"John Norman - Gor 03 - Priest - King of Gor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Norman John)

cities pass freely to and fro at the fair, but that each Gorean, whether male or female, is
expected to see the Sardar Mountains, in honour of the Priest-Kings, at least once in his life,
prior to his twenty-fifth year. Accordingly the pirates and outlaws who beset the trade routes to
ambush and attack the caravans on the way to the fair, if successful, often have more than
inanimate metals and cloths to reward their vicious labours.

This pilgrimage to the Sardar, enjoyed by the Priest-Kings according to the Caste of the
Initiates, undoubtedly plays its role in the distribution of beauty among the hostile cities of
Gor. Whereas the males who accompany a caravan are often killed in its defence or driven off,
this fate, fortunate or not, is seldom that of the caravan's women. It will be their sad lot to
be stripped and fitted with the collars and chains of slave girls and forced to follow the wagons
on foot to the fair, or if the caravan's tharlarions have been killed or driven off, they will
carry its goods on their backs. Thus one practical effect of the edict of the Priest-Kings is
that each Gorean girl must, at least once in her life, leave her walls and take the very serious
risk of becoming a slave girl, perhaps the prize of a pirate or outlaw.

The expeditions sent out from the cities are of course extremely well guarded, but pirates and
outlaws too can band together in large numbers and sometimes, even more dangerously, one city's
warriors, in force, will prey upon another city's caravans. This, incidentally, is one of the
more frequent causes of war among these cities. The fact that warriors of one city sometimes wear
the insignia of cities hostile to their own when they make these attacks further compounds the
suspicions and internecine strife which afflicts the Gorean cities.

This chain of reflections was occasioned in my mind by sight of some men of Port Kar, a savage,
coastal city on the Tamber Gulf, who were displaying a sullen chain of twenty freshly branded
girls, many of them beautiful. They were from the island city of Cos and had undoubtedly been
captured at sea, their vessel burned and sunk. Their considerable charms were fully revealed to
the eye of appraising buyers who passed down the line. The girls were chained throat to throat,
their wrists locked behind the small of their backs with slave bracelets, and the knelt in the
customary position of Pleasure Slaves. When a possible buyer would stop in front of one, one of
the bearded scoundrels from Port Kar would poke her with a slave whip and she would lift her head
and numbly repeat the ritual phrase of the inspected slave girl, Buy Me, Master. They had thought
to come to the Sardar as free women, discharging their obligation to the Priest-Kings. They would
leave as slave girls. I turned away.

My business was with the Priest-Kings of Gor.

Indeed, I had come to the Sardar to encounter the fabled Priest-Kings, whose incomparable power so
inextricably influences the destinies of the cities and men of the Counter-Earth.

It is said that the Priest-Kings know whatever transpires on their world and that the mere lifting
of their hand can summon all the powers of the universe. I myself had seen the power of Priest-
Kings and knew that such beings existed. I myself had traveled in a ship of the Priest-Kings
which had twice carried me to this world; I had seen their power so subtly exercised as to alter
the movements of a compass needle, so grossly demonstrated as to destroy a city, leaving behind
not even the stones of what had once been a dwelling place of men.

It is said that neither the physical intricacies of the cosmos nor the emotions of human beings
are beyond the scope of their power, that the feelings of men and the motions of atoms and stars