Tal, Goreans,

Greetings, visitors,

Welcome once again to the Booknotes column. We left the story at something of a cliffhanger, where Kamchak’s triumphal feast celebrating his conquest of Turia was rudely interrupted by the news that the Tuchuk encampment was under a treacherous attack by the Paravaci. This leaves him the unpleasant choice between giving up his intended assault on Saphrar’s citadel, where he means to put Saphrar unpleasantly to death for the murder of Kutaituchik, or letting the women and livestock in the Tuchuk camp be massacred or carried off. This is doubtless going to leave Tarl with yet another hurdle to tackle before he gets his hands on the Egg of the Priest-Kings, his quest for which has up to now met with no more success than a brief glimpse of the golden sphere in Saphrar’s possession. But surely after all his deeds of daring to date and all the reverses that an uncaring Fate has cast into his path, his fortunes are about to mend–aren’t they? We’d better find out.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Kamchak has an airborne reserve consisting of just two tarnsmen: Tarl himself and Harold of the Tuchuks. These two were both awarded the brevet rank of Commander of a Thousand for their heroic efforts noted in the last instalment; now Kamchak makes the promotion substantive and gives them a Thousand apiece, doughty Tuchuk warriors mounted on kaiila, but with a long ride ahead of them before they can even come to the battle and a host outnumbering them many times over when they do get there. Our two tarnsmen themselves, however, can get there several hours before even the swift-running kaiila, and their first mission is to appeal for help to the two uninvolved tribes of the Wagon Peoples, the Kataii and the Kassars.

Tarl pleads as eloquently as he can, but cannot persuade the Kataii Ubar, Hakimba himself, to come to the aid of the betrayed Tuchuks, even when he invokes the spectre of Paravaci slaughtering Tuchuk bosk–a violation of the Wagon People’s most sacred taboo. Harold meanwhile enjoys no better success in his negotiations with Conrad, Ubar of the Kassars, and the digruntled pair prepare to do the best they can with the few numbers that they have. Their small commands are lent fighting spirit when they see the depradations the unopposed Paravaci have wrought, and their initial assault deals the enemy a bloody nose, but even after ingeniously stampeding the remains of the Tuchuk bosk into the Paravaci host, the latter still have a huge advantage in numbers; and it is growing too late for Kamchak to come to their aid even if he was willing to give up the siege of Saphrar’s citadel.

Norman maintains the dramatic tension through the night of doubt and sorrow, and through the battle that is joined the following morning between the tired remnant of the two Thousands on the one hand, and the regrouped horde of the Paravaci on the other, until when all seems lost the Kassars and Kataii come to their aid after all, deciding that, on reflection, the Paravaci perfidy merits punishment. This they hand out most ably, leaving Tarl to pick over the ruins of the camp and Kamchak’s plundered wagon, despoiled of everything of value. Only a few pathetic remnants are left behind, as well as an oddity or two such as Kamchak’s strange grey leather footstool. Aphris and Elizabeth are nowhere to be seen.

Chapter Twenty-Four

Tarl and Harold return to Turia to find Kamchak still busy at work evicting the Turians from their conquered city yet, unusually for a Gorean conquerer, allowing them to take plenty of provisions with them and refusing to raze the city itself. He is pleased to hear how things have turned out in the battle at the wagons, explaining that it was a Tuchuk gamble to stake all on the Kataii and Kassars coming to their aid. But there is some deeper meaning behind the business which he does not explain for the present. As to Turia, he has decided that the Tuchuks need the city, both as a trading outpost and indeed as an enemy to keep them on their toes, although Tarl still considers that, even so, Kamchak has shown Turia astonishing leniency. This matter Kamchak curtly refuses to discuss.

Harold cheerfully informs Tarl that he is now the proud possessor of a wagon befitting his status, as indeed is Harold himself, and the wagons have been theirs since they first entered Turia, as a reward for their courage. Tarl protests that he failed in his mission, but Harold explains that it is the taking part and not the winning that the Tuchuks consider meritorious, although since the deeds that made them Commanders of Thousands, the wagons have been upgraded somewhat. Of Aphris there is still no news, and as to Elizabeth, Harold only remarks that Kamchak gave her to a warrior. Not altogether cheered by this news, Tarl is still attracted enough by the prospect of a comfortable night in a wagon well stocked with Paga and Ka-la-na to go and try out his new acquisition.

Chapter Twenty-Five

He is astonished to learn that the warrior to whom Kamchak gave Elizabeth is none other than himself, and his immediate reaction on learning that Elizabeth is now his is to chivalrously grant her her freedom on the spot. But Elizabeth’s reaction is an odd one. Once Tarl has helped her over another piece of culture shock concerning nose piercing (for the benefit of our younger readers, I will remark that this kind of personal ornamentation was extremely outré, at least to white Anglo-Saxons, when the book was written in the late 1960s), she begins to behave like a right little minx.

What follows amounts to yet another first in Tarl’s life. He has never owned a slave in the true Gorean sense–he did, of course, own Dina of Turia for a while earlier in this very story, but that hardly counts for our present purposes. He and Elizabeth embark on a kind of shared adventure in which they both, rather timidly, explore the master/slave relationship, albeit in a rather diluted form and with a good deal of prompting from Elizabeth, to whom Tarl is still relating more or less as an Earth woman and an equal.

After some discussion on the philosophy of the relationship between men and women according to Gorean thought, and Tarl trying to avoid encumbering himself with a woman who would be sorely in need of his protection, and a ritual submission from Elizabeth that is designed to force Tarl into accepting her as a slave (since he must otherwise either slay her or betray the Warrior Code), they engage in a contest in which Tarl must demonstrate that he can make Elizabeth "truly a slave", bringing her to orgasm in spite of her best efforts not to be brought there–and, of course (for this is Tarl Cabot we are talking about) he succeeds in doing this. Just as well, as he had engaged in a wager to accept Elizabeth’s collar, at least in private, if he failed.

Chapter Twenty-Six

The morning after the night before, and with Elizabeth having confessed herself madly in love with Tarl, he returns to the siege of Saphrar’s compound, to find Ha-Keel’s mercenary tarnsmen being bought off by the greater wealth now in Kamchak’s hands–all the plunder of Turia–and he looks on as, one by one, Saphrar’s infantry are suborned in the same way. Even those who might be signed up to the Warrior’s Code see the sense in accepting an immense sum in gold in preference to an inevitable death at the hands of Kamchak’s Tuchuks, and so Saphrar, who has lived by gold, begins to die by gold.

At last there are only a handful of warm bodies between Kamchak and Saphrar, one of whom, a young Warrior cut from the same cloth as Tarl himself, disdains any amount of gold as an inducement to violate his caste codes. Kamchak has him shot, but non-fatally, and recruits the protesting but helpless youth to the ranks of the Tuchuks, seeing him as senior officer material.

This leaves only Ha-Keel, the hooded Paravaci seen just before the Yellow Pool episode, and Saphrar himself. Ha-Keel looks on impassively as Saphrar tries to buy his life and freedom with the threat to destroy the golden sphere, a threat Kamchak sneers at, calling the sphere worthless. This draws a strenuous protest from Tarl, and at last he and Kamchak discuss the true reason why Tarl came to the Wagon Peoples. Tarl admits he would, if necessary, have stolen the sphere, but vehemently asserts that he would not have killed Kutaituchik, and would have returned the sphere to the Sardar. Kamchak believes him, but is still clinging to his view that the golden sphere is worthless.

Since Ha-Keel can flee on his tarn, the hooded Paravaci, whom Harold is all for engaging in mortal combat, tries to barter for a passage, offering half the wealth of his tribe; but Ha-Keel wryly observes that nothing the Paravaci own can be as precious as the last egg of the Priest-Kings, which impels the terrified Paravaci to try to wrest it from Saphrar. At this, Saphrar, getting the worst of the wrestling match, bites the Paravaci with a set of hollowed-out canines filled with ost venom, resulting in the sudden and agonising demise of that unworthy fellow and the accidental shattering of the golden sphere.

While Harold identifies the deceased party as Tolnus, the Ubar of the Paravaci, and Tarl mourns the shattered egg and consequent extinction of the Priest-Kings and his failed mission on behalf of his friend Misk, Kamchak first orders that Tolnus’s priceless necklace be returned to the Paravaci so that they can restore some of the fortunes their Ubar’s treachery has cost them, and then sets off in leisurely pursuit of Saphrar, who is eventually traced to the Yellow Pool of Turia. Meanwhile he explains to Tarl that the golden sphere really is as worthless as he has been claiming all along, and reveals the subterfuge, involving a tharlarion egg and some gold dye. Then he goes to watch Saphrar being digested by his pet–it was that, or being torn to pieces by Kamchak’s hunting sleen–and lets him know the secret of the egg before he dies horribly. Kamchak had a double grudge against Saphrar, for it was he who first introduced old Kutaituchik to the kanda habit and made an addict of him, and as Kamchak observes, "It was twice he killed my father."

Having no love for the horror of the Yellow Pool, Kamchak burns it, and takes his leave of Saphrar’s compound, receiving equably the news that Ha-Keel has made good his escape. He likens the mercenary captain’s skill to that of Pa-Kur the Master Assassin, from Book One, who was after all only "missing, presumed dead"; but Kamchak’s testimony only spins this shaggy-dog story out a little more, and does nothing to resolve the mystery. At last he tells Tarl the truth about the egg; he has seen it many times in plain view in the wagon of the Tuchuk Ubar–not Kutaituchik’s wheeled palace, for he was only the false Ubar, but in the wagon of Kamchak himself; it is the leather footstool, which Kamchak assures Tarl is quite sturdy enough to have withstood the irreverent abuse to which it has been subjected during this time.

Tarl is pleasantly surprised to learn that Kamchak will give him the egg after all. He has subjected Tarl to a series of tests, up to and including the destruction of the false egg, to assure himself that Tarl deserves to be given it, and that he wants it for love of the Priest-Kings and no baser purpose. Thus assured, Tarl cheerfully receives the news that Aphris has been found, by Albrecht of the Kassars, and that Kamchak succeeded in buying her back for a beggarly ten thousand bars of gold. Harold laughs his head off at this, and Tarl cracks a smile of his own, seeing Kamchak forced to admit to caring for a slave; but he’s seen nothing as yet.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

His mission of revenge done, Kamchak not only allows Turia to remain standing but restores its Home Stone to a grateful Phanius Turmus and frees that worthy with honour. While all present ponder the meaning of Kamchak’s mercy, the Ubars of the other Wagon Peoples, Conrad of the Kassars, Hakimba of the Kataii, and an unnamed Paravaci who has held the office for only a few hours, come to announce the results of the Omen Taking. The omens are, for the first time in centuries, propitious to the appointing of a Ubar San, and it is as this, Ubar-in-Chief of all the Wagon Peoples, that the victorious Kamchak is now hailed. This, he explains privately, was the other part of his gamble when he risked the destruction of the Tuchuks: that he could show how the Wagon Peoples might be divided and conquered, and hence teach them to unify. But it’s clear that he is only interested in the power of the Ubar San in case of emergency, and will otherwise leave the separate peoples to live their separate ways.

There is one gamble left to him–and I, for one, believe that this is a genuine gamble on Kamchak’s part, and no "Tuchuk wager"; a gamble in which he certainly hopes that the outcome will be what he wants, and even guesses that it is more likely than not, but one in which, for once, he has to put his trust in that hope alone. He grants Aphris her freedom to return to her spared city, with her fortune restored to her. As Harold explains, Kamchak’s own mother was Turian, and it was only when she died that Kutaituchik turned to kanda as an anodyne. Stone-faced, Kamchak leaves the palace and heads out of the city while a stunned Aphris tries to comprehend the enormity of Kamchak’s gift; but she does not think about it for long before running after Kamchak and declaring that she would rather be his slave than the richest free woman in Turia. At this, Kamchak knows that his gamble has come good and proclaims Aphris his Ubara Sana, High Queen of the Wagon Peoples.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Elizabeth settles a long-standing quarrel with a spiteful slave who has been making her life as much of a misery as she could these past few weeks, and Tarl bids a fond farewell to Kamchak, Harold, and the Wagon Peoples, and the smell of bosk and axle-grease and so on. They will remember him for ever, having named two years of their calendar after him; and Kamchak promises to bring the Wagon Peoples to Tarl’s aid if ever he should call. (Once again, don’t hold your breath. In twenty-one succeeding Gor books, this never happens.) Then, the Priest-Kings’ last egg in his possession and Elizabeth Cardwell a passenger aboard his tarn, Tarl takes his leave of the Plains of the Wagon Peoples, and we of this book.

But for Tarl’s delivery of the egg to the Priest-Kings, and what follows thereafter, and for a magnificent epic tale set amid the lofty cylinders of Gor’s greatest city, Ar herself, not seen since Book One, I must ask the reader to wait until next month, when we lift the cover on Volume Five, "Assassin of Gor"!