Tal, Goreans,

Greetings, visitors,

Welcome once again to the Booknotes column. In this issue we begin looking at Volume Five, "Assassin of Gor". This was in fact the first of the series that I read, twenty-one years ago:

Perhaps the comparison with Chapman’s Homer is pretentious, but as for me, I devoured every page of this book eagerly; as soon as I had turned the last page I began over again; I re-read it perhaps three or four times in quick succession. By this time of course I was aware, as I had not been when I initially borrowed it from a friend who had in turn borrowed it from a library, that this book was not the first in the series but the fifth. This went some way to explain why I had found myself dropping into the middle of an ongoing story with several references to things I didn’t understand, but I didn’t find it too hard a read in any case and was content to let the unexplained references lurk at the back of my mind for as long as necessary. It wasn’t long before I started hunting down the other volumes.

With four books in the series behind us, we can have a quick recap of Tarl Cabot’s career to date. He has been brought to Gor and trained in the ways of the sword, the spear and the tarn. Through a series of amazing scrapes, he has purloined the Home Stone of Ar and thus ended the empire-building career of the ambitious Ubar Marlenus; and also won himself the love of Marlenus’s beautiful but wilful and occasionally vicious daughter Talena. He has prevented Ar’s throne falling into the wrong hands, been spirited away from Gor on his wedding night, and found himself returned to Gor seven years later when all hope seemed gone. Thus returned, he has found his home city Ko-ro-ba razed, set off to the Sardar to demand an accounting from the god-like Priest-Kings, been delayed in Tharna where he has found a regime of inverted sexism guilty of, if anything, worse crimes than anything male domination ever perpetrated; helped to set matters aright there; and continued to the Sardar. Arriving there, he has found out the true insectoid nature of the Priest-Kings, as no man before him had done and escaped to tell the tale; and played a major role in a civil war amongst those same Priest-Kings and brought about the downfall of another tyrant, this one being Sarm the Priest-King whose selfish desire for personal immortality would have seen the end of his own race. Most recently, Tarl has been to the land of the Wagon Peoples in search of the last female egg of the Priest-Kings, and found out that there are "Others" who oppose the Priest-Kings; and, of course, he has not only recovered the precious egg but done great deeds of moment by the way. While there is still no sign of Talena, he has acquired some other love interests by the way, the latest an Earth woman called Elizabeth Cardwell, originally brought to Gor to be used as a (very minor) tool against him. What next? Time to turn that page and find out.

Chapter One

But, this is a little odd. We have grown used over the last four books to seeing the view through Tarl Cabot’s own eyes, and all of a sudden there is no sign of our narrator-protagonist and instead we are looking over the dark, brooding shoulder of Kuurus, of the Caste of Assassins. He is watching the newly-rebuilt city of Ko-ro-ba, outside the walls of which it seems that a high-caste funeral is taking place. A tall pyre is built and prepared for the coming cremation, and as Kuurus watches, the funeral procession itself approaches, bearing the body of the deceased on a bier. It is a large man, in the scarlet of a Warrior, with the flame-red hair that is characteristic of… but surely this can’t be?

Further cause for trepidation comes as the focus sharpens on the three chief mourners. One of them is dressed in the Administrator’s robes, another is a small blue-clad Scribe, while the third is a Warrior of distinctly Viking appearance. Devotees of the series to date will recognise (as I did not on first reading this book) Matthew Cabot, Torm the Scribe, and the Older Tarl, the father and two closest friends of…

The lately-departed and much-lamented is laid on the oil-soaked pyre, which the bearded Warrior ignites with a thrown torch and a cry of anguish (is that a zeugma or a syllepsis?) and the whole shooting match goes up in a satisfyingly thorough blaze. The red-haired Warrior is reduced to smoke and ashes, and when, hours later, the pyre has died down and is being extinguished and combed for enough fragments to fill a memorial urn, the saturnine Kuurus finally approaches the man appointed to deal with him. He – a man with the peculiar hairlessness we have seen before only in two of Tarl Cabot’s friends, Al-Ka and Ba-Ta, the artificial Muls fabricated by Kusk the Priest-King, and thus we have yet more to worry us – informs Kuurus that he is on a mission of revenge, with no clues except a patch of cloth associated with Ar’s sport of tarn-racing. Of course Kuurus asks whom he is to avenge, and he receives the reply that we are both expecting and dreading: "Tarl Cabot." Cue dramatic cadence…

Chapter Two

Whereupon we hie us promptly to Ar just in time for Kuurus’s arrival. Assassins have been in bad odour here ever since Book One, when Pa-Kur tried to usurp the throne after Marlenus’s downfall (see above), but they are now free to go about their business once more. And a dark business it evidently is, to judge by Kuurus’s reception, which is reminiscent of the arrival of Clint Eastwood’s famous "Man With No Name" on some dust-blown Western street. Mothers usher their children to one side, passers-by avoid having the Assassin’s shadow cross theirs, a street trader willingly hands over his wares if only the Assassin will leave him be, and a frightened slave girl dressed in yellow cringes at attracting his attention but goes with him at his unspoken command.

Yup, these Assassins certainly know how to make an entrance, and this scene goes a long way to explain how it is that in certain parts of on-line Gor you can’t throw a virtual half-brick without hitting an IRC assassin. Kuurus successfully maintains this same modest, unassuming profile as he makes his way to a paga tavern, chains up his borrowed slave, and regally gives the staff and clientele his leave to be about their business.

His quiet drink is interrupted by the arrival of the panic-stricken Hup the Fool, a dwarf and a beggar. (One person, not three, I hasten to add.) Hup has earned the enmity of a wealthy slaver, named Portus, by some too-aggressive begging, and barely has he hidden himself when no fewer than four Warriors in Portus’s employ turn up, intending to reduce Ar’s Hup quota by one. Ar’s citizens have no real quarrel with this course of action, viewing beggars as a slur on their great city, but just when Hup’s luck seems to be out big-time, Kuurus drops a mild hint concerning the success of the day’s begging and a small coin changes hands. His services thus secured, and ignoring Portus’s counter-offer of a golden tarn disc, Kuurus disposes of the four Warriors with arrogant ease. The swordplay is almost worthy of… but that cannot be, surely.

After the mess has been cleared up, Kuurus is approached by a huffing Portus, who, having had to see Hup go free, is of a mind to salvage something to his good by hiring Kuurus’s sword to his own service. They discuss the political situation in Ar, which is not altogether stable, especially since Kazrak the Administrator (another friend of Tarl’s from Book One) was deposed and exiled; the mood of the people, which is worse; and the slave-trading business, which is being dominated to a mysterious extent by Cernus, Ar’s wealthiest slaver, who is both apparently defying the laws of economics and managing to trade a remarkable quantity of non-Gorean-speaking barbarians. Kuurus placidly hears all that Portus has to say, and then declares his intention to take employment with Cernus, which is a cue for Portus to beat feet out of the tavern without delay.

Kuurus now turns his attention to the frightened slave girl who has been chained up awaiting his pleasure while all this has been going on; but her demeanour changes once the pair of them are safely inside an alcove, and Norman stops teasing us. Tarl is alive and perfectly well after all; that’s him in the black, disguised as an Assassin. It seems from what he says to the girl, who is that Elizabeth Cardwell who was introduced in the previous book, that they are once more on serious business for the Priest-Kings; but for now they get on with the much more urgent business of making the beast with two backs.

Chapter Three

Once they have had time to become thoroughly reacquainted, Tarl drops back into character as Kuurus and dismisses Elizabeth from his presence with an audibly-simulated slap, and takes his leave of the paga tavern. He has time enough on the way to the House of Cernus to take in some of the sights of Ar, including kibitzing on a game of Kaissa that is taking place on the street. This, we learn, is a typical venue for such entertainment, where a Gorean chessmaster ekes out a meagre living playing amateurs for a copper tarn disc a time, and at heavy monetary odds into the bargain.

The Player himself affords Tarl some opportunity for comment; firstly, that Players are not a caste unto themselves but unusually gifted Kaissa exponents from all castes, with much the same licence to wander from city to city as Singers have, and with a generally-observed immunity from being enslaved. This makes it somewhat odd that this particular man is blinded and branded, but Tarl concludes that this was just done out of spite by a Slaver. Secondly, he is rather old in appearance, which Tarl tells us is unusual on Gor, where the Physicians have developed a serum to prevent ageing. He tells us in passing that on the whole they have not bothered with lesser infirmities, but ignored them and let the population get on with evolving immunity to such diseases, to the extent that but for the terrible Dar-kosis there is next to no disease on Gor. It’s certainly a lot to the benefit of the Gorean lifestyle that there’s no syphilis; but Norman’s bald assertion that disease can be overcome just by ignoring it and letting evolution sort things out does rather overlook the fact that diseases evolve too, and that on Earth, where up to at least the eighteenth century medical practice might as well have consisted of hoping that disease would give up and go away, infectious illnesses took an enormous toll until antisepsis, vaccination and antibiotics came along. Still, no-one ever claimed that Norman was a biologist, least of all himself.

Back to our Kaissa game. The Player soon attracts an opponent in the shape of a rather venal Vintner, who insists on hugely favourable odds both in terms of money and in game mechanics. Norman, having already asserted that many a Gorean in the street plays Kaissa to a level that an Earthly chess-master might envy, does rather draw the long bow here in having the Player concede odds of Ubar, Ubara and Tarnsman, as well as allowing the Vintner three consecutive moves at one point in the game. (As a sub-county player myself, I dare assert that Kasparov couldn’t give me Queen, Rook and three moves at a time of my choice and have a hope of winning.) Still, like the only other game we’ve seen so far in the books, the one between Marlenus and Mintar in Book One, this game is more allegory than substance.

Devotees of the game itself will not find anything helpful here, and must wait for another seven books or so before they get their teeth into any real meat. The game proceeds towards its inevitable conclusion and the Player is faced with a loss that will take him eighty wins to make up, a loss he is incurring on purpose so that future punters will think they have a chance, when Tarl can stand it no longer and offers him the immense sum of a golden double-tarn if he can win after all. This the Player does in brilliant style, and even the Vintner, who was all but caught cheating a blind man earlier in the game as well as having insisted on ridiculously favourable odds, is man enough to congratulate the Player heartily. But another spectator, a Tarn Keeper, drops Tarl in it by referring to him as a "Killer" in the blind Player’s hearing, and the Player is too proud to accept "black gold", though it be a generous year’s wages and he desperately in need of it. Which piece of drama places him rather obviously at the opposite end of the moral spectrum from the grasping Vintner (even if that worthy did show signs of relenting at the end of the game).

Chapter Four

Tarl, disguised as Kuurus, makes his truculent entrance in the House of Cernus, offering to kill the best swordsman in the house; but Cernus says that this is himself, and tells Kuurus that he is expected. His earlier deeds have been relayed to Cernus, who informs the presumed Assassin that there is no guilty person present meriting the retribution that is the black caste’s stock in trade. The news that Kuurus has come to avenge Tarl Cabot is met with much consternation, for Tarl’s fame has stood high hereabouts ever since the Siege of Ar in Book One. Tarl himself reflects bitterly on the sad fate of a poor Warrior visiting Ko-ro-ba whose only crime was to look enough like himself to be murdered by mistake at midnight. Assuming that he was indeed the intended target, and that it has something to do with the enmity between Priest-Kings and those "Others" first mentioned in Book Four, Tarl is in Ar looking for the murderer.

There is another piece of business to attend to once this matter has been discussed (suitably modified in order to square with Tarl’s presumed identity), and that is Kuurus’s cavalier treatment of Elizabeth. She is already in Cernus’s house as a slave, and on the whole Cernus doesn’t seem to mind that Kuurus picked her up on the street and used her for his pleasure, since she was already a "Red Silk" girl – by which, since this is a matter that Physicians can ascertain, evidently no more nor less is meant than that she was not a virgin; the term "Red Silk" is a metaphor, for she was in fact wearing yellow slave livery when we last saw her, and still is. However, Cernus pretends to Elizabeth that he will punish Kuurus if she so wishes, and when, in character, she eagerly pleads for this, Cernus has an untrained slave girl assigned to the assassin’s quarters – and this untrained slave girl will be Elizabeth herself.

And as the derisive laughter echoes in the ears of the mock-horrified Elizabeth, we take our leave of the intrepid pair for now. What will happen to them in the house of Cernus the Slaver, and why are they there in the first place? Find out next month!