Read Online Hunters of Gor by John Norman - Free Book Online

side. There, lost to the bustle in the tavern, oblivious to the
    music, sat two men across a board of one hundred red and yellow squares, playing
    Kaissa, the game. One was a Player, a master who makes his living, though
    commonly poorly, from the game, playing for a cup of paga perhaps and the right
    to sleep in the taverns for the night. The other, sitting cross-legged with him,
    was the broad-shouldered, blond giant from Torvaldsland whom I had seen earlier.
    He wore a shaggy jacket. His hair was braided. His feet and legs were bound in
    skins and cords. The large, curved, double-bladed, long-handled ax lay beside
    him. On his large brown leather belt, confining the long shaggy jacket he wore,
    which would have fallen to his knees, were carved the luck signs of the north.
    Kaissa is popular in Torvaldsland as well as elsewhere on Gor. In halls, it is
    often played far into the night, by fires, by the northern giants. Sometimes
    disputes, which otherwise might be settled only by ax or sword, are willingly
    surrendered to a game of Kaissa, if only for the joy of engaging in the game.
    The big fellow was of Torvaldsland. The master might have been from as far away
    as Ar, or Tor, or Turia. But they had between them the game, its fascination and
    its beauty, reconciling whatever differences, in dialect, custom or way of light
    might divide them.
    The game was beautiful.
    The girl who served us was also beautiful. We had finished with our meal. And we
    were now finishing second cups of paga.
    She again knelt beside us. “Do masters wish more?” she asked.
    “What is your name?” asked Rim, his hand in her hair. He turned her head
    slightly to the side.
    She looked at him, for the side of her eyes. “Tendite,” she said, “if it pleases
    Master.”
    It was a Turian name. I had once known a girl by that name.
    “Do masters wish more?” she asked.
    Rim grinned.
    There was, outside, the shouting of men in the street. We looked to one another.
    Thurnock threw down a silver tarsk on the table.
    I, too, was curious. So, too, was Rim. He regarded Tendite.
    She moved to dart away. Quickly, he took her by the hair and pulled her quickly,
    bent over, to a low, sloping side of the room. “Key” he called to the
    proprietor, pointing toward the side of the room. The proprietor hurried over,
    in his apron, and handed Rim a key. It was number six. Rim, taking the key in
    his mouth, put the girl down rudely on her knees, her back to the low wall, took
    her hands back and over her head and snapped them into slave bracelets, dangling
    on a chain, passing through a heavy ring set in the wall. He then took the key,
    which could open the bracelets, and dropped it in his pouch. She looked up at
    him, in fury. It is a way of reserving, for a time, a girl for yourself.
    “I shall return shortly,” he said.
    She knelt there, in the darkness of the side of the room, in her yellow silk,
    her hands locked above and behind her head.
    “Do not run away,” Rim cautioned her.
    He then turned to join us and, together, we left the tavern, to see what the
    commotion might be outside. Many others, too, had left the tavern.
    The girl had left the dancing sand. Even the musicians poured out of the tavern.
    We walked along the front of the street, until we came to a side street, leading
    down to the wharves. It was not more than a hundred yards from the tavern.
    Men, and women and children, were lining the side street, and others were
    pouring in from the street before the tavern.
    We heard the beating of a drum and the playing of flutes.
    “What is going on?” I asked a fellow, of the metal workers.
    “It is a judicial enslavement,” he said.
    With Rim and Thurnock, moving in the crowd, I craned for a look.
    I saw first the girl, stumbling. She was already stripped. Her hands were tied
    behind her back. Something, pushing her from behind, had been fastened on her
    neck. Behind her came a flat-topped wagon, of some four feet in height. It