"08 - Hunters of Gor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norman John)

Let her stay in the marshes until she had had her pretty fill, and then let her crawl whimpering back to the portals of the house of Bosk, whining and scratching like a tiny domestic sleen for admittance, to be taken back!

But I knew Telima would not come back.

I wept.

"What are you going to do?" asked Samos. He did not lift his eyes from the board.

"In the morning," I said, "I leave for the northern forests."

"Tersites," said Samos, not looking up, "builds a ship, fit to sail beyond the world's end."

"I no longer serve Priest-Kings," I said.

I wiped my eyes on the sleeve of the woolen robe. I returned to stand above the board.

My Home Stone was threatened.

Yet I felt hard and strong. I wore steel at my side. I was Bosk. I was once of the warriors.

"Home Stone to Ubar's Tarnsman One," I said.

Samos made the move for me.

I nodded my head to the chained, nude male slave, flanked by his guards, to one side.

"Is this the slave?" I asked Samos.

"Bring him forward," said Samos.

The two guards, helmeted, threw him to his feet, and half dragging him, half carrying him, their hands on his arms, brought him before us. Then they forced him again to his knees, and thrust his dark, shaggy head down to the tiles before our sandals.

The slave girl laughed.

When the guard removed his hand from the slave's hair, he straightened his back, and regarded us.

He seemed proud. I liked this.

"You have an unusual barber," said Samos.

The slave girl laughed again, delightedly.

The strip which had been shaven on his head, from the forehead to the back of the neck, signified that he had been captured, and sold, by the panther girls of the northern forests. It is among the greatest shames that a man can know, that he had been enslaved by women, who had then, when weary of him, sold him, taking their profit on him.

"It is said," said Samos, "that only weaklings, and fools, and men who deserve to be slave girls, fall slave to women."

The man glared at Samos. I could sense, again, that, in his manacles, behind his back, his fists were clenched.

"I was once the slave of a woman," I told the man.