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on the vast grasslands of the Barrens. Unable to find Grunt, I
feared I must enter the Barrens alone. Already, early this morning, the Lady
Mira of Venna, and
Alfred of Port Olni, with their mercenaries, had left Kailiauk.
The fellow leaning on the rail turned to look at me. "Why do you wish to find
Grunt?" he asked.
"I wish to enter the Barrens," I said.
"It is madness to do so," said he.
I shrugged.
"It is unfortunate you did not come to Kailiauk a month ago," he said.
"Why is that?" I asked.
"Settlers, armed, with two hundred wagons, crossed the Ihanke," he said. "Men,
women, children. There must have been seven or eight hundred of them. You
could have accompanied them.
There is perhaps safety in such numbers."
"Perhaps," I said. Such a. party, however, I knew must travel slowly. Also, it
would be impossible to conceal its trails and movements.
"You are a big fellow," he said, "and seem quick, and strong. Why did you not
sign articles with the troops who left this morning?"
I did not respond to him.
"It was the largest mercenary band ever to leave
Kailiauk," he said. "You should have gone with them."
"Perhaps," I said.
"I'm chained! I'm chained!" wept one of the girls in the pit below. She knelt,
nude, in the mud. With her small hands, her tiny wrists in their close-
fitting manacles, she seized the chain attached to the collar on her neck. She
jerked it twice against the back of her neck. It cut at the back of her neck.
"I'm chained," she wept, disbelievingly.
"Where am I? What has become of me? Where are my clothes? Who are these men?
How is it that they dare to look at me? In what place do I find myself?"
"They cannot even speak Gorean," said the man beside me.
"Barbarians," I said.
"Yes," he said. The girl had spoken in English.
This had confirmed my surmise as to their origin. I
had come to Seibar's market out of curiosity. I had heard he was the major
dealer in Kailiauk for barbarian slaves. I did not know, but I suspected that
he himself was not in league with Kurii, but merely purchased wholesale lots
of such girls from one or more of their agents. Such girls, I
gathered, from my conversations with the teamster with whom I had ridden to
Fort Haskins, were sold at various points along the perimeter. I had, earlier
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in the afternoon, on one of my purchased kaiila, scouted the terrain north and
south of
Kailiauk. In my ride I had come to one place, sheltered among small hills, in
which I had found scorched grass and several, rounded six-inch-deep
impressions in the earth. It had been there, I
speculated, that one of the steel ships of the
Kurii had landed. Also there were wagon tracks leading away from the area,
toward Kailiauk. I was less fortunate, at various small camps and outlying
farms, in obtaining information as to the possible whereabouts of a white
trader named Grunt. I did not approach the Ihanke, nor did I wish to do so, if
possible, until I knew exactly what I was doing.
I did not know, for example, even if it were guarded or not.
"Even if such girls understood Gorean," said the fellow next to me, amused,
"they could probably not even understand what was required of them. They
probably do not even know the hundred kisses."
"They could be taught," I said.
"That is so," he laughed.
"Stand aside, Gentlemen, if you would," said a voice near us, that of a
slaver's man.
We stepped back and he, from a basket, hurled an assortment of scraps, such as
crusts of bread and rinds of fruit, into the muddy pit. It was the refuse, the
garbage, I gathered, from a meal of the slaver's men.
In the pit the girls regarded the refuse with horror. Then I saw the small,
chained hand of one reach forth toward a piece of roll. She picked it
up and thrust it in her mouth. Another girl then reached to a bit of fruit.
Another then snatched at a gravy-sopped wedge of yellow Sa-Tarna bread.
Then, in an instant, in their chains, they scrambled in the mud after the
garbage, twisting and shrieking, caught and restricted in their chains,
scratching, and rolling and fighting, for the least of the tidbits cast to
them by a free man.
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