Tal Goreans,
Greetings visitors,

Welcome once again to the Booknotes column. After an enjoyable interlude looking at Gor through the eyes of Judy Thornton, we return to our regular narrator, Tarl Cabot. He appeared briefly in the last book - long enough to decode a mysterious message, Half-Ear Arrives and to collar a beautiful female agent of Kurii. Concerning Half-Ear, we know only that he is a great war general of the Kurii and that Samos, who is not ordinarily short of cojones, is in no hurry to meet him. But as to where on Gor Half-Ear might be, or what he might be about, we have yet to learn; and if we want to find out, we had better open the covers of Beasts of Gor without delay.

Chapter One

Tarl is in his own house, in Port Kar, reflecting on the whereabouts of Half-Ear and the intentions of the Kurii. They have been present in Sol system for many centuries, but have been deterred by the power of the Priest-Kings from approaching too closely - at least, until now. But a few years ago, as described in Priest-Kings of Gor, civil war rent the Nest of the Priest-Kings and they have yet to regain their full power. The men of Gor have only the caution of the Kurii to thank for their continued freedom, as if the present weakness of the Priest-Kings were fully known there would no doubt be an invasion in progress in short order, and only the fear that the said weakness might be only a feint to lure them into rashness deters the alien invaders. The arrival of Half-Ear presages either a serious intelligence-gathering exercise or else the establishment of a staging post to enable the invasion to take place, but unfortunately for Tarl he has no idea where all of this might be going on.

But Tarl is not one to mooch around feeling sorry for himself, not when he has a luscious wench to occupy his private time, and such is presently the case. This is Vella, the former Miss Elizabeth Cardwell of Earth, once Tarl’s major love-interest and sidekick, who fled when he would have had her returned to Earth, was later found in a tavern in Lydius and abandoned by him to the life of a paga slave, who subsequently turned up in the Tahari in the collar of an enemy of Tarl’s and who lied in a trial that resulted in Tarl being sentenced to the salt mines. When the occasion arose, Tarl managed to lay his hands on her, and she now labours as a low slave in his house, but is sometimes permitted to lie ch ained at the foot of his bed and, as now, be dragged onto the same for his pleasures, for which use of her she proclaims herself his helpless love slave.

All well and good and as things should be from Tarl’s point of view, but his temper is not improved w hen his enjoyment of her is interrupted by the arrival of a hunting sleen. Now a sleen is no pushover even for an armed man; the best of warriors would do well to get more than one blow at it. Fortunately though, Tarl keeps a souvenir in his bedchamber, a Torvaldsland axe, and one well-aimed blow with this is enough to stop even a sleen in its tracks. The alarm is raised; Bertram of Lydius, who was ostensibly selling him the sleen for tabuk-hunting, is nowhere to be found, and Tarl will have words with Vella, who has been in charge of keeping his sleeping chamber clean and tidy.

It soon turns out, under Tarl’s unusual employment of sexual intercourse as an interrogation technique, that Vella was inveigled into providing Bertram with a piece of Tarl’s clothing, supposedly to get his measurements for a fur jacket, and this was used to set the sleen upon his scent. Tarl is angry with Vella for letting herself be duped, and by no means convinced that she was not actively complicit in this attempt on his life; but he decides to regard her as innocent, at least for now. As he is about to be off, she again pleads with Tarl to believe that she was tricked; but Tarl only points out that It is morning in Port Kar, to which she responds, as if by rote, If I do not please you this day, impale me - the only one of Tarl’s slaves to be made to offer such a daily plea. Plainly Tarl is not free of grudges where Vella is concerned - but this cameo marks her final appearance in the series, though she is occasionally referred to again.

Chapter Two

Tarl is having a snack with Samos and discussing a secret message which has been delivered, using the common technique of having an Earth girl deliver it, unaware of what it is she carries. In this case the message is a scytale, which is to say a strip of cloth wrapped around the shaft of a spear and then written on; and Tarl tells us enough about the ins and outs of such a means of ciphering to satisfy us that the author has done his research and enjoys telling us all that he has found out. The luckless messenger, who was dressed in jeans and a rather mannish shirt and shoes, is less than overjoyed when Tarl tells her where she is (for she has heard of Gor as a storybook world) and what is going to happen to her; in contrast to his concern for Elizabeth Cardwell some years previously, Tarl makes it plain on this occasion that he couldn’t care less.

As to the message itself, this informs Tarl that Zarendargar, war general of the Kurii, awaits him at the world’s end. This is fortuitous, as the mad shipbuilder Tersites has been hard at work in Port Kar’s shipyards for some time preparing a vessel for just such a voyage. It is an unusual ship by Gorean standards, two-masted, square-rigged, deep-keeled, and with a ram that would strike at the waterline instead of below, and with oversized oars intended to be pulled by many men; in short, leaving aside the question of the ram, a much more ocean-worthy vessel than the lateen-rigged biremes and triremes that are the more usual fare on Gor, at least in my half-expert opinion. Samos believes Tersites a genius; everyone else, Tarl included, considers him mad, though at least Tarl concedes that he does not know whether Tersites is also a genius.

Pondering the challenge arrogantly thrown down by the Kurii, Tarl decides that he will take this strange ship and sail beyond the sunset, but first he has other business. The ship must be provisioned and a crew must be found, but most pressingly of all, it is En-Kara, and Tarl has a prior engagement at the Sardar Fairs. Scormus, the fiery, brilliant Kaissa champion of Ar, is to meet Cos’s champion, wise old Centius, for the title of world champion, and Tarl is not about to miss that for anything, even the invasion of Gor. Besides, allegedly Zarendargar is waiting for him; in that case, he can wait a little more.

There are two minor items of gossip before Tarl is on his way. The herd of Tancred, a vast herd of northern tabuk (moose, if you like) has not turned up on its expected migration this year; this is bad news for the red hunters, Gor’s Eskimos, who will starve without them, and Tarl compassionately orders a supply ship to be sent. And somewhere in the north - Samos points out its location on the map - there is an iceberg that does not drift on the sea. Filing these two pieces of data in his mind, Tarl returns to matters of greater import: the coming Kaissa match. Scormus is sure to win, in Tarl’s opinion. He has the killer’s instinct, while old Centius is more concerned with discovering the perfect game of Kaissa than actually winning anything. It is just a shame that Tarl won’t be able to get worthwhile odds on Scormus winning; on the other hand, Tarl is very wealthy these days, and can afford to bet a bundle in order to make a pittance.

Chapter Three

At the Fair, Tarl witnesses a couple of players from a recent game of Girl Catch and enjoys the company of a Torvaldslander, one Oleg, who unlike him is uninterested in the Kaissa match as he considers that the game is not Kaissa when it is not played to northern rules. This gives Tarl the opportunity to attempt to resolve a few of the inconsistencies in earlier descriptions of Gorean chess, and to introduce another when he establishes that Players are a caste unto themselves, in direct contradiction of Assassin for a start. He then enjoys some more of the sights and sounds of the Fair, including a puppet show that owes some inspiration to Punch and Judy and other ancient folk-tales. He sees a red hunter and wonders if he knows about the herd of Tancred, brushes off a slave girl who importunes him for sex, and at length finds the odds merchants, where he wagers fourteen hundred gold tarns on Scormus at 14/1 on. This is an immense sum, and the odds merchant is startled; but on learning his customer’s identity, the man accepts the bet. Moments later the news filters through that Scormus will have first move in the game, which causes the odds on him to lengthen to 36/1 on, and Tarl congratulates himself on getting a comparatively good deal.

Continuing with his wandering, Tarl amuses himself by touring the slave markets, where he notices four newly-arrived Earth girls about to be sold. They are publicly debating their plight in English, which of course Tarl speaks as his mother tongue, and he leaves them just as it is dawning on them that they may be slaves.

There is a more than usually festival air in the vicinity of the Kaissa match, where the two champions have exchanged greetings, a courteous one from Centius and a savage one from Scormus, who isn’t about to mess around with any meaningless pleasantries. Tarl enjoys a bite to eat and then returns to the slave markets, where our three Earth girls are digesting the realities of their position and concluding that, if they must be slaves, they would rather have a Master than a Mistress. The red hunter previously noticed arrives and buys two of the girls for a couple of small furs, and the other two come to the full realisation of their status and, interestingly, immediately start imploring the passers-by to buy them, although of course possibly no-one but Tarl understands them. Amused, he moves on, and finds himself a wench for the night.

Chapter Four

So at last it is to the Kaissa match, but on his way there Tarl sees the red hunter yet again, along with his two new slaves whose bloodstained thighs attest to their no-longer-virgin status. The hunter has brought an offering for the Priest-Kings, a carved tabuk which he leaves with the prayer Let the herd come.

Tarl then goes to take his seat, which cost him two tarns of gold - more, we learned in Assassin, than a Player plying his trade upon the streets might make in a year, and so no small sum of money for a seat at a sporting occasion. Of course he stands to win a hundred tarns once Scormus has disposed of Centius, thanks to his good fortune at getting his bet down in time. This match will consist of a single game, which to the Earth chess player reads rather like a boxing match decided by the first knock-down, but that’s how the Goreans like their Kaissa decided. Tarl describes the means by which the game will be recorded, and how the time-controls work - much as in Earth chess, and it’s worth remarking that chess clocks were a mid-1800s innovation, and for most of its history chess was played perfectly well with no time limits.

Then the champions enter and take their seats, and the game begins, in which we learn more about the mechanics of Kaissa than from any other description in the books, or perhaps from all other such descriptions put together. Scormus opens up with his Ubara’s Spearman, drawing cries of The Ubara\rquote s Gambit! from the crowd. Plainly the author is evoking the shade of chess’s Queen’s Gambit, a hammerlock of an opening, the weapon of the remorseless strategist who seizes the initiative from the first move and mercilessly grinds down his opponent, as he evoked the shade of the King’s Knight’s Gambit when he described Ivar Forkbeard’s favourite opening in Marauders Personally, I can’t suppress a slight grin here, in that there are several highly-specific reasons why the Queen’s Gambit enjoys the reputation that it does, none of which applies to Kaissa, and that the mere opening move does not guarantee that the Gambit is going to be played. At any rate, Centius, after pondering for an unusually long while, does not respond as expected but plays a reputedly weak opening. Scormus seizes on the easy prey and furiously sets about refuting Centius’s schoolboy tactics, and a few moves later he is already enjoying a material advantage more than sufficient to win.

But suspicion dawns in Tarl’s mind sooner than it does in Scormus’s, and by the time the game is ten moves old, it is plain that Centius is enjoying fantastic tactical compensation for his material deficit. At this point he ceases to give us a move-by-move description and wisely cuts forward to where Scormus, instead of making his twenty-second move, signals his resignation of the game after being swept off the board by a blistering attack. Scormus leaves the stage and is not seen again; Centius is quite apologetic about the whole thing, as he feels he has betrayed his intention of playing the perfect game by perpetrating a rather crude trick; the crowd is going wild, including Tarl despite losing his fourteen hundred gold tarns, and the Telnus Defence, a kind of hybrid of chess’s Englund Gambit and Danish Gambit with colours reversed, but with a few extra twists owing to Kaissa’s bigger board and preponderance of line-pieces, is the talk of the whole Fair.

Feeling that his time and money have been far from wasted, Tarl prepares to return to Port Kar and to take ship for the world’s end. But first he interrupts a murder attempt. Bertram of Lydius, no-one else, is assaulting a merchant, and of course Tarl disposes of him; but on this occasion, the villain gets away. As for the purported victim, Tarl is extremely suspicious. Having quickly taken Bertram’s measure, he can be sure that the stabbed merchant would not be only injured if Bertram had meant to kill him. Plainly the w hole thing is some kind of set-up, and he lets them know that he is not deceived. The affair was meant to bring to his attention a blue stone carving, red-hunter style, of a half-eared Kur, plainly Zarendargar. Perhaps this was meant to send him hastening north in hopes to catch Zarendargar unawares; but Tarl believes that the Kur meant him to see through the subterfuge in a moment, and he only thanks the merchant and his accomplice for delivering the message.

So, the world’s end in this context apparently means the north pole, and we can be sure Tarl will be heading there shortly, possibly aboard the ship of Tersites, which might after all make a polar-exploration vessel - heavy, powerful, and with an icebreaker for a ram. But we are out of time for t his month and must leave our hero to make his way back to Port Kar, and for what happens next, I must ask the reader to rejoin me next month when we take our second look at Beasts of Gor.

I wish you well,

Socrates