“Take him to an alcove,” I said. “Bind and gag him. Then, too, retire to your alcoves.”

“Very well,” they said, retiring, taking with them the stumbling, miserable fellow in the ruby necklace.

The seraglio, then, seemed empty, silent. We heard the torches crackle. I looked again to Lana. She shrank back. She, the seraglio mistress, unprotected, bound, gagged, helpless, was alone with us.

“I left her for you,” said Hassan.

Swiftly I untied her hands and then retied them, so that they were above her head and behind it, fastened at the sides of the pillar. I then, lifting her, lowered her gently to the tiles. She squirmed, helplessly. By the ankles I pulled her as far from the pillar as the bonds on her wrists, fashioned by Hassan from strips from her white, removed clothing, would permit. She lifted one knee. I thrust her knees apart. She lifted her head, trying to put her gagged mouth against me. I saw pain in her eyes. I pulled down the gag, for a moment, and let her free herself of the wadding. “I love you, Master,” she whispered. “I love you!” I kissed her, thrust back the wadding, and regagged her.

I rose to my feet.

“You have ruined her, I judge,” said Hassan, “as an effective mistress of the seraglio.”

The girl was trying to put her leg against me, reaching for me. I took her ankle, and crouching, kissed it, on the top, and then pressed my lips to the bottom of her foot, near the instep, then beneath and behind the shin, then again, twice, near the bottom of the foot, at the instep.

I judged her responses, the movements of her eyes. “Yes,” I said, “I expect so.”

Lana lifted her body to me, helplessly. “I will guarantee, my dear,” I said to her, “that, hereafter, you will be given to men.” I then, with her virgin blood, on her belly, traced the Tahari slave mark. Seeing this, the mark of a free man’s satisfaction with her, I had little doubt that Tarna would dismiss her from the seraglio, sending her in chains to the lower levels, where, with low-order slave girls, she might be used to serve the lusts of her raiders.

Lana’s eyes shone with pleasure. I had found her acceptable. I had, furthermore, indicated this upon her flesh. She would now be done with the seraglio. She would now have to do with free men, with true men, she the slave. She lay bound and gagged, proudly. She stretched her body, as she could, luxuriantly, reveling in the sensation in her body and the feel of the coolness of the tiles upon her flesh.

I noted that Hassan, following my example, had also indicated his pleasure on the flesh of the other girl.

“We must leave soon,” he said.

“There are two guards outside the outer door,” I said. “They will expect me, soon, to bring you through.”

“Surely,” said he, “I should be better dressed for riding in the night.”

“One of the guards outside the outer door,” I said, “may perhaps be persuaded to loan you garments, weapons and accouterments.”

“He would be a good fellow, indeed,” said Hassan.

“They seemed to me good fellows,” I said.

13 An Acouaintance is Renewed

My left foot broke through the crust of salt. “Kill us! Kill us!” I heard a man cry. I heard the stroke of the lash behind me, and another cry, long miserable.

My left leg, to the thigh, slipped into the brittle layers of crust. I fell, unable to break my fall because of the manacles confining my wrists at my waist, fastened to the loop of chain, burning in the sun, about my waist. I could not see, for the slave hood. My back, and body, burned. Our feet, to the knees, were wrapped in leather, but, in many places, in making our way across the crusts, the weight of our bodies forced us deeper than this into the crusts. The salt, working its way into the leather wrappings, found its way to the feet, I could feel blood inside the wrappings. Some men, though I did not know how many, had gone lame. They were no longer with the chain. They had been left behind, their throats cut, lying in the crusts. The chain on the collar at my throat jerked. I lay still for a precious moment in the burning crusts. The lash struck me. The chain jerked again and I struggled to my feet. Again the lash fell. I stumbled on. The path is broken by a kaiila, whose long, haired legs, with broad pads, break through, and lift themselves free, of the crusts, “I did not think a woman could hold you,” had said the man.

Scarcely had Hassan and I, clad in the garments of guards, astride kaiila taken from the stables of Tarna’s kasbah, emerged from the fortress’s gate than, on the path to Red Rock, clouds of riders had swept before us. Wheeling our kaiila we had sought escape, only to discover we were surrounded. In the bright moonlight of Gor’s three moons we turned. On every side were riders, many with crossbows.

“We have been waiting for you,” said one of the riders. “Will it be necessary to kill the kaiila?” The riders were veiled in red.

“No,” had said Hassan. He had disarmed himself, and dismounted. I followed his example.

Ropes were put on our throat; our hands were tied behind our backs.

On foot, among our captors, tethered by the neck to saddle rings, bound, we trudged to the larger of the pair of kasbahs, that other than Tarna’s. The journey was not long, only some two pasangs.

At the foot of the great gate we stopped. The walls were more than seventy feet high. The battlements, square and looming, of which there were seventeen, assuming general symmetry and counting the two flanking the central gate, soared to ninety feet. The front wall was some four hundred feet in length; the side walls were some four hundred and fifty feet in length. The walls in such a kasbah are several feet thick, formed of stones and mud brick; the walls in this kasbah, as in most, too, were covered with a sheen of plaster, whitish pink, which, in the years of exposure to the heat and sun, as is common, had flaked abundantly.

“You are Tarl Cabot,” said the leader of the men who had captured us, indicating me.

I shrugged. Hassan looked at me.

“And you,” said the man, indicating Hassan, “are Hassan, the bandit.”

“It is possible,” admitted Hassan.

“It is as naked prisoners that you will enter this kasbah,” said the man.

We were stripped by the scimitar.

Naked, bound, standing in the sand, tethered, surrounded by kaiila, and riders, we looked up at the lofty walls of flaking plaster, the battlements flanking the great gate. The moonlight reflected from the walls of pinkish, flaking plaster.

Two of the kaiila snorted, pawing the sand.

The great gate, on its heavy hinges, opening in the middle, slowly swung back.

We faced the opening.

“You two have been troublesome,” said the rider. “You will be troublesome no more.”

We could see the whitish courtyard, its sand, beyond the gate, lamps set in walls.

“Whose kasbah is this?” I asked.

“It can be only,” said Hassan, “the kasbah of the Guard of the Dunes.”

“That of the Salt Ubar?” I asked.

“That,” agreed Hassan. I had heard of the Salt Ubar, or the Guard of the Dunes.

The location of his kasbah is secret. Probably, other than his own men, only some few hundred know of it, primarily merchants high in the salt trade, and few of them would know its exact location. Whereas salt may be obtained from sea water and by burning seaweed, as is sometimes done in Torvaldsland, and there are various districts on Gor where salt, solid or in solution, may be obtained, by far the most extensive and richest of known Gor’s salt deposits are to be found concentrated in the Tahari. Tahari salt accounts, in its varieties, I would suspect, for some twenty percent of the salt and salt-related products, such as medicines and antiseptics, preservatives, cleansers, bleaches, bottle glass, which contains soda ash, taken from salt, and tanning chemicals, used on known Gor. Salt is a trading commodity par excellence. There are areas on Gor where salt serves as a currency, being weighed and exchanged much as precious metals. The major protection and control of the Tahari salt, of course, lies in its remoteness, the salt districts, of which there are several, being scattered and isolated in the midst of the dune country, in the long caravan journeys required, and the difficulty or impossibility of obtaining it without knowing the trails, the ways of the desert. A lesser protection and control of the salt, though a not unformidable one, lies in the policing of the desert by the Salt Ubar, or the Guard of the Dunes. The support of the kasbah of the Salt Ubar comes from fees supplied by high salt merchants, the measure of which fees, of course, they include in their wholesale pricings to lesser distributors. The function of the kasbah of the Salt Ubar, thus, officially, is to administer and control the salt districts, on behalf of the Tahari salt merchants, primarily by regulating access to the districts, checking the papers and credentials of merchants, inspecting caravans, keeping records of the commerce, etc. For example, caravans between Red Rock, and certain other oases, and the salt districts, will travel under an escort of the Guard of the Dunes. Many salt caravans, incidentally, travel only between the districts and the local oases, while others travel between the local oases and the distant points, often culminating with Kasra or Tor. Some caravans, of course, journey through from the distant points to the salt districts, accepting the danger and inconvenience of trekking the dune country, but thereby avoiding the higher charges of picking up salt from the storehouses in the local oases. Even these caravans, of course, once in the dune country are accompanied by the men of the Guard of the Dunes.