Nomads of Gor by John Norman Page A

of which are
    indigenous to the drier valleys of the western Cartius. They
    are bitter but edible.
      "Well done!" cried Kamchak as he saw the tospit, unsplit,
    impaled halfway down the shaft of the lance, stopped only by
    my fist and the retaining strap.
    Such a thrust was worth two points for us.
      I heard Elizabeth Cardwell's cry of joy as she leaped into
    the air, clumsy in the furs, clapping her hands. She carried,
    on a strap around her neck, a sack of tospits. I looked at her
    and smiled. Her face was vital and flushed with excitement.
      "Tospit!" called Conrad of the Kassars, the Blood People,
    and the girl hastened to set another fruit on the wand.
    There was a thunder of kaiila paws on the worn turf and
    Conrad, with his red lance, nipped the tospit neatly from the
    tip of the wand, the lance point barely passing into it, he
    having drawn back at the last instant.
      "Well done!" I called to him. My own thrust had been full
    thrust, accurate enough but rather heavily done, in war, such
    a thrust might have lost me the lance, leaving it in the
    _
     
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      body of an enemy. His thrust was clearly, I acknowledged,
      worth three points.
      Kamchak then rode, and he, like Conrad of the Kassars,
      deftly took the fruit from the wand; indeed, his lance enter-
      ing the fruit perhaps a fraction of an inch less than had
      Conrad's. It was, however, also a three-point thrust.
      The warrior who then rode with Conrad thundered down
      the lane in the turf.
      There was a cry of disappointment, as the lance tip
      sheared the fruit, not retaining it, knocking it from the wand.
      It was only a one-point thrust.
      Elizabeth cried out again, with pleasure, for she was of the
      wagon of Kamchak and Tarl Cabot.
      The rider who had made the unsatisfactory thrust suddenly
      whirled the kaiila toward the girl, and she fell to her knees,
      realizing she should not have revealed her pleasure at his
      failure, putting her head to the grass. I tensed, but Kamchak
      laughed, and held me back. The rider's kaiila was now
      rearing over the girl, and he brought the beast to rest. With
      the tip of his lance, stained with the tospit fruit, he cut the
      strap that held the cap on her head, and then brushed the cap
      off; then, delicately, with its tip, he lifted her chin that she
      might look at him.
      "Forgive me, Master," said Elizabeth Cardwell.
      Slave girls, on Gor, address all free men as master,
      though, of course, only one such would be her true master.
      I was pleased with how well, in the past months, Elizabeth
      had done with the language. Of course, Kamchak had rented
      three Turian girls, slaves, to train her; they had done so,
      binding her wrists and leading her about the wagons, teaching
      her the words for things, beating her with switches when she
      made mistakes; Elizabeth had learned quickly. She was an
      intelligent girl.
      It had been hard for Elizabeth Cardwell, particularly the
      first weeks. It is not an easy transition to make, that from a
      bright, lovely young secretary in a pleasant, fluorescently lit,
      air-conditioned office on Madison Avenue in New
      to a slave girl in the wagon of Tuchuk warrior.
      When her interrogation had been completed, and she had
      collapsed on the dais of Kutaituchik, crying out in misery
      "La Kajira. La Kajira!" Kamchak had folded her, still weep-
      ing, clad in the Sirik, in the richness of the pelt of the red
      tart in which she had originally been placed before us.
      As I had followed him from the dais I had seen Kutaituchik,
      the interview ended, absently reaching into the small
      golden box of kanda strings, his eyes slowly beginning to
      close.
      Kamchak, that night, chained Elizabeth Cardwell in his
      wagon, rather than beneath it to the wheel, running a short
      length of chain from a slave ring set in the floor of the
      wagon box to the collar of her Sirik. He had then