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cowardice.
I, too, was of Port Kar.
I had learned that beneath the hide of men burned the hearts of sleen and
tharlarion, and that their moralities and ideals were so many cloaks to
conceal the claw and tooth. Greed and selfishness I now, for the first time,
understood. There is more honesty in Port Kar, I thought, than in all the
cites of
Gor. Here men scorn to sheath the claws of their heart in the pretenses of
their mouth. Here, it this city, alone of all the cities of Gor, men did not
stoop to cant and prattle. Here they knew, and would acknowledge, the dark
truths of human life, that, in the end, there was only gold, and power, and
the bodies of women, and the steel of weapons. Here they concerned themselves
only with themselves. Here they behaved as what they were, cruelly and with
ruthlessness, as men, despising, and taking what they might, should it please
them to do so. And it was in this city, now mine, that I belonged, I who had
lost myself, who had chosen ignominious slavery to the freedom of honorable
death.
I took yet another swallow of paga. There was a girl s scream and, from the
alcove into which Surbus had dragged her, the girl, bleeding, fled among the
tables, he plunging drunken after her.
Protect me! she cried, to anyone who would listen. But there was only
laughter, and men reaching out to seize her.
She ran to my table and fell to her knees before me. I saw not she was the one
who had served me earlier.
Please, she wept, her mouth bloody, protect me. She extended her chained
wrists to me.
No, I said.
Then Surbus was on her, his hand in her hair, and he bent her backwards.
He scowled at me.
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I took another sip of paga. It was no business of mine.
I saw the tears in the eyes of the girl, her outstretched hands, and then,
with a cry of pain, she was draged back to the alcove by the hair.
Several men laughed.
I turned again to my paga.
You did well, said a man next to me, half-shaven. That was Surbus.
One of the finest swords of Port Kar, said another.
Oh, I said.
Port Kar, squalid, malignant Port Kar, scourge of gleaming Thassa, Tarn of the
Sea, is a vast, disjointed mass of holdings, each almost a fortress, piled
almost upon one another, divided and crossed by hundreds of canals. It is, in
effect, walled, though it has few walls as one normally thinks of them. Those
buildings which face outwards, say, either at the delta or along the shallow
Tamber Gulf, have no windows on the ourward side, and the outward walls of
them are several feet thick, and they are surmounted, on the roofs, with
crenelated parapets. The canals which open into the delta of the Tamber were,
in the last few years, fitted with heavy, half-submerged gates of bars. We had
entered the city through one such pair of gates. In Port Kar, incidentally,
tehre are none of the towers often encountered in the norther cities of Gor.
The men of Port Kar had not chosen to build towers. It is the only city on Gor
I know of whihc was built not by free men, but by slaves, under the lash of
masters.
Commonly, on Gor, slaves are not permitted to build, that being regarded as a
privilege to be reserved for free men.
Politically, Port Kar is a chaos, ruled by several conflicting Ubars, each
with his own following, each attempting to terrorize, to govern and tax to the
extent of his power. Nominally beneath these Ubars, but in fact much
independent of them, is an oligarchy of merchant princes, Captains, as they
call themselves, who, in council, maintain and manage the great arsenal,
building and renting shitps and fittings, themselves controlling the grain
fleet, the oil fleet, the slave fleet, and others. Samos, First Slaver of Port
Kar, said to be an agent of Priest-Kings, was, I
knew, a member of this council. I had been suppose to contact him. Now, of
course, I would not do so.
There is even, in Port Kar, a recognized caste of Thieves, the only such I
know of on Gor, which, in the lower canals and perimeters of the city, has
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