I watched the dancing girl of Port Kar writhing on the square of sand between the tables, under the whips of masters, in a Paga tavern of Port Kar.

"Your paga," said the nude slave girl, who served me, her wrists chained. "It is warmed as you wished."

I took it from her, not even glancing upon her, and drained the goblet.

She knelt beside the low table, at which I sat cross-legged.

"More," I said, handing her back the goblet, again not deigning to even glance upon her.

"Yes, Master," she said, rising, taking the goblet.

I liked paga warm. One felt it so much the sooner.

It is called the Whip Dance, the dance the girl upon the sand danced.

She wore a delicate vest and belt of chains and jewels, with shimmering metal droplets attached. And she wore ankle rings, and linked slave bracelets, again with shimmering droplets pendant upon them; and a locked collar, matching.

She danced under ships' lanterns, hanging from the ceiling of the paga tavern, it located near the wharves bounding the great a.r.s.enal.

I heard the snapping of the whip, her cries.

The dancing girls of Port Kar are said to be the best of all Gor. They are sought eagerly in the many cities of the planet. They are slave to the core, vicious, treacherous, cunning, seductive, sensuous, dangerous, desirable, excruciatingly desireable.

"Your paga," said the girl, who served me.

I took it from her, again not seeing her. "Go, Slave," said I.

"Yes, Master," she said and, with a rustle of the chain, left my side.

I drank more paga.

So I had come to Port Kar.

Four days ago, in the afternoon, after two days in the marshes, my party had reached the ca.n.a.ls of the city.

We had come to one of the ca.n.a.ls bordering on the delta.

We had seen that the ca.n.a.l was guarded by heavy metal gates, of strong bars, half submerged in the water.

Telima had looked at the gates, frightened. "When I escapted from Port Kar," she said, "there were no such gates."

"Could you have escaped then," asked I, "as you did, had there been such gates?"

"No," she whispered, frightened, "I could not have."

The gates had closed behind us.

Our girls, our slaves, wept at the poles, guiding the raft into the ca.n.a.l.

As we pa.s.sed beneath windows lining the ca.n.a.ls men had, upon occasion, leaned out, calling us prices for them.

I did not blame them. They were beautiful. And each poled well, as could only one from the marshes themselves. We might well have congratulated ourselves on our catch of rence girls.

Midice, Thura, Ula, Telima.

We no longer kept them in a throat coffle. But we had, about the throat of each, wrapped, five times, a length of binding fiber, and knotted it, that this, serving as collar, might mark them as slave. Aside from this they were not, at the time we had entered the city, secured, save that a long length of binding fiber, knotted about the right ankle of each, tied them together. Telima had been branded long ago, but the thighs of Midice, Thura and Ula had never yet felt the iron.

I watched the girl from Port Kar dance.

We could, tomorrow, brand the three girls, and purchase collars.

There was something of an uproar as a large, fierce-looking fellow, narrow-eyed, ugly, missing an ear, followd by some twenty of thirty sailors, burst into the tavern.

"Paga! Paga!" they cried, throwing over some tables they wished, driving men from them, who had sat there, then righting the tables and sitting about them, pounding on them and shouting.

Girls ran to serve them paga.

"It is Surbus," said a man near me, to another.

The fierce fellow, bearded, narrow-eyed, missing an ear, who seemed to be the leader of these men, seized one of the paga girls, twisting her arm, dragging her toward one of the alcoves. I thought it was the girl who had served me, but I was not certain.

Another girl ran to him, bearing a cup of paga. He took the cup in one hand, threw it down his throat, and carried the girl he had seized, screaming, into one of the alcoves. The girl had stopped dancing the Whip Dance, and cowered on the sand. Other men, of those with Surbus, seized what paga girls they could, and what vessels of the beverage, and draged their prizes toward teh alcoves, sometimes driving out those who occupied them. Most, however, remained at the tables, pounding on them, demanding drink.

I had heard the name of Surbus. It was well known among the pirate captains of Port Kar, scourge of gleaming Tha.s.sa.

I threw down another burning swallow of the paga.

He was pirate indeed, and slaver, and murderer and thief, a cruel and worthless man, abominable, truly of Port Kar. I felt little but disgust.

And then I reminded myself of my own ign.o.bility, my own cruelties and my own 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 b.l.o.o.d.y, "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.

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 Tha.s.sa, Tarn of the Sea, is a vast, disjointed ma.s.s of holdings, each almost a fortress, piled almost upon one another, divided and crossed by hundreds of ca.n.a.ls. 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 ca.n.a.ls 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 a.r.s.enal, building and renting s.h.i.tps 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 ca.n.a.ls and perimeters of the city, has much power, that of the threat and the knife. They are recognized by the Thiefs Scar, which they wear as a caste mark, a tiny, three-p.r.o.nged brand burned into the face in back of and below the eye, over the right cheekbone.

One might think that Port Kar, divided as she is, a city in which are raised the thrones of anarchy, would fall easy prey to either the imperialisms or the calculated retaliations of the other cities, but it is not true. When threatened from the outside the men of Port Kar have, desperately and with the viciousness of cornered urts, well defended themselves. Further, of course, it is next to impossible to bring large bodies of armed men through the delta of the Vosk, or, under the conditions of the marsh, to supply them or maintain them in a protracted siege.

The delta itself is Port Kar's strongest wall.

The nearest solid land, other than occasional bars in the marshes, to Port Kar lies to her north, some one hundred pa.s.sangs distant. This area, I supposed, might theoretically be used as a staging area, for the storing of supplies and the embarkation of an attacking force on barges, but the military prospects of such a venture were decidedly not promising. It lay hundreds of pasangs from the nearest Gorean city other, of course, than Port Kar. It was open territory. It was subject to attack by forces beached to the west from the tarn fleets of Port Kar, through the marsh itself by the barges of Port Kar, or from the east or north, depending on hte marches following the disembarkation of Port Kar forces.

Further, it was open to attach from the air by means of the cavalries of merceneary tarnsmen of Port Kar, of which she has several. I knew one of these mercenary captains, Ha-Kee, murderer, once of Ar, whom I had met in Turia, in the house of Saphrar, a merchant. Ha-Keel alone commanded a thousand men, tarnsmen all. And even if an attacking force could be brought into the marsh, it was not clear that it would, days later, make its way to the walls of Port Kar.

It might be destroyed in the marshes. And if it should come to the walls, there was little likelihood of its being effective. The supply lines of such a force, given the barges of Port Kar and her tarn cavalries, might be easily cut.

I took another drink of paga.

The men who had come to the tavern were roistering but order, to some extent, had been restored. Two of the ship's lanterns had been broken. There was gla.s.s, and spilled paga about, and two broken tables. But teh musicians were again playing and again, in the square of sand, the girl performed, through not now the Whip Dance. Nude slave girls, wrists chained, hurried about. The Proprietor, sweating, ap.r.o.ned, was tipping yet another great bottle of paga in its sling, filling cups, that they might be borne to the drinkers. There was an occasional scream from the alcoves, bringing laughter from the tables. I heard the flash of a whip somewhere, and the cries of a girl.

I wondered if, now that the ca.n.a.ls were barred, slaves escaped from Port Kar.

The nearest solid land was about one hundred pasangs to the north, but it was open land, and, there, on the edges of the delta, there were log outposts of Port Kar, where slave hunters and trained sleen, together, patrolled the marshes' edges.

The vicious, siz-legged sleen, large-eyed, sinuous, mammalian but resermbling a furred, serpentine lizard, was a reliable, indefatigable hunter. He could follow a scent days old with ease, and then, perhaps hundreds of pasangs, and days, later, be unleashed for the sport of the hunters, to tear his victim to pieces.

I expected there was not likely to be escape for slaves to the north.

That left the delta, with its interminable marshes, and the thirst, and the tharlarion.

Hunting sleen are trained to scent out and destroy escaped slaves.

Their senses are unusually keen.

Tuchuks, in the sounth, as I recalled, had also used sleen to hunt slaves, and, of course, to protect their herds.

I was becoming drunk, my thoughts less connected.

The sea, I thought, the sea.

Could not Port Kar be attacked from the sea?

The music of the musicians began to beat in my blood, reeling there.

I looked at the girls serving paga.

"More paga!" I cried, and anoher wench ran lightly to serve me.

But only Cos and Tyros had fleets to match those of Port Kar.

There were the northern islands, of course, and they were numerous, but small, extending in an archipelago like a scimitar northeastward from Cos, which lay some four hundred pasangs west of Port Kar. But these islands were not united, and, indeed, the government of them was usualy no more than a village council.

They usually possessed no vessels more noteworthy than clinker-built skiffs and coasters.

The girl in teh sand, the dancing girl, was now performing the Belt Dance. I had seen it done once before, in Ar, in the house of Cernus, a slaver.

Only Cos and Tyros had fleets to match those of Port Kar. And they, almost of tradition, did not care to engage their fleets with hers. Doubtless all sides, including Port Kar, regarded the risks as too great; doubtless all sides, including Port Kar, were content with the stable, often profitable, situation of constant but small-scale warfare, interspersed with some trading and smuggling, which had for so long characterized their relations. Raids of one upon the other, involving a few dozen ships, were not infrequent, whether on the shipping of Port Kar, or beaching on Cos or Tyros, but major actions, those which might involve the hundreds of galleys possessed by these redoubtable maritime powers, the two island Ubarates and Port Kar, had taken place in the more than a centrury.

No, I said to myself, Port Kar is safe from the sea.

And then I laughed, for I was considering how Port Kar might fall, and yet she was my own, my own city.

"More paga!" I cried.

Tarnsmen, aflight, might annoy her with arrows or fire, but it did not seem they could seriously harm her, not unless they come in thousands upon thousands, and not even Ar, Glorious Ar, possessed tarn cavalries so great. And how, even then, could Port Kar fall, for she was a ma.s.s of holdings, each individually defensible, room to room, each separated from the others by the ca.n.a.ls which, in their hundreds, crossed and divided the city?

No, I said to myself, Port Kar could be held a hundred years.

And even should she, somehow, fall, her men need only take ship, and then, when it pleased them, return, ordering slaves again to build in the delta a city called Port Kar.

On Gor, I told myself, and perhaps on all worlds, there will always be a Port Kar.

I found the girl on the sand seductive, and beautiful. The girls of Port Kar, I told myself are the best on Gor.

Tarnsmen, I thought, tarnsmen.