"John Norman - Gor 06 - Raiders of Gor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norman John)

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