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  06 Raiders of GorRaiders or Gor

  John Norman

  Chronicles of Counter-Earth Volume 6

  1 The Blood Mark

  I could smell the sea, gleaming Thassa, in the myths said to be without a

  farther shore.

  I reached down from the rush craft and took a palm of water into my hand and

  touched my tongue to it. Thassa could not be far beyond.

  I took the triangular-bladed tem-wood paddle and moved the small craft, light

  and narrow, large enough scarcely for one man, ahead. I was formed of pliant,

  tubular, lengthy Vosk rushes, bound with march vine.

  To my right, some two or three feet under the water, I saw the sudden, rolling

  yellowish flash of the slatted belly of a water tharlarion, turning as it made

  its swift strike, probably a Vosk carp or marsh turtle. Immediately following I

  saw the water seem to glitter for a moment, a rain of yellowish streaks beneath

  the surface, in the wake of water tharlarion, doubtless its swarm of scavengers,

  tiny water tharlarion, about six inches long, little more than teeth and tail.

  A brightly plumaged bird sprang from the rushes to my left, screaming and

  beating its sudden way into the blue sky. In a moment it had darted again

  downward to be lost in the rushes, the waving spore stalks, the seed pods of

  various growths of the Gorean tidal marshes. Only one creature in the marshes

  dares to outline itself against the sky, the predatory UI, the winged

  tharlarion.

  It was difficult to see more than a few feet ahead: sometimes I could see no

  further than the lifted prow of my small craft, as it nosed its way among the

  ruses and the frequent rence plants.

  It was the fourth day of the sixth passage hand, shortly before the Autumnal

  Equinox, which in the common Gorean calendar begins the moth of Se’Kara. In the

  calendar of Ko-ro-ba, which, like most Gorean cities, marks years by its

  Administration of my father, Matthew Cabot. In the calendar of Ar, for those it

  might interest, it was the first year of the restoration of Marlenus, Ubar of

  Ubars, but, more usefully for the purposes of consolidating the normal chaos of

  Gorean chronology, it was the year 10,119 Contasta Ar, that is, from the

  founding of Ar.

  My weapons shared the boat, with a gourd of water and a tin of bread and dried

  bosk meat. I had the Gorean short sword in its scabbard, my shield and helmet,

  and, wrapped in leather, a Gorean long bow of supple Ka-la-na wood, from the

  yellow wine trees of Gor, tipped with notched bosk horn at each end, loose

  strung with help and whipped with silk, and a roll of sheaf and flight arrows.

  The bow is not commonly favored by Gorean warriors, but all must respect it. It

  is the height of a tall; its back, away from the bowman, is flat; its belly,

  facing the bowman, is half-rounded; it is something lika an inch and a half wide

  and an inch and a quarter thick in the center; it has considerable force and

  requires considerable strength to draw; many men, incidentally, even some

  warriors, cannot draw the bowy; nine of the arrrows can be fired aloft before

  the first falls again to the earth; at point-blank range it can be fired

  completely through a four-inch beam; at two hundered yards it can pin a man to a

  wall; at four hundred yards it can kill the huge, shambling bosk; its rate of

  fire is nineteen arrows in a Gorean Ehn, about eighty Earth seconds; and a

  skilled bowman, but not an extradordinary one, is expected to be able to place

  these nineteen arrows in on Ehn into a target, the size of a man, each a hit, at

  a range of some two hundred and fifty yards. Yet, as a weapon, it has serious

  disadvantages, and on Gor the crossbow, inferior in accuracy, range and rate of

  fire, with its heavy cable and its leaves of steel, tends to be generally

  favored. The long bow cannot well be used except in a standing, or at least

  kneeling, position, thus making more of a target of the archer; the long bow is

  difficult to use from a saddle; it is impractical in close quarters, as in

  defensive warfare of in fighting from room to room; and it cannot be kept set,

  loaded like a firearm, as can the crossbow; the crossbow is the assassin’s

  weapon, par excellence; further, it might be mentioned that, although it takes

  longer to set the crossbow, a weaker man, with, say, his belt claw or his

  winding gear, can certainly manage to do so; accordingly, for every man capable

  of drawing a warrior’s long bow there will be an indefinite number who can use

  the crossbow; lastly, at shorter distances, the crossbow requires much less

  skill for accuracy than the long bow.

  I smiled to myself.

  It is not difficult to see why, popularly, the crossbow should be regarded as a

  generally more efficient weapon that the long bow, in spite of being inferior to

  it, in the hands of an expert, in range, accuracy and rate of fire. Well used,

  the long bow is a far more devastating weapon than its rival, the crossbow; but

  few men had the strenght and eye to use it well; I prided myself on my skill

  with the weapon.

  I paddled along, gently, kneeling on the rushes of my small, narrow craft.

  It is the weapon of a peasant, I heard echoing in my mind, and again smiled. The

  Older Tarl, my former master-at-arms, had so spoken to me years before in

  Ko-ro-ba, my city, the Towers of the Morning. I looked down at the long, heavy,

  leather-wrapped bow of supple Ka-la-na wood in the bottom of the rush craft.

  I laughed.

  It was true that the long bow is a weapon of peasants, who make and use them,

  sometimes with great efficiency. That face, in inself, that the long is a

  peasant weapon, would make many Goreans, particularly those ont familiar with

  the bow, look down upon it. Gorean warriors, generally drawn from the cities,

  are warriors by blood, by caste; moreover, they are High Caste; the peasants,

  isolate in their narrow fields and villages, are Low Caste; indeed, the Peasant

  is regarded, by those of the cities, as being little more than an ignoble brute,

  ingnorant and superstitious, venal and vicious, a grubber in the dirt, a

  plodding animal, an ill-tempered beast, something at best cunning and

  treacherous; and yet I knew that in each dirt-floored cone of straw that served

  as the dwelling place of a peasant and his family, there was, by the fire hole,

  a Home Stone; the peasants themselves, though regarded as the lowest caste on

  all Gor by most Goreans, call themselves proudly the ox on which the Home Stone

  rests, and I think their saying is true.

  Peasants, incidentally, are seldom, except in emergencies, utilized in the armed

  forces of a city; this is a futher reason why their weapon, the long bow, is

  less known in the cities, and among warriors, than it deserves to be.

  The Gorean, to my mind, is often, though not always, bound by historical

  accidents and cultrual traditions, which are then often rationali
zed into a

  semblance of plausibility. For example, I had even heard arguments ot the effect

  that pleasants used the long bow only because they lacked the manufacturing

  capablity to produce crossbows, as though they could not have traded their goods

  or sold animals ot obtain crossbows, if they wished. Further, the heavy,

  bronze-headed spear and the short, double-edged steel sword are traditionally

  regarded as the worthy, and prime, weapons of the Gorean fighting man, he at

  least who is a true fighting man; and similarly traditionally, archers, who slay

  from a distance, not coming to grips with their enemy, with their almost

  invisible, swiftly moving shafts of wook, those mere splinters, are regarded as

  being rather contemptible, almost on the periphery of warriorhood; villains in

  Gorean epics, incidentally, when not of small and despised castes, are likely to

  be archers; I had heard warriors say that they would rather be poisoned by a

  woman than slain by an arrow.

  I myself, perhaps because I had been raised not on Gor, but on Earth, did not,

  fortunately in my opinion, suffer from these inhibiting prepossessions; I could

  use the long bow with, so to speak, no tincture of shame, no confusion of

  conscience, without the least injury to my self-esteem; I knew the long bow to

  be a magnificent weapon; accordingly, I made it my own.

  I heard a bird some forth or fifty yards to my right; it sounded like a marsh

  gant, a small, horned, web-footed aquatic fowl, brad-billed and broad-winged.

  Marsh girls, the daughters of rence growers, sometimes hunt them with throwing

  sticks.

  In some cities, Port Kar, for example, the long bow is almost unknown. Similarly

  it is not widely known even in Glorious Ar, the largest city of known Gor. It is

  reasonably well know in Thentis, in the Mountains of Thentis, famed for her tarn

  flocks, and in Ko-ro-ba, my city, the Towers of Morning. Cities vary. But

  generally the bow is little known. Small straight bows, of course, not the

  powerful long bow, are, on the other hand, reasonably common on Gor, and these

  are often used for hunting light game, such as the brush-maned, three-toed

  Qualae, the yellow-pelted, sing-horned Tabuk, and runaway slaves.

  I heard another bird, another marsh gant it seemed, some fifty yards away, but

  this time to my left.

  I was late in the afternoon, the fourteenth Gorean Ahn I would have guessed.

  Some swarms of insects hung in the sedge here and there but I had not been much

  bothered: it was late in the year, and most of the Gorean insects likely to make

  life miserable for men bred in, and frequented, areas in which bodies of

  unmoving, fresh wather were plentiful. I did see a large, harmless zarlit fly,

  purple, about two feet long with four translucent wings, spanning about a yard,

  humming over the surface of the water then alighting and, on it’s padlike feet,

  daintily picking its way across the surface. I flicked a salt leach from the

  side of my light craft with the corner of the tem-wood paddle.

  On river barges, for hundreds of pasangs, I had made my way down the Vosk, but

  where the mighty Vosk began to break apart and spread into its hundreds of

  shallow, constantly shifting channels, becoming lost in the vast tidal marshes

  of its delta, moving toward gleaming Thassa, the Sea, I had abandoned the

  barges, purchasing from rence growers on the eastern periphery of the delta

  supplies and the small rush craft which I now propelled through the rushes and

  sedge, the wild rence plants.

  I noticed that one of these rence plants had, tied about it, below the tuft of

  stamens and narrow petals, a white cloth, re-cloth.

  I paddled over to look at the cloth. I looed about myself, and was for some time

  quiet, not moving. Then I moved past the plant, parting the rence and passing

  throug.

  I heard again the cry of the marsh gant, from somewhere behind me.

  No one had been found who would guide me into the delta of the Vosk. The

  bargemen of the Vosk will not take their wide, broad-bottomed craft into the

  delta. The channels of the Vosk, to be sure, shift from season to season, and

  the delta is often little more than a trackless marsh, literally hundreds of

  square pasangs of estuarial wilderness. In many places it is too shallow to

  float even the great flat-bottomed barges and, more inmportantly, a path for

  them would have to be cut and chopped, foot by foot, through the thickets of

  rush and sedge, and the tangles of marsh vine. The most important reason for not

  finding a guide, of course, even among the eastern rence growers, is that the

  delta is claimed by Port Kar, which lies within it, some hundred pasangs from

  its northwestern edge, bordering on the shallow Tamber Gulf, beyond wich is

  gleaming Thassa, the Sea.

  Port Kar, crowded, squalid, malignant, is sometimes referred to as the Tarn of

  the Sea. Her name is a synonym in Gorean for cruelty and piracy. The fleets of

  tarn ships of Port Kar are the scourge of Thassa, beautiful, lateen-rigged

  galleys that ply the trade of plunder and enslavement from the Ta-Thassa

  Mountains of the southern hemisphere of Gor to the ice lakes of the North; and

  westward even beyond the terraced island of Cos and the rocky Tyros, with its

  labyrinths of vart caves.

  I knew one in Port Kar, by name Samos, a slaver, said to be an agent of

  Priest-Kings.

  I was in the delta of the Vosk, and making my way to the city of Port Kar, which

  alone of Gorean cities commonly welcomes strangers, though few but exiles,

  murderers, outlaws, thieves and cutthroats would care ot find their way to her

  canaled darknesses.

  I recalled Samos, slumped in his marble chair at the Curulean in Ar, seemingly

  indolent, but indolent as might be the satisfied beast of prey. About his left

  shoulder, in the manner of his city, he had worn the knotted ropes of Port Kar;

  his garment had been simple, dark and closely woven; the hood had been thrown

  back, revealing his broad, wide head, the close-cropped white hair; the face had

  been red from windburn and salt; it had been wrinkled and lined, cracked like

  leather; in his ears there wha been two small golden rings; in him I had sensed

  power, experience, intelligence, cruelty; I had felt in him the presence of the

  carnivore, at that moment not inclined to hunt or kill. I did not look forward

  to meeting him. Yet it was said, by those I trusted, that he has served the

  Priest-Kings well.

  I was not particularly surprised at finding a bit of rep-cloth tied on the rence

  plant, for the delta is inhabited. Man has not surrendered it entirely to the

  tharlarion, the UI and the salt leach. There are scattered, almost invisible,

  furtive communites of rence growers who eke out their livelihood in the delta,

  nominally under the surzerainty of Port Kar. The cloth I found had probably been

  a trail mark for some rence growers.

  A kind of paper is made from rence. The plant itself has a long, thick root,

  about four inches thick, which lies horizontally under the surface of the water;

  small roots sink downward into the mud from this main root, and several “stems,”

  as many as a dozen, rise from it, often of the
length of fifteen to sixteen feet

  from the root; it has an excrescent, usually single floral spike.

  The plant has many uses besides serving as a raw product in the manufacture of

  rence paper. The root, which is woody and heavy, is used for certain wooden

  tools and utensils, which can be carved from it; also, when dried, it makes a

  good fuel; from the stem the rence growers can make reed boats, sails, mats,

  cords and the kind of fibrous cloth; further, its pith is edible, and for the

  rence growers is, with fish, a staple in their diet; the pith is edible both raw

  and cooked; some men, lost in the delta, not knowing the pith edible, have died

  of starvation the the midst of what was, had they known it, an almost endless

  abundance of food. The pith is also used, upon occasion, as a caulking for boat

  seams, but tow and pitch, covered with tar or grease, are generally used.

  Rence paper is made by slicing the stem into thin, narrow strips; those near the

  center of the plant are particularyly favored; one layer of strips is placed

  longitudinally, and then a shorter layer is placed latitudinally across the

  first layer; these two surfaces are then soaked under water, which releases a

  gluelike substance from the fibers, melding the two surfaces into a single,

  rectangular sheet; these formed sheets are then hammered and dried in the sun;

  roughness in removed by polishing, usually with a smooth shell or a bit of

  kailiauk horn; the side of a tharlarion tooth may also be used in this work/ The

  paper is then attacked, sheet to sheet, to form rolls, usually about twenty

  sheets to a roll. The best paper is on the outside of the roll, always, not to

  practice deceit in the quality of the roll but rather to have the most durable

  paper on the outside, which will take the most weathering, handling and genteral

  wear/ Rence paper comes in various grades, about eight in all. The rence growers

  market their product either at the eastern or western end of the delta.

  Sometimes rence merchants, on narrow marsh craft rowed by slaves, enter some

  pasangs into the delta to negotiate the transactions, usually from the western

  edge, that bordering the Tamber Gulf. Rence paper is, incidentally, not the only

  type of writing material used on Gor. A milled linen paper is much used, large

  quantities of which are produced in Ar, and vellum and parchment, prepared in