Planet of the Complete Bloody Psychopaths, Part 5

[bellatrys]

aka "Tarnsman of Gor," © 1966 John Norman

[raps podium] Hey! Anyone here never ever hear of Barsoom before? No hands going up at all? Anybody out there who didn't already know that everyone knows that Gor is a total rip-off of John Carter, with added testosterone & misogyny? --That's what I thought.

BTW, the expression "Complete Bloody Pyschopath" entered my personal lexicon via Simon Green's Deathstalker books, which were my guilty over-the-top pleasure in the '90s, up until halfway through the third? fourth? one where they went to the Planet of Misfit Toys* and everything fell apart in a very bad emergency dismount, only partially-recovered-from in the endgame and subsequent retcon series entries, but cracktastic fun while it lasted. As an expression commonly used by the marginally-saner, unhappily-berserker protagonist of his less-well-hinged Motley Band and others they encounter (as in "Why don't you want him/her to join us?" "Because s/he's a complete bloody psychopath!!1!" "Is that your only reason? Because if so, lookit us." "--Point.") it seemed apt for Norman's world. However, even the Planets of All Carnivorous Plants and Gazillions Of Hungry Dinosaurs they visit earlier on in the Deathstalker books, are not as Implausible and amoral as Gor.
For the first time in days her eyes filled with anger. "Scavengers," she said, "come to feast on the bodies of wounded tarnsmen."

I said nothing, knowing in my heart that I, in my way, had been responsible for this vast martial array on the banks of the Vosk. It was I who had stolen the Home Stone of Ar, who had brought about the downfall of Marlenus, the Ubar, who had set the spark that had brought Ar to anarchy and the vultures below to feed on the divided carcass of what had been Gor's greatest city.

Talena leaned back against my shoulder. Without looking at me, her shoulders shook, and I knew she was weeping.

If I could have, I would in that moment have rewritten the past, would have selfishly abandoned the quest for the Home Stone- yes, willingly would have left the scattered hostile cities of Gor to face, one by one, the imperialistic depredations of Ar, if it were not for one thing- the girl I held in my arms. [Chapter 11]

See, he's a Sensitive Soul, the Young Master is. Actually, sarcasm aside, this is true. He is presented as the Nice Guy (and not in our recent subversive feminist sense) so as to engage in what has been dubbed in Left Blogistan "moving the center" - that is, the function of the loudest frothing demagogues like Limbaugh and Coulter getting so much airtime is to shift the norm ever farther to their own side, so that by comparison to their extremes anyone LESS than a Complete Bloody Psychopath sounds sane and moderate. But they're not. Tarl Cabot isn't a humane and decent man - he's just not the hothouse-raised Utter Jackass that your native-or-fully-assimilated Gor guy is. Yet.

By representing the Norm [sorry] on Gor as one in which women are beaten, raped, killed, and otherwise ignored as agents entirely, and by representing Tarl-Galahad as being too kind-hearted to actually beat, or rape, or kill, or utterly-ignore the wishes of, a woman, Norman presents anything short of outright violence as virtue - including involuntary imprisonment and sensory deprivation. Yay Tarl.
Talena seemed depressed, in odd contrast to her liveliness of the caravan days. "What will become of me in Ko-ro-ba?" she asked.

"I don't know," I said, smiling. "Perhaps you could be a tavern slave."

She smiled wryly. "No, Tarl of Bristol," she said. "More likely I would be impaled, for I am still the daughter of Marlenus."

I did not tell her, but if that was decreed to be her fate and I could not prevent it, I knew she would not be impaled alone. There would be two bodies on the walls of Ko-ro-ba. I would not live without her.

He's so romantic! The tragic hero who loves her more than life itself - we know this because he tells us so.

So, of course, they go out and party. What else ya gonna do when it's TEOTWAWKI?
That night I took Talena into the City of Tents, and by the light of torches set on lances we walked arm in arm through the crowded streets, among the colorful tents and market stalls.

Not only warriors were in evidence, but tradesman and artisans, peddlers and peasants, camp women and slaves. Talena clung to my arm, fascinated. We watched in one stall a bronzed giant apparently swallowing balls of fire, in the next a silk merchant crying the glories of his cloth, in another a hawker of Paga; in still another we watched the swaying bodies of dancing slave girls as their master proclaimed their rent price.

"I want to see market," [sic] Talena said eagerly, and I knew the market she meant. This vast city of silk would surely have its Street of Brands. Reluctantly I took Talena to the great tent of blue and yellow silk, and we pressed in among the hot, smelling bodies of the buyers, forcing our way toward the front. There Talena watched, thrilled, as girls, several of whom she had known in the caravan, were placed on the large, rounded wooden block and sold, one by one, to the highest bidder.

"She's beautiful," Talena would say of one as the auctioneer would tug the single loop on the right shoulder of the slave livery, dropping it to the girl's ankles. Of another, Talena would sniff scornfully. She seemed to be pleased when her friends were bought by handsome tarnsmen, and laughed delightedly when one girl, to whom she had taken a dislike, was purchased by a fat, odious fellow, of the Caste of Tarn Keepers.

To my surprise, most of the girls seemed excited by their sale and displayed their charms with brazen gusto, each seeming to compete with the one before to bring a higher price. It was, of course, far more desirable to bring a high price, thereby guaranteeing that one's master would be well-fixed. According, the girls did their best to move the interest of the buyers. I noted that Talena, like others in the room, did not seem in the least to feel that there was anything objectionable or untoward in this commerce in beauty. It was an accepted, ordinary part of the life of Gor.

I wondered if, on my own planet, there was not a similar market, invisible but present, and
just as much accepted, a market in which women were sold, except that they sold themselves, were themselves both merchandise and merchant. How many of the women of my native planet, I wondered, did not with care consider the finances, the property of their prospective mates? How many of them did not, for all practical purposes, sell themselves, bartering their bodies for the goods of the world? Here on Gor, however, I observed ironically, bitterly, there was a clear division between merchandise and merchant. The girls would not collect their own profit, not on Gor.

Yes, somehow as a young man in Bristol and in Oxford, he was unaware of the marriage market and the whole late-18th concept of marriage being no more than legalized prostitution, as per Mary Wollstonecraft. He must have slept through lecture that day.
We purchased a bottle of Ka-la-na wine and shared it as we walked through the streets. She begged a tenth of a tarn disk from me, and I gave it to her. Like a child she went to one or two stalls, making me look the other way. In a few minutes she returned, carrying a small package. She gave me the change and leaned against my shoulder, claiming that she was weary. We returned to our tent. Kazrak was gone, and my suspicion was that he was gone for the night, that he was even now tangled in the sleeping robes of one of the torchlit booths of the City of Tents.

Talena retired behind the silk partition, and I built up the fire in the center of the tent, not wishing to retire as yet. I could not forget the figure on the throne, he of the black helmet, and I thought perhaps that he had noticed me and had reacted. It had been, perhaps, my imagination. I sat on the tent carpet, poking at the small fire in the cooking hole. I could hear from a tent nearby the sound of a flute, some soft drums, and the rhythmic jangle of some tiny cymbals.

As I mused, Talena stepped forth from behind the silk curtain. I had thought she had retired. Instead, she stood before me in the diaphanous, scarlet dancing silks of Gor. She had rouged her lips. My head swam at the sudden intoxicating scent of a wild perfume. Her olive ankles bore dancing bangles with tiny bells. Attached to the thumb and index finger of each hand were tiny finger cymbals. She bent her knees ever so slightly and raised her arms gracefully above her head. There was a sudden bright clash of the finger cymbals, and, to the music of the nearby tent, Talena, daughter of the Ubar of Ar, began to dance for me.

As she moved slowly before me, she asked softly, "Do I please you, Master?" There had been no scorn, no irony in her voice.

"Yes," I said, not thinking to repudiate the title by which she had addressed me.

She paused for a moment and walked lightly to the side of the tent. She seemed to hesitate for an instant, then quickly gathered up the slave whip and a leading chain. She placed them firmly in my hands and knelt on the tent carpet before me, her eyes filled with a strange light, her knees not in the position of a Tower Slave but of a Pleasure Slave. [ie apart]

"If you wish," she said, "I will dance the Whip Dance for you, or the Chain Dance."

I threw the whip and chain to the wall of the tent. "No," I said angrily. I would not have Talena dance those cruel dances of Gor, which so humbled a woman.

"Then I will show you a love dance," she said happily, "a dance I learned in the Walled Gardens of Ar.

"I should like that," I said, and, as I watched, Talena performed Ar's strangely beautiful dance of passion.

AIIIEEEE!!!! IT'S NEGAVERSE FAILE!!!! --Sorry. Bad flashback there.
She danced before me for several minutes, her scarlet dancing silks flashing in the firelight, her bare feet, with their belled ankles, striking softly on the carpet. With a last flash of the finger cymbals, she fell to the carpet before me, her breath hot and quick, her eyes blazing with desire. I was at her side, and she was in my arms. Her heart beat wildly against my breast. She looked into my eyes, her lips trembling, the words stumbling but audible.

"Call for the iron," she said. "Brand me, Master."

Um, what was that about the man-woman/natural-master-slave stuff not showing up in the first book, again? I guess I'm having a hallucination.
"No, Talena," I said, kissing her mouth. "No."

"I want to be owned," she whimpered. "I want to belong to you, fully, completely in every way. I want your brand, Tarl of Bristol, don't you understand? I want to be your branded slave."

I fumbled with the collar at her throat, unlocked it, threw it aside.

"You're free, my love," I whispered. "Always free."

She sobbed, shaking her head, her lashes wet with tears. "No," she wept. "I am your slave." She clenched her body against mine, the buckles of the wide tharlarion belt cutting into her belly. "You own me," she whispered. "Use me."

See? See? Dammit, that's what women WANT! It's a WASTE to try to give them freedom, they don't LIKE it, they try to get rid of it the first chance they get!!! It's Not Tarl's Fault!!!

Fortunately this is brought to a violent and abrupt end in the very next paragraph:
There was a sudden rush of men behind me as tarnsmen broke into the tent. I remember turning swiftly and seeing for the fraction of a second the butt of a spear crashing toward my face. I heard Talena scream. There was a sudden flash of light, and then darkness.

--and we come to an end of fanboy attemptings-to-imagine-what-sex-w/-real-girls is like, and get back to the other stuff that can drift all too easily and dangerously into wank material, but not as obviously to the outside world.

First we have Tarl waking up in a torture-frame, where he is to die a Shameful Death:
My wrist and ankles were bound to a hollow, floating frame. The ropes sawed into my flesh as the weight of my body drew on them. I turned my head, sick to my stomach, and threw up into the turbid waters of the Vosk. I blinked my eyes against the hot sun and tried to move my wrists and ankles.

A voice said, "He's awake."

Dimly I felt spear butts thrust against the side of the hollow frame, ready to edge it out into the current.

I cleared my head as best I could, and into my uncertain field of vision moved a dark object, which became the black helmet of a member of the Caste of Assassins. Slowly, with a stylized movement, the helmet was lifted, and I found myself staring up into a gray, lean, cruel face, a face that might have been made of metal. The eyes were inscrutable, as if they had been made of glass or stone and set artificially in that metallic mask of a countenance.

"I am Pa-Kur," said the man.

It was he, the Master Assassin of Ar, leader of the assembled horde.

"We meet again," I said.

Yes, he really wrote that.

They snipe back and forth about an earlier failed assassination attempt on the scion of House Cabot and which of them is more of a badass and then Tarl asks the million-tarn question, What happened to the Girl? and - you knew this was coming, too, right?
"What have you done with the girl?"

"She is Talena, daughter of the Ubar Marlenus," said Pa-Kur. "She will rule in Ar as my queen."

"She would die first," I said.

She has accepted me," said Pa-Kur, "and will rule by my side." The stone eyes regarded me, expressionless. "It was her wish that you die the death of a villain," he said, "on the Frame of Humiliation, unworthy to stain our weapons.

I closed my eyes. I should have known that the proud Talena, daughter of a Ubar, would leap at the first chance to return to power in Ar, even though it be at the head of a plundering host of brigands. And I, her protector, was now to be discarded. Indeed, the Frame of Humiliation would be ample vengeance to satisfy even Talena for the indignities she had suffered at my hands. It, if anything, would wipe out forever from her mind the offensive memory that she had once needed my help and had pretended to love me.

Then, each of the men of Pa-Kur, as is the custom before a frame is surrendered to the waters of the Vosk, spit on my body. Lastly, Pa-Kur spit in his hand and then placed his hand on my chest. "Were it not for the daughter of Marlenus," said Pa-Kur, his metallic face as placid as the quicksilver behind a mirror, "I would have slain you honorably. That I swear by the black helmet of my caste."

"I believe you," I said, my voice choked, no longer caring if I lived or died.

The spear butts pressed against the frame, shoving it away from the bank. The current soon caught it, and it began to spin in slow circles farther and farther out into the midst of that vast force of nature called the Vosk.
Okay we get pages of Tarl angst over his impending doom as he's swept along the river waiting for the corkindrills to get him and alternately resigning himself stoically to his fate and wanting to live and thinking about his betrayal:

"My wrists and ankles had turned white and were numb. The oppressive, blinding glare of the sun, the heavy weight of its heat bore down on me. My throat was parched, and, hanging only an inch or so above the Vosk, I burned with thirst. Thoughts, like prodding needles, vexed my brain. The image of the treacherous, beautiful Talena, in her dancing silks, as she had lain in my arms, tormented me- she who would glady give her kisses to the cold Pa-Kur for a place on the throne of Ar, she whose implacable hatred had sent me to this terrible death, not even permitting me the honor of a warrior's end. I wanted to hate her- so much I wanted to hate her- but I found that I could not. I had come to love her. In the glade by the swamp forests, in the grain fields of the empire, on the great highway of Ar, in the regal, exotic caravan of Mintar, I had found the woman I loved, a scion of a barbaric race on a remote and unknown world."

And then a wild tarn flying overhead sees him and snatches him up to eat him, yanking him free of the Frame of Humiliation - no, of COURSE it's not his own black stallion tarn, showing up to save him, that would be an ABSURD coincidence.

His noble black stallion tarn comes along and fights the other wild tarn and knocks him free and carries him back to its nest, where he promptly kicks it firmly in the head to remind it who's boss and it dutifully goes off and finds an antelope to eat instead of him, and he fixes up the saddle and bridle which he finds conveniently rubbed off on the cliff-ledge and not down some chasm, and away they go, tally-ho! to take the Mystic Rock of Ar back to Ko-ro-ba.

You may find it implausible that after being racked for a couple days without food or water whilst suffering a concussion on top of a hangover, Young!Tarl could even move, let alone kick a giant hungry raptor inna head hard enough to make it think better of snacking on him. Silly you! Tarl's a cyborg -- no wait, that would make too much sense. But he must be superhuman - I mean, he defeated ol' Kazrak after they'd been living off nothing but scrounged roadside berries for a couple days, hardly breaking a sweat - and I don't think you can really do that.

Needless to say, at least for anyone who's ever read a Bodice-Ripper, Talena hasn't really betrayed him, she was trying to save his life and give him a chance to get away, and was willing to marry a man she didn't love in noble self-sacrifice - I told you, ad hoc personality traits are a mark of the non-Heroine - and this of course allows opportunities (if the author so choses) for bitter recriminations, haughtiness, injured pride-leads-to-stupidity and still more wacky misunderstandings before the Designated Pair are reconciled. This being guy-emo-crack, and not intended for an audience of chicks, we don't get much of that - we just get Tarl angst and serial rescue attempts.

This is when we get the aforementioned lure/ambush/capture by Talena's pop who just happens to be lurking in the same area of the wilderness that Tarl is flying over, using himself as leopard bait whilst disguised as a leper to lure in curiously-altruistic warriors - nah, don't try to figure it out. The Powers that nobody intelligent on Gor (as we are repeatedly told) actually believes in clearly have their fingers on the Balance, and I don't mean the Priest-Kings, unless they actually are gods pretending to be Really Advanced Technocrats.
Things look bad for Our Hero:
Shackled in a kneeling position, my back open and bleeding from the lash, I was thrown before the Ubar. Nine days I had been a prisoner in his camp, subjected to torture and abuse. Yet this was the first time since I had saved his life that I had seen him. I gathered that he had finally seen fit to terminate the suffering of the warrior who had stolen the Home Stone of his city.

One of the tarnsmen of Marlenus thrust his hand in my hair and forced my lips down to his sandal. I forced my head up and kept my back straight, my eyes granting my captor no satisfaction. I knelt on the granite floor of a shallow cave in one of the Voltai peaks, a sheltered fire on each side of me. Before me, on a rough throne of piled rocks, sat Marlenus, his long hair over his shouders, his great beard reaching almost to his sword belt. He was a gigantic man, larger even than the Older Tarl, and in his eyes, wild and green, I saw the masterful flame which had, in its way, also burned in the eyes of Talena, his daughter. Die though I must at the hands of this magnificent barbarian, I could feel no ill will toward him. If I had had to kill him, I would have done so not with hatred or rancor, but rather with respect. [chapter 14]

Wasn't making that up, either. I tell you, "Gay Bejewelled Nazi Bikers of Gor"--not really a parody!
"You are a young and brave and foolish warrior," he said. He looked into my eyes for a long time, then leaned back against his rough throne. "I was once as young and brave as you," he said, "and perhaps as foolish- yes, perhaps as foolish." The eyes of Marlenus stared over my head, into the darkness outside. "I risked my life a thousand times and gave the years of my youth to the vison of Ar and its empire, that there might be on all Gor but one language, but one commerce, but one set of codes, that the highways and passes might be safe, that the peasants might cultivate their fields in peace, that there might be but one Council to decide matters of policy, that there might be but one supreme city to unite the cylinders of a hundred severed, hostile cities- and all this you have destroyed." Marlenus looked down at me. "What can you, a simple tarnsman, know of these things?" he asked. "But I, Marlenus, though a warrior, was more than a warrior, always more than a warrior. Where others could see no more than the codes of their castes, where others could sense no call of duty beyond that of their Home Stone, I dared to dream the dream of Ar- that there might be an end to meaningless warfare, bloodshed, and terror, an end to the anxiety and peril, the retribution and cruelty that cloud our lives- I dreamed that there might arise from the ashes of the conquests of Ar a new world, a world of honor and law, of power and justice."

"Your justice," I said.

"Mine, if you like," he agreed.

Remember their rule was so harsh that nobody could wait to rise up in vengeance from all the countryside round, once they lost the Mandate. Remember that the kindly Spiders are persecuted by them. Now forget all that, because Young!Tarl sure does.
"Do you know, Tarnsman," he asked, "that there is no justice without the sword?" He smiled down on me grimly. "This is a terrible truth," he said, "and so consider it carefully." He paused. "Without this," he said, touching the blade, "there is nothing- no justice, no civilization, no society, no community, no peace. Without the sword there is nothing."

"By what right," I challenged, "is it the sword of Marlenus that must bring justice to Gor?"

"You do not understand," said Marlenus. "Right it-self- that right of which you speak so reverently- owes its very existence to the sword."

"I think that is false," I said. "I hope it is false." I shifted, even that small movement irritating the whip cuts on my back.

It's very clear to me that people who lament that it started out so much better and got so much worse in re the Ethics of Gor and the BDSM are missing a major canon element, as well as the point: Tarl is while not supposed to be seen as as big a looby as he looks to anyone who's got half a brain, still supposed to be understood as a naive, propagandized child of Earth, full of naive childish inhibitions about human relations and civilization and so forth. Later he will grow up and realize that this was his error, the product of the decadent, effete Terran society he was brought up in.

Him becoming more and more at ease with slavery, both male and female, the Classical idea that there are Natural Slaves, Natural Warriors, Natural Elites, and the proper state of man one of constant battle, "omnium contra omnes" - that was supposed to be character development. That was Tarl growing up into full manhood and maturity - the evil mirrorverse opposite of Taran's wanderings.

--Yes, this is what Norman/Lange really does believe, and defend, when he goes meta and talks about his politics. You'll see.
Marlenus was patient. "Before the sword," he said, "there is no right, no wrong, only fact- a world of what is and what is not, rather than a world of what should be and what should not be. There is no justice until the sword creates it, establishes it, guarantees it, gives it substance and significance." He lifted the weapon, wielding the heavy metal blade as though it were a straw. "First the sword-" he said, "then government- then law- then justice."

"But," I asked, "what of the dream of Ar, that dream of which you spoke, that dream that you believed it right to bring about?"

"Yes?" said Marlenus.

"Is that a right dream?" I asked.

"And yet," I said, "your sword has not yet found the strength to bring it into being."

Marlenus looked at me thoughtfully, then laughed. "By the Priest-Kings," he said, "I think I have lost the exchange."

I shrugged, somewhat incongruously in the chains; it hurt.

"But," went on Marlenus, "if what you say is true, how shall we separate the right dreams from the wrong dreams?

It seemed to me a difficult question.

--I know why his College teachers were so eager to help him get a job on the other side of the ocean, that they went along with his boosting of his credentials, even if Tarl can't figure it out.
"I will tell you," laughed Marlenus. He slapped the blade fondly. "With this!"

The Ubar then rose and sheathed his sword. As if this were a signal, some of his tarnsmen entered the cave and seized me.

"Impale him," said Marlenus.

The tarnsmen began to unlock the shackles, that I might be impaled freely on the lance, perhaps so that my struggles might provide a more interesting spectacle to the onlookers.

I felt numb, even my back, which presumably would have been a riot of pain if I had not felt myself near death.

But not to fear! Marlenus is blissfully unaware of the already-well-established trope of the Villain Gloat-off in Earth folklore, and thus goes on to make some serious Noob mistakes (granted he doesn't realize yet that he's dealing with The Hero, but he really ought to, givent that just based on the things he can know, 1) the Top Assassin that he hired to take Tarl out as a matter of policy preemption wasn't able to do it, 2) Tarl succeeded in stealing his Mystic Rock out of the heart of his city in a daring and should-be impossible mission (frex, it involved him lurking around for hours first pretending to be a local), 3) Tarl only was captured by him by a freak chance involving paths crossing, and Tarl being too kind-hearted to let even a highly-contageous Alt-Leper get eaten by ten-foot-tall leopards and does what no other Gor guy would do, fly down to rescue him. Like the List says, don't give the Hero a sporting chance!

(OTOH, Talena has clearly both read the List, and is aware that Pa-kur can barely spell his own name, and is thus quiteunaware that he should "maintain a healthy amount of skepticism when he captures the beautiful rebel and she claims she is attracted to his power and good looks and will gladly betray her companions if he just lets her in on his plans" or that he should as a rule just kill the Hero already instead of using some drawn-out cunning torture device...)

In fact, it almost seems at first like Marlenus is aware of it, given that he seems to be starting out with #47 on just the rumor that there's a Callow Youth in the realm who might be planning on taking him out down the road; but then he goes and Explains His Plans at length, Gives The Hero A Sporting Chance, and Fails To Take Advantage Of The Opportunity To Spare the Guy Who Saved His Life And Thus Indebt Him ... but Tarl is so smitten with a mancrush on him that it doesn't matter about the torture and the impaling and the almost-torn-in-half. This is because unlike Pa-kur, Marlenus is good-looking; from their first meeting in the ambush:
Disregarding my misgivings, I took the hand, to draw the unfortunate creature to its feet. [See, not even Tarl believes that Gorean leprosy is really that contagious, because otherwise he just committed slow suicide as surely as if he'd injected himself with syphilis on The Planet With No Penicillin. --No, they don't seem to have STDs on Gor, just alt-leprosy.]

To my amazement, the hand that clasped mine firmly was as solid and hardened as saddle leather. Before I realized what was happening, my arm had been jerked downward and twisted, and I had been thrown on my back at the feet of the man, who leaped up and set his boot on my throat. In his hand was a warrior's sword, and the point was at my breast. He laughed a mighty, roaring laugh and threw his head back, causing the hood to fall to his shoulders. I saw a massive, lionlike head, with wild long hair and a beard as unkempt and magnificent as the crags of the Voltai itself. The man, who seemed to leap into gigantic stature as he lifted himself into full height, took from under his yellow robes a tarn whistle and blew a long, shrill note. Almost instantly the whistle had been answered by other whistles, responding from a dozen places in the nearby mountains. Within a minute the air was filled with the beating of wings, as some half a hundred wild tarnsmen brought their birds down about us.

"I am Marlenus, Ubar of Ar," said the man.

FYI, Norman is really fond of the idea of impaling people. Really fond. Especially of the idea of impaling women, as it turns out in latter books, although I never actually read any bits of any that had scenes of actual impaling in them (remember, he's a sheltered and rather prissy liberal arts major whose notions of violence and injury all seem to have come from other fic, including '60s adventure movies and superhero comics.) Not that I give much credence to Freud, but you know, sometimes a big sharpened stick inserted involuntarily into someone's bodily orifices really is just a Phallic Symbol.
"Your daughter, Talena, is alive," I said to Marlenus. He had not asked and did not now appear to have much interest in the matter. Still, if he was human at all, I assumed this remote, kingly, dream-obsessed man would want to know.

This, after Talena had already told him right out early on that she'd only ever met her father a couple of times in her life, and that he had no interest in her except for the bride-price she would bring, and that she was only sorry that he'd fallen because she now was an exile with a price on her head.
"She would have brought a thousand tarns," said Marlenus. "Proceed with the impalement."

The tarnsmen grasped my arms more securely. Two others removed the tharlarion lance from its crevice and brought it forward. It would be forced into my body, and I would then be lifted, with it, into place.

"She's your daughter," I said to Marlenus. "She's alive."

"Did she submit to you?" asked Marlenus.

"Yes," I said.

"Then she valued her life more than my honor."

"Suddenly my feeling of numbness, of incapacity, departed as if in a lightning flash of fury.

See? Battle-Muse! I'm trying to remember if she gets a single further line of dialogue in the book, and I can't come up with any.
Without realizing what I was doing, I had shaken the two restraining tarnsmen from my arms as if they had been children, and I rushed on Marlenus and struck him violently in the face with my fist, causing him to reel backward, his face contorted with astonishment and pain. I turned just in time to knock the impaling lance aside as, carried by two men, it plunged toward my back. I seized it, twisting it, and, using it like a bar held by the men, leaped into the air, kicking at them. I heard two screams of pain and found that I held the lance. Some five or six tarnsmen ran toward the wide opening of the shallow cave, but I rushed forward, holding the lance parallel to my body, striking them with almost superhuman strength and forcing them over the ledge near the mouth of the cave. Their screams mingled with shouts of rage as the other tarnsmen rushed forward to capture me.

One tarnsman leveled a crossbow, and in that instant I hurled the lance and he toppled backward, the shaft of the weapon protruding from his chest, the bolt from his crossbow ricocheting from the rock above my head with a flash of sparks. One of the men I had kicked lay writhing at my feet. I seized the sword from his scabbard. I engaged and dropped the first of the tarnsmen to reach me and wounded the second, but was pressed back toward the rear of the cave. I was doomed, but resolved to die well.

"As I fought, I could hear the lion laughter of Marlenus behind me, as what had been a simple impalement turned into a fight of the sort after his own heart. As I found a moment's respite, I spun to face him, hoping to have it out with the Ubar himself, but as I did so, the shackles that I had worn struck me forcibly in the face and throat, thrown like a bolo by Marlenus. I choked, and shook my head to clear the blood from my eyes, and in that instant was seized by three or four of the Ubar's tarnsmen."

"Well done, young warrior," acclaimed Marlenus. "I thought I would see if you would die like a slave." He addressed his men, pointing to me. "What say you?" he laughed. "Has this warrior not earned his right to the tarn death?"

"He has indeed," said one of the tarnsmen, who held a wadded lump of tunic over his slashed rib cage.

What did I tell you?
"You will be torn to pieces," said Marlenus. "Not pleasant, but better than impalement."

I was fastened securely. A tarnsman mounted one tarn; another tarnsman mounted the other tarn.

"I'm not dead yet," I said. It was a stupid thing to say, but I felt that it was not yet my time to die.

"Marlenus did not deride me. "You it was who stole the Home Stone of Ar," he said. "You have luck."

"No man can escape the tarn death," said one of the men. [He didn't read the List either.]

The warriors of the Ubar moved back, to give the tarns room.

Marlenus himself knelt in the darkness to check the knots in the binding fiber, tightening them carefully. As he checked the knots at my wrists, he spoke to me.

"Do you wish me to kill you now?" he asked softly. "The tarn death is an ugly death." His hand, shielded from his men by his body, was on my throat. I felt it could have crushed it easily.

"Why this kindness?" I asked.

"For the sake of a girl," he said.

"But why?" I asked.

"For the love she has for you," he said. [We may legitimately doubt this proclaimed motivation, given subsequent exchanges.]

"Your daughter hates me," I said.

"She agreed to be the mate of Pa-Kur, the Assassin," he said, "in order that you might have one small chance of life, on the Frame of Humiliation."

"How do you know this?" I asked.

"It is common knowledge in the camp of Pa-Kur," replied Marlenus. I could sense him smiling in the darkness. "I myself, as one of the Afflicted, learned it from Mintar, of the Merchant Caste. Merchants must keep their friends on both sides of the fence, for who knows if Marlenus may not once more sit upon the throne of Ar?" [Mintar btw was Tarl's old boss, after he defeated Kazrak and took his place in the caravan.]

I must have uttered a sound of joy, for Marlenus quickly placed his hand over my mouth.

He asked no more if he should kill me, but rose to his feet and walked away, under the snapping wing of one of the tarns, and waved farewell. "Good-bye, Warrior," he called.

With a sickening lurch and sharp jolt of pain the two tarnsmen brought their birds into the air. For a moment I swung between the birds, and then, perhaps a hundred feet in the air, the tarnsmen, at a prearranged signal- a sharp blast of a tarn whistle from the ground- turned their birds in opposite directions. The sudden wrenching pain seemed to rip my body. I think I inadvertently screamed.

To make a too-long story shorter, after impossible feats of Manly Warrior Aerial Combat (remember, nine days!), Tarl retakes his loyal Black Stallion Tarn and they go off to the siege of Ar to see if he can retrieve Talena, whom he now realizes loves him after all. (This is the part where we learn that Goreans Have No Pockets, but not where they keep their money.)

Tarl is of course reunited with Kazrak:

I was searching for Kazrak's tent, which lay in the outer ring near the tharlarion corrals. My calculations had been correct, and in a moment I had slipped inside the domed framework of his tent. I dropped the ring that I wore, with the crest of Cabot, to his sleeping mat.

For what seemed an interminable hour, I waited in the dark interior of the tent. At last the weary figure of Kazrak, helmet in hand, bent down to enter the tent. I waited, not speaking, in the shadows. He came through the opening, dropped his helmet on the sleeping mat, and began to unsling his sword. Still I would not speak, not while he controlled a weapon; unfortunately, the first thing a Gorean warrior is likely to do to the stranger in his tent is kill him, the second is to find out who he is. I saw the spark of Kazrak's fire-maker, and I felt the flush of friendship as I saw his features briefly outlined in the glow. He lit the small hanging tent lamp, a wick set in a copper bowl of tharlarion oil, and in its flickering light turned to the sleeping mat. No sooner had he done so than he fell to his knees on the mat and grasped the ring.

"By the Priest-Kings!" he cried.

I leaped across the tent and clapped my hands across his mouth. For a moment we struggled fiercely. "Kazrak!" I said. I took my hand from his mouth. He grasped me in his arms and crushed me to his chest, his eyes filled with tears. I shoved him away happily.

"I looked for you," he said. "For two days I rode down the banks of the Vosk. I would have cut you free."

"That's heresy," I laughed.

"Let it be heresy," he said. "I would have cut you free."

"We are together again," I said simply. [Not. Saying. Anything.]

"I found the frame," Kazrak said, "half a pasang from the Vosk, broken. I thought you were dead."

The brave man wept, and I felt like weeping, too, for joy, because he was my friend. With affection I took him by the shoulders and shook him. I went to his locker near the mat and got out his Ka-la-na flask, taking a long draught myself and then shoving it into his hands. He drained the flask in one drink and wiped his hand across his beard, stained with the red juice of the fermented drink."

"We are together again," he said. "We are together again, Tarl of Bristol, my sword brother."

and with Marlenus - no hard feelings about the attempted execution -
"You are willing," I asked, "to turn the city over to Pa-Kur- that his horde should swarm into the cylinders, that the city may be looted and burned, the people destroyed or enslaved?" I shuddered involuntarily at the thought of the uncontrolled hordes of Pa-Kur among the spires of Ar, butchering, pillaging, burning, raping- or, as the Goreans will have it, washing the bridges in blood.

"he eyes of Marlenus flashed. "No," he said. "But Ar will fall. The Initiates can only mumble prayers to the Priest-Kings, arrange the details of their meaningless, innumerable sacrifices. They crave political power, but can't understand it or manipulate it. They will never withstand a well-mounted siege. They will never keep the city."

"Can't you enter the city and take power?" I asked. "You could return the Home Stone. You could gather a following."

tho' some hard feelings about Marlenus' apparent** continued failure to appreciate the Wonderful Wonderfulness of his daughter -
Mintar was idly arranging the pieces on the game board, first in one pattern and then in another. "In large matters, as the pieces are now set," he said, "the girl is unimportant, but only the Priest-Kings can foresee all possible variations. It might be well to remove the girl from the board." So saying, he picked a piece, the Ubar's Consort, or Ubara, from the board and dropped it into the game box.

Marlenus stared down at the board, his fists clenched. "Yes," he said, "she must be removed from the board, but not simply for reasons of strategy. She has dishonored me." He scowled at me. "She has been alone with a warrior- she has submitted herself- she has even pledged to sit at the side of an assassin."

"She has not dishonored you," I said.

"She submitted herself," said Marlenus.

"Only to save her life," I said.

"And rumor has it," said Mintar, not looking up from the board, "that she pledged herself to Pa-Kur only that some tarnsman she loved might be given a small chance of life."

"She would have brought a bride price of a thousand tarns," said Marlenus bitterly, "and now she is of less value than a trained slave girl."

"She is your daughter," I said, my temper rising.

"If she were here now," said Marlenus, "I would strangle her."

"And I would kill you," I said."

"Well, then," said Marlenus, smiling, "perhaps I would only beat her and throw her naked to my tarnsmen."

"And I would kill you," I repeated.

"Indeed," said Marlenus, looking at me narrowly, "one of us would slay the other."

"Have you no love for her?" I asked.

Marlenus seemed momentarily puzzled. "I am a Ubar," he said. He drew the robes of the Afflicted once more around his gigantic frame and picked up a gnarled staff he carried. He dropped the hood of the yellow robe about his face, ready to go, then turned to me once more. With the staff he poked me good-naturedly in the chest. "May the Priest-Kings favor you," he said, and, inside the folds of the hood, I knew he was chuckling.
[...]
Mintar looked up, and he, too, seemed pleased. "You are the only man who has ever escaped the tarn death," he said, something of wonder in his voice. "Perhaps it is true, as they say, that you are that warrior brought every thousand years to Gor- brought by the Priest-Kings to change a world."

--and Tarl sneaks around for a bit pretending to be one of the Caste of Assassins, who have also apparently never read the List, by the cunning artifice of wearing an Assassin outfit, trying to meet Talena, who is reportedly being held until the wedding in a bejewelled cage built around her with no door - no, don't think about the practicalities of that - but finds out that this is merely a decoy who looks like her, in a scene where we meet the (apparently) Only Black Person On Gor*** which was probably settled, Tarl tells us towards the beginning, by "Chaldeans or Celts or Syrians or Englishmen"--
"Here I was admitted without question, as though my helmet were sufficient guarantee in itself of my right to be there. Inside the second wall, I was escorted among the tents by a tower slave, a black girl whose livery was golden and who wore large golden earrings that matched a golden collar. Behind me, two guards fell into line."

--and Marlenus sneaks around trying to sieze the sacred rocks of the other cities to subjugate them again from the sanctuary where they're kept, and Tarl sends Kazrak tearfully off to try to raise the cavalry by going to Ko-ro-ba and the city of the freed slave girl from the beginning of the raid, where they herd the tarns in flocks, remember, and there are passages under the city with secret entrances worthy of Indiana Jones, handily concealed in a handily-vacant leprosarium pit, and lots of Conanesque hacking and slashing, until we get to the climax, when Tarl rescues Marlenus from the tower he's holed up in with everybody's stones, besieged by the rebels who took over after his flight:
It was behind this makeshift rampart, which could be defended against a hundred men, that I saw the haggard but still blazing eyes of Marlenus. I removed my helmet and set it on the steps. In a moment he had burst through the obstruction as if it had been made of kindling wood.

Wordlessly we embraced.

--and swashbuckles his way up to the Initiates' tower where Pa-Kur has blithely handed Talena over to be impaled after all, as the price of the city's surrender.
The tarn's steel-shod talons struck the marble roof of the cylinder with a flash of sparks. The great wings smote the air twice, raising a small hurricane that caused the startled onlookers to stagger backward. Lying on the ground, bound hand and foot, still clad in the white robe, was Talena. The point of the sharpened impaling post lay near her. As the tarn had landed, her executioners, two burly, hooded magistrates, had scrambled to their feet and fled to safety. The Initiates themselves do not execute their victims, as the shedding of blood is forbidden by those beliefs they regard as sacred. Now, helpless, Talena lay almost within the wing span of my tarn, so near to me and yet a world away. [...]
"Who are you?" cried Pa-Kur, drawing his sword.

I threw off my helmet, flinging it down. "I am Tarl of Bristol," I said.

The cry of amazement and joy that broke from Talena's lips told me all I wanted to know.

"Impale her," shouted Pa-Kur.

As the burly magistrates hastened forward, I seized my spear and hurled it with such force as I would not have believed possible. The spear flashed through the air like a bolt of lightning and struck the oncoming magistrate in the chest, passing through his body and burying itself in the heart of his companion.

There was an awe-stricken silence as the immensity of what had occurred impressed itself on the onlookers.

And oh, hey, she does get four more lines of dialogue, in the last scene before the epilogue:
I sheathed my sword and went to Talena. I unbound her. Trembling, she stood beside me, and we took one another in our arms, the blood from my wound staining her robe.

"I love you," I said.

"We held one another, and her eyes, wet with tears, lifted to mine. "I love you," she said."

The lion laugh of Marlenus resounded from behind us. Talena and I broke apart. My hand was on my sword. The Ubar's hand gently restrained mine. "It has done enough work for one day," he smiled. "Let it rest."

The Ubar went to his daughter and took her fine head in his great hands. He turned her head from side to side and looked into her eyes. "Yes," he said, as if he might have seen his daughter for the first time, "she is fit to be the daughter of a Ubar." Then he clapped his hands on my shoulders. "See that I have grandsons," he said.

I looked about. Sana stood in the arms of Kazrak, and I knew that the former slave girl had found the man to whom she would give herself, not for a hundred tarns, but for love.

My father stood watching me, approval in his eyes. In the distance Pa-Kur's camp was only a framework of blackened poles. In the city his garrison had surrendered. Beyond the walls the horde had cast down its weapons. Ar was saved.

Talena looked into my eyes. "What will you do with me?" she asked.

"I will take you to Ko-ro-ba," I said, "to my city."

"If you did not," I laughed, "I would throw you across my saddle and carry you to Ko-ro-ba by force."

She laughed as I swept her from her feet and lifted her to the saddle of my giant tarn. In the saddle, her arms were around my neck, her lips on mine. "Are you a true warrior?" she asked, her eyes bright with mischief, testing me, her voice breathless.

"We shall see," I laughed.

"Then, in accord with the rude bridal customs of Gor, as she furiously but playfully struggled, as she squirmed and protested and pretended to resist, I bound her bodily across the saddle of the tarn. Her wrists and ankles were secured, and she lay before me, arched over the saddle, helpless, a captive, but of love and her own free will. The warriors laughed, Marlenus the loudest. "It seems I belong to you, bold Tarnsman," she said, "What are you going to do with me?" In answer, I hauled on the one-strap, and the great bird rose into the air, higher and higher, even into the clouds, and she cried to me, "Let it be now, Tarl," and even before we had passed the outermost ramparts of Ar, I had untied her ankles and flung her single garment to the streets below, to show her people what had been the fate of the daughter of their Ubar.

And thus every girl's fantasy of public aerial rape on top of a giant psychotic bird by a giant psychotic warrior is fulfilled, and every Humanities-major Nice Guy's dream of being finally recognized as a Real Man by an entire planet, and not just getting the Supermodel but having her willingly submit to public humiliating sex with him, and everyone would live happily ever after, if only the cold manipulating Priest-kings hadn't tragically zapped him back to Terra just long enough after for him to have fathered what he knows will be (of course) a son on Gor...

Next: John Norman goes meta about John Norman, in the conclusion of the party of the first part - wait, wrong meta, and this isn't SUPPOSED to be a comedy--

* "The Island of Misfit Toys" as an sfnal trope needs to be banned for the next 100 years under pain of severe sporking and confiscation of their Rudolph videos, especially to Simon Green.

**We may very well be supposed to take this not as Marlenus literally longing to honor-kill her, but as merely testing the depth of Young!Tarl's devotion. Or, as I think likeliest from the text, both.

***As I noted to buggery in comments earlier, the "cheetah-like" slave girl at the Ko-ro-ban brothel described as having "brown shoulders" might be also supposed to be black, but could equally be supposed to be a white girl with a Malibu-Barbie tan, or another Mediterranean-descended type like Talena, so I'm only going to say a possible two so far on the Planet Of All White People.