it so troubled me): where is Elizabeth Cardwell? She was last seen in the final paragraph of "Assassin" after Cernus's wagon had been well and truly fixed, and it now turns out that when Tarl reported to the Sardar, he made arrangements to have her returned to Earth, over her protests and perhaps in defiance of logic, since she was abducted from Earth initially and the indications that we have had are that the slavers sponsored by the Others can do much as they please there and could presumably pick her up again without difficulty. Our headstrong Elizabeth rejected his decision and fled the Sardar aboard Tarl's great tarn, Ubar of the Skies, which outraged him to the extent that when the bird returned to him Tarl drove it away. This, I would say, counts as a second lapse of logic, since we can hardly suppose that he'd have been more pleased with the tarn if it had made a tasty snack of her (which would have been the usual way of a tarn with one who was not its owner; and Ubar of the Skies is already known to be a terrible man-eater, at least since "Outlaw").

Angry, bitter and miserable for the two women he has loved and lost, and thoroughly drunk, Bosk buys a humungous bottle of paga to take away and returns to the home he has set up with his two friends and their slaves, where they hold an impromptu feast, after drunkenly heading out to get the slaves branded. No sooner is she branded and collared than his new slave Midice sets about wheedling, beginning with demanding a gold bangle that Telima wears. He doesn't give it to her at the first time of asking, but she doesn't have to wheedle very long or hard, and while Bosk is removing it from Telima, he thinks to ask her why Ho-Hak the Rencer should have been so moved at Bosk's statement that it was for the sake of the child Eechius that he rescued them from the slavers (see last issue of the Booknotes). There is a certain inevitability about the news that this boy was Ho-Hak's son.

Despite the feast, music, dancing, and his first bout of sex with his new slave, Bosk is miserable and unsatisfied, and he goes for a pre-dawn wander, ending up back at the same paga tavern as before. There, while he is musing on the rottenness of Port Kar, he again makes the acquaintance of Surbus, who is about to buy and put to death the slave-girl who has displeased him. What follows is proof that in Gorean terms any man has the perfect right to destroy a slave as long as he can afford to pay for her - and also that any other man who happens by in time to interfere has the perfect right to do so. For Bosk has just enough of the old Tarl left in him to be moved to mercy on the slave's account, first offering to buy her for a higher price than Surbus has paid, and then to do with his sword what money and words could not accomplish, citing "The right of one of Port Kar to do what pleases him". And though Bosk may consider that he has none of the honour left that Tarl had, his swordsmanship has not deserted him, and Surbus, named as one of the finest swords in Port Kar, is dispatched with such cold efficiency that it doesn't even rate a description.

Oddly, the girl Surbus would have killed is moved to pity on his behalf. He is mortally wounded and his death is only a few Ehn away, and she struggles to grant him his last wish, to see the Sea one last time before he dies. Finding his dying body too much to handle, she begs Bosk's help, which request puzzles him. But he sees fit to grant it, and on the dawn-lit roof of the tavern his first sight of Thassa, Gor's mighty ocean, coincides with Surbus's last. That pirate dies apparently content, Bosk invites the now masterless slave girl (called Luma) to attach herself to him, and is almost immediately confronted by Surbus's second-in-command Tab and heavily-armed pirate crew.

Tarl, of course, used to have a long history of doing charitable deeds with no immediate thought of self-interest and ultimately profiting by them, and the same proves to be true of Bosk, who now learns that his act of kindness in letting the dying Surbus have his last wish means that Tab and all his men are now Bosk's, along with all of the pirate's extensive possessions. So his lucky star hasn't altogether set on him, after all.

Chapter Ten - The Council of Captains

Half a year later Bosk has become a person of consequence in Port Kar, although by no means high on the ladder. We see him at the Council of Captains, Port Kar's equivalent of a parliament, to which his ownership of the ships and crews formerly belonging to Surbus entitles him. He takes this occasion to tell us about the ships commonly plying Gor's seas, the five Ubars of Port Kar (who don't show their faces much), and how he himself has learned the craft of the Sea from Tab. He speaks of having first seen the sea on the morning when Surbus died, but I have to assume that he means Thassa by this; having grown up in Bristol, he would surely have seen the Bristol Channel several times in his life, either in his home city or maybe on a day trip to such fleshpots as Clevedon, Nailsea or Weston-Super-Mare.

At any rate, he has proved an able pupil in everything he has set his hand to since coming to Gor, and the mariner's craft doesn't break the pattern. His random act of altruism bears yet more fruit in that Luma proves to be a Scribe and an accomplished accountant, and she runs his business extremely well. For it is to business that he turns his fleet, buying and selling cargoes for profit rather than plundering them from other seafarers, and he does very well at it, keeping his piratical crews happy with plenty of pay and luxuries.

The Council business is less than gripping. There are rumours that Cos and Tyros are planning an invasion, but these are very old rumours that have never come to anything, although this causes Bosk to give the reader some estimates of their comparative naval strength - about five thousand ships apiece, and although many of Port Kar's ships are not dedicated warships, they can still be used in battle. There is the possibility of a strike over wages in the arsenal, which provides occasion to mention the fact that Gorean labourers are on the whole contented with their lot, proud of their work, and don't have the same devotion to becoming wealthy as those of Earth do.

Comic relief is afforded by the intrusion of an eccentric shipbuilder named Tersites, who has some original and courageous propositions concerning ship design but doesn't succeed in attracting much backing. The Gorean warship, on Bosk's description, resembles a xebec more nearly than any other Earth ship, or else the trireme of the classical era, and the Goreans are much opposed to any alterations to the standard design. (On the basis of my own admittedly limited knowledge of seafaring, I'm inclined to think that their devotion to the lateen rig owes more to romance than common sense.) The innovations of Tersites tease us - exactly what can he hope to achieve with a two-masted square-rigger with a stern-hung rudder, multi-manned oars and a ramming beak set above the waterline? - but I urge the reader not to spend too much thought upon it.

Bosk on the other hand is quite prepared to innovate, if not in ship design then in working practices. His oared vessels are crewed with free men instead of slaves, which gives him the advantage of a crew that can be armed - and this original idea earns favour with some other captains of Port Kar as well. We'll see in due course that he introduces some other ideas that reflect the worth of enlightened self-interest, too. But for now, he tells us of receiving a message ostensibly from Samos, the agent of Priest-Kings whom he was originally travelling to Port Kar to see before it all went tospit-shaped. Hardly has he angrily crumpled up and discarded the message, firmly putting his association with the Priest-Kings behind him, than a dramatic piece of news is brought to the Council. The messenger, by a remarkable coincidence, is that Henrak who betrayed the rencers to the Port Kar slavers, and the dreadful news is that the arsenal is on fire.

We have covered but two chapters this month, but there has been much to remark upon and there is even more to come in the next, too much to fit in at the end of a column; so as Port Kar's night is lit by the leaping flames of this mysterious fire, we shall take our leave for now, and look forward to next month, in which we shall make our fourth foray into the sixth volume of the Gorean Chronicles, "Raiders of Gor".

I wish you well,

Socrates