Tal, Goreans,

Greetings, visitors,

Welcome once again to the Booknotes column. We met a new narrator last issue, a somewhat spoiled and beautiful Earth woman by the name of Elinor Brinton, and she has thus far proven unable to end a chapter without falling either asleep or unconscious. After a trying day or so, Elinor quit Earth aboard a flying saucer, and although the experience hasn't summarily driven her round the bend, she was last seen unconscious yet again, apparently sedated. So to find out if she is going to buck this trend, we had better open for the second time the covers of "Captive of Gor".

Chapter Five

Elinor awakens to find herself on a world which, as she quickly divines, is not Earth. She is no longer aboard the ship, which is close at hand in an advanced state of disrepair. She suppresses her first impulse, which is to flee in panic, to check out the shipwreck in the hope of finding food. The ship itself is quite deserted and proves quite as thoroughly wrecked on the inside as the outside. To add to her woes, she is not the only scavenger interested in it, and she has to brave some of the local fauna in order to find anything to eat.

That done, Elinor clears off, and it is as well for her that she does, as another ship soon arrives, a silver one, and after the wreck has been inspected (this is done by a giant golden insectoid to which Elinor cannot put a name, though we can, of course) it explodes into an ionised cloud, perhaps by some demolition device. Elinor remains concealed, which is just as well for the sake of the narrative, as it would have been a very short story indeed if she had seized the opportunity to make herself known to the Priest-Kings. Given what we know of their tech capabilities, it's safe to assume they weren't looking very hard for survivors.

Elinor, very reasonably, does indeed now flee in panic, and after encountering some more of the local scary wildlife, she drops in exhaustion. Then, having counted the moons, she falls asleep, just when we were thinking she might remain conscious for a whole chapter.

Chapter Six

Awakening in the strange surroundings, Elinor is at first moved to despair at the thought she must surely perish of hunger and thirst, but she soon has her spirits lifted by finding berries and water. Still, given a choice between bare subsistence and a safe return to her own home, Elinor naturally favours the latter, and as soon as she hears human voices she makes a beeline for them. They prove to be of somewhat strange aspect to her eyes, not least because the female members of the company are fastened to a wagon-harness and everyone is oddly dressed.

The language barrier makes its presence felt at once; Elinor, a typical Anglophone, expects Earth's most widely spoken non-native language to be as current here as at home, and of course it is not, and the leader of the natives, whom she has heard addressed as Targo, has the same expectation of his own language. (If that name, Targo, and the fact that he has a one-eyed henchman, rings a bell, then so it should. We met this pair back in "Outlaw of Gor" when they were temporarily in possession of Lara, Tatrix of Tharna.) After a while she notices that a word or two of this language sounds rather like what her kidnappers spoke to each other, which she can't help finding scary. She is reassured, though, to note that this bunch are apparently Iron Age savages, although this does mean putting her plan of return to Earth on hold pro tem.

Putting her brain to work, she reasons that Targo & co are so on edge because they have lately been attacked, and she proceeds to speculate as to the nature of the beautiful women harnessed to the wagon. A flush of purely female jealousy sweeps over her, indeed, at the realisation that a generous half of the group are more beautiful than she is, and she has to comfort herself with the thought of her presumed intellectual superiority and greater sophistication.

However, Targo is running out of patience with her. She has no means to communicate with him except body language, and when she irritates him beyond endurance by trying to impress on him his uselessness and stupidity, he has her stripped, and her hitherto hidden brand is made visible to all. The guards laugh over this, exclaiming "Kajira!", which is lost on Elinor, but after Targo has had a brief laugh on his own account, he angrily orders one of the girls, Lana by name, to give Elinor a whipping. It's not a very severe whipping, but it is absolutely the first blow that has ever been applied to Elinor and it has a profound impact on her.

She soon gets Targo's point when he drops a heavy hint that she should grovel and abase herself before him, and she gets hitched to the wagon along with the other girls and made to pull it. One of the girls identifies herself as "Ute", and gives Elinor some very minor cause for celebration by apparently liking her; but Elinor drops a notch in Ute's estimation almost at once, and also sets a trend for how her character is going to show itself, when they are put to work hauling the wagon and she tries to shirk her share of the work. Of course she doesn't get away with it; and the realisation horrifies her, as up to now she has had her way with pretty much everyone she has ever met, and it frightens her to think that such as fine woman as she is must now be treated the same as some barbarian peasant girl. But at least she stays conscious right to the end of this chapter, for which achievement she is probably owed some kind of accolade.

Chapter Seven

We rejoin Elinor a little later. She fills in some background about Targo that she must surely have learned rather later, as she doesn't have the necessary command of the language to have learned it yet - and, for that matter, she can't possibly have learned all that Gorean geography just yet, either.

Much of what she now tells us is not especially relevant, but the fact that Lana seems to be in charge of the females, though deferring absolutely to the men, does very much concern Elinor, especially given that Lana doesn't like her. Neither does anyone else, for that matter, and Ute is still cross with Elinor for not pulling her weight. We also, being regular readers of the Gor series, will be interested to learn that this Lana was trained in Ar, in the house of Cernus, and so is assuredly the same Lana who used to delight in giving Virginia Kent such a hard time.

We also learn that Targo's sorry condition when we met him was due to having been attacked by an outlaw tarnsman called Rask of Treve. We first heard of Treve back in Book Three, though we've never been there, and we know enough of it to say that the phrase "an outlaw from Treve" is almost a tautology. Rask, on the other hand, we've as yet heard nothing of, but let's pay attention to this piece of name-dropping anyway.

Life gets a bit easier when Targo encounters a merchant caravan and is able to buy some supplies and transport, and Elinor learns to wear a camisk (a kind of poncho, but worn on the square instead of the diagonal). Indeed, although Elinor has figured out that she and the other girls are all slaves, most of them seem not too unhappy with their lot. They play in the river with one of the guards, who gives one of them a good ducking, which is only a couple of letters of the alphabet away from the normal treatment of a slave girl, and then Lana and two other girls proceed to entertain the group with a biting caricature of Elinor. Miserably, Elinor approaches Ute and humbles herself by way of apology, and Ute, who is plainly kind at heart, at once forgives her and starts to make a pet of her.

She begins to learn Gorean, and learns it quite well and grammatically from one of the girls, who is a Scribe, and almost at once starts to look down her nose at Ute, who speaks only lower-class Gorean; but she keeps her assumed superiority under wraps for now.

Elinor is put back in her place soon after when the caravan meets a free woman, one Lady Rena, and she is made to kowtow in front of her, which she resents. She scores herself a minor point when it's time to pick berries, as she steals some of Ute's so as to get her own work done the sooner, and also steals a few for herself. This is trivial in itself, but it tells us something about Elinor's pettiness and how she repays kindness. A little later the Lady Rena herself is picked up by Targo, stripped and branded, and Elinor promptly has a holiday in her heart at the realisation that she now has someone lower on the totem pole than herself, and can get a bit of her own back for the condescending treatment the Free Woman offered her; but Ute is, of course, much kinder to the luckless Lady Rena, which makes Elinor fit to spit feathers.

Chapter Eight

The journey continues, and the slave caravan reaches Laura, the first township of any size that they have reached, but although Elinor is still entertaining hopes of being returned to Earth, nothing comes of this. She does, however, get her first look at male slaves. These bear a shaven stripe on their heads as a mark of having been taken by the Panther Women, free-ranging female outlaws who live in the forests. In the course of telling her about the Panthers, Ute comforts Elinor, who doesn't seem happy, with the thought that she will soon have a nice collar and master, although Elinor rejects the notion out of hand. Ute's philosophy is worth stating:

"In every woman there is a Free Companion and a slave girl. The Free Companion seeks for her companion, and the slave girl seeks her master."

It ought to be said that, on the strength of her own account of herself, Elinor doth protest too much; but she earns the mockery of her fellow-slaves, and Ute has to scold them for being nasty to her. In fact, almost as soon as they arrive at Laura, Elinor is groped by one of the locals, and can't suppress a feeling of satisfaction that she, and not Lana, was singled out to be groped. Targo, noticing a change in her demeanour, promotes her on the slave chain, and she seems pleased at the gain in status, even if it is slave status.

She is taken to a physician, who administers some preventive medicine to her, and also something he calls the "Stabilisation Serums". When she defies orders to attempt to speak to this high-caste man, her guard punishes her, and it seems that he is about to rape her, until another guard interrupts him; but this whole incident causes the guards to remark that she is learning slave-girl wiles, and Elinor doesn't seem to mind this all that much - and for that matter, she is finding men a good deal more interesting than she was wont to. She is coming to terms with the idea that she is a slave girl, that she is not going home, and that a master might be a very nice idea indeed, and her unconscious reaction to this earns her further promotion on the slave chain.

They are entertained by a clown and his trained beast, an animal like none Elinor has ever heard of, and a terrifying one at that. Also, disturbingly, she seems to notice it looking at her with signs of intelligence. The difference between men and women is brought home to her when the beast, as a prearranged joke, pretends to charge at the slave girls and they all flee in terror, and Elinor tells us of how in Gorean society male strength and courage are very much to the point, unlike on Earth (by which the author generally means the West, and America in particular), where they are dismissed as of little consequence and have not much impact on society.

Still, on the whole, Elinor seems to be becoming quite contented with her lot, and this even carries over into her dealings with the former Lady Rena, whom she starts to treat kindly. She is surprisingly pleased to be allowed to go and entertain a group of guard, along with Ute and Lana, and she joins in enthusiastically with the business of amusing them. She still has some reservations about her own response to being treated as a pleasure slave, and suddenly reacts in fear and denial when being handled by one of the guards excites her (and him).

But while he is still pondering the exact nature of his reaction to her reaction, they are ambushed by a party of Panther Women and taken prisoner. The leader of the Panther Women, one Verna, enjoys herself with a spot of taunting of the guards and the slaves alike; then she takes Elinor and the whole band vanish into the forest.

So, just as Elinor was becoming used to her new station in life, though she still had a few issues to resolve, the goalposts have been moved and she has yet another set of circumstances to adjust to. And what these may be, and how she will react, we shall learn in time, starting one month hence when we take a third look at "Captive of Gor".

I wish you well,

Socrates