Nomads of Gor Read Free Page A

Wagon Peoples.
      The Wagon Peoples, it is said, slay strangers.
          The words for stranger and enemy in Gorean are the
      same.
      I would advance openly.
          If I were found on the plains near the camps or the bosk
      herds I knew I would be scented out and slain by the do-
      mesticated, nocturnal herd sleen, used as shepherds and
      sentinels by the Wagon Peoples, released from their cages
      with the falling of darkness.
          These animals, trained prairie sleen, move rapidly and
      silently, attacking upon no other provocation than trespass on
      what they have decided is their territory. They respond only
      to the voice of their master, and when he is killed pr dies, his
      animals are slain and eaten.
          There would be no question of night spying on the Wagon
      Peoples.
      I knew they spoke a dialect of Gorean, and I hoped I
      would be able to understand them.
          If I could not I must die as befitted a swordsman of
      Ko-ro-ba.
          I hoped that I would be granted death in battle, if death it
      must be. The Wagon Peoples, of all those on Gor that I
      know, are the only ones that have a clan of torturers, trained
      as carefully as scribes or physicians, in the arts of detaining
      life.
          Some of these men have achieved fortune and fame in
      various Gorean cities, for their services to Initiates and
      Ubars, and others with an interest in the arts of detection
      and persuasion. For some reason they have all worn hoods. It
      is said they remove the hood only when the sentence is
      death, so that it is only condemned men who have seen
      whatever it is that lies beneath the hood.
          I was surprised at the distance I had been from the herds,
      for though I had seen the rolling dust clearly, and had felt
      and did feel the shaking of the earth, betraying the passage
      of those monstrous herds, I had not yet come to them.
      But now I could hear, carried on the wind blowing toward
      distant Turia, the bellowing of the basks. The dust was now
      heavy like nightfall in the air. The grass and the earth
      seemed to quake beneath my tread.
          I passed fields that were burning, and burning huts of
      peasants, the smoking shells of Sa-Tarna granaries, the shat-
      tered, slatted coops for vulos, the broken walls of keeps for
      the small, long-haired domestic verr, less belligerent and
      sizeable than the wild verr of the Voltai Ranges.
          Then for the first time, against the horizon, a jagged line,
      humped and rolling like thundering waters, seemed to rise
      alive from the prairie, vast, extensive, a huge arc, churning
      and pounding from one corner of the sky to the other, the
      herds of the Wagon Peoples, encircling, raising dust into the
      sky like fire, like hoofed glaciers of fur and horn moving in
      shaggy floods across the grass, toward me.
           And then I saw the first of the outriders, moving toward
      me, swiftly yet not seeming to hurry. I saw the slender line of
      his light lance against the sky, strapped across his back.
          I could see he carried a small, round, leather shield, glossy,
      black, lacquered; he wore a conical, fur-rimmed iron helmet,
      a net of colored chains depending from the helmet protecting
      his face, leaving only holes for the eyes. He wore a quilted
      jacket and under this a leather jerkin; the jacket was trimmed
      with fur and had a fur collar; his boots were made of hide
      and also trimmed with fur; he had a wide, five-buckled belt. I
      could not see his face because of the net of chain that hung
      before it. I also noted, about his throat, now lowered, there
      was a soft leather wind scarf which might, when the helmet
      veil was lifted be drawn over the mouth and nose, against
      the wind and dust of his ride.                          
          He was very erect in the saddle. His lance