"New Text Document" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norman John - Gor 04 - Nomads of Gor)

The consequences of my act, if I were successful, were too complex and fearful to calculate, the factors involved being so numerous and obscure.

If it turned out badly, what I did, I would have no defence other than that I did what I did for my friend for him and for his brave kind, once hated enemies, whom I had learned to know and respect.

There is no loss of honour in failing to achieve such a task, I told myself. It is worthy of a warrior of the caste of Warriors, a swordsman of the high city of Ko-ro-ba, the Towers of the Morning.

Tal, I might say, in greeting, I am Tarl Cabot of Ko-ro-ba; I bring no credentials, no proofs; I come from the Priest-Kings; I would like to have the object which was brought to you from them; they would now like it back; Thank you; farewell.

I laughed.

I would say little or nothing.

The object might not even be with the Wagon Peoples any longer.

And there were four Wagon Peoples, the Paravaci, the Kataii, the Kassars, and the dreaded Tuchuks.

Who knew with which people the object might have been placed?

Perhaps it had been hidden away and forgotten?

Perhaps it was now a sacred object, little understood, but reveredЧand it would be sacrilege to think of it, blasphemy to speak its name, a cruel and slow death even to cast oneТs eyes upon it.

And if I should manage to seize it, how could I carry it away?

I had no tarn, one of GorТs fierce saddle birds; I had not even the monstrous high tharlarion, used as the mounts of shock cavalry by the warriors of some cities.

I was afoot, on the treeless southern plains of Gor, on the Plains of Turia, in the Land of the Wagon Peoples.

The Wagon Peoples, it is said, slay strangers.

The words for stranger and enemy in Gorean are the same.

I would advance openly.

If I were found on the plains near the camps or the bosk herds I knew I would be scented out and slain by the domesticated, nocturnal herd sleen, used as shepherds and sentinels by the Wagon Peoples, released from their cages with the falling of darkness.

These animals, trained prairie sleen, move rapidly and silently, attacking upon no other provocation than trespass on what they have decided is their territory. They respond only to the voice of their master, and when he is killed or dies, his animals are slain and eaten.

There would be no question of night spying on the Wagon Peoples.

I knew they spoke a dialect of Gorean, and I hoped I would be able to understand them.

If I could not I must die as befitted a swordsman of Ko-ro-ba.

I hoped that I would be granted death in battle, if death it must be. The Wagon Peoples, of all those on Gor that I know, are the only ones that have a clan of torturers, trained as carefully as scribes or physicians, in the arts of detaining life.

Some of these men have achieved fortune and fame in various Gorean cities, for their services to Initiates and Ubars, and others with an interest in the arts of detection and persuasion. For some reason they have all worn hoods. It is said they remove the hood only when the sentence is death, so that it is only condemned men who have seen whatever it is that lies beneath the hood.

I was surprised at the distance I had been from the herds, for though I had seen the rolling dust clearly, and had felt and did feel the shaking of the earth, betraying the passage of those monstrous herds, I had not yet come to them. But now I could hear, carried on the wind blowing toward distant Turia, the bellowing of the bosks. The dust was now heavy like nightfall in the air. The grass and the earth seemed to quake beneath my tread.