A Gorean Storean Ch. 01

That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In Gorean

Sometimes she can't help feeling like she's throwing good love after bad; the way she's sitting here with her knees in the dirt, watching him so intently, listening to the soft words he's murmuring to the giant bird as he slides off the harness and grooms the feathers- she's thinking, I might as well be invisible- she's thinking I don't care I don't care I don't care... but she does. He reminds her somehow of a tear in the fabric of reality- she pictures this as a vertical oil stain, a viscous kind of anti-window, as thin and infinite as a mirror. Anything that touches it vanishes without a trace; it barely ripples the surface. He seems to draw her like the gravitational pull created by the abyss of a dead star, as cold and remote and utterly indifferent to the debris that cannot escape its orbit. Like me.

She knows from the past that he can speak English- This is the last time I speak to you in your Barbarian tongue, girl. You learn Gorean or you don't speak at all.

But she has a feeling that even if he were willing to speak her language, he wouldn't be the chatty type; if saved words were silver coins, he'd be rich, she thinks. She's only seen the money he keeps in the leather pouch down by his side once or twice. He has a few silver coins, a lot of smaller copper ones, and she saw the light hit something that looked like gold, but still, she doesn't think he has a lot of money. It doesn't seem to bother him.

Ma, Ja Vana'she

Harta!

Sula

Kajira

She hears these words, mostly. Well, the first phrase is one she says, not he, but it is the only Gorean he actually taught her. He pulled her to her feet by the hair, speaking in that language whose beauty she noticed even in the violence of that day from which she kept expecting to awaken, she was so sure it was a dream, and even when he slapped her, it took her a minute to realize that he expected a response- pointing at her, he repeated slowly- Ma, Vana'she.

"Ma, Vana'she," she was finally able to whisper, and she blushed when he laughed and whispered, below his breath so as not to seem to be speaking to her, but in English, "Barbarian." And then he said something in Gorean, and laughed again.

She didn't know what he said, although now she has a pretty good idea. Now she just says "Ma, Vana'she" to everything. He communicates in gestures, clever ones really, almost like sign language- he'll point to the ground, then spread his first two fingers, and she'll kneel with her thighs apart and say "ma, Vana'she." She can say it well enough now that he doesn't laugh- much.

She recognizes Kajira, because that's what he calls her. She doesn't know if it's a name. He pointed to himself and said, "Lo Vol. Rarius. Citetatavis Thentis." Then he pointed to her and his blue eyes lit up as he smiled- "La?" And so she started to introduce herself, but he interrupted her- "Kajira." She repeated "La... Kajira?" Hesitatingly, skeptically, having no idea what she was saying, but he laughed aloud- he doesn't laugh often, or smile, but when he does, he is curiously uninhibited, his flashes of emotion as bright and sudden as the crackle and glare of lightening.

She's pretty sure that "sula" means "get on your back and spread your legs," it's what he says when he pushes her to the ground, and Harta seems to mean, "Keep doing that, but faster." No need to explain the context that made those meanings clear.

In daylight, she can't keep her eyes off him; at night, after he has rolled off her and gone to sleep, she cries. She weeps for the briefness of the time in which his strong arms clasped her. She weeps for the tease of it- already they are divided by a barrier far more insurmountable than that of her inability to speak his language. She wishes she had the strength of character to resist her feelings, to force herself to attempt to resist him at least. It's not so much her fear (and she is afraid of him) that causes her to lose every one of these internal battles- she recognizes pure, animal lust when she feels it. She longs for him every second. She is furious with him. Not because he captured her and is holding her prisoner, not because he treats her with the casual, contemptuous affection that a man might his dog- no, it's this barrier, this wall that she cannot penetrate, this strange way in which she cannot touch him. This is why her knowledge that she loves him weighs on her like slow torure.

He had heard of such things, of course- everyone knew such things had been known to happen, although not often- and so he felt a bizarre sense of familiarity even in a situation he had never seriously imagined occurring in his own life, which had been long and outré, although he would have described it as a rather prosaic one, at least for a man who wore the scarlet. He had the strange sense of having wandered into an off-color joke that seems unbelievably funny half-way down the second bota of paga.

So when he saw the girl crouching, utterly still, at the spring in the little ka-la-na grove down the hill from where he had landed and whither he had come to fill his waterskins, frozen in her attitude of drinking, the water escaping her motionless hands curved to form a cup beneath eyes now dilated with fear, he laughed aloud. He had seen them, of course, these girls that were supposed to come from another world. Tarl of Bristol, one of those men whom one called friend and sword-brother and got drunk with every night and whose slave-girls you fucked while you were visiting his city, and whom on leaving you almost forgot about, had even taught him a little of their tongue. But to come upon one like this, in the wild, still wearing her outlandish garments, inexplicably wandering without a word of Gorean or, very likely, any idea where she was, seemed so like the premise of a dirty joke that he laughed, and laughed the louder when she jumped like a startled tabuk at the sound of his voice, and cried out in her strange tongue.

She leapt to her feet to flee, and Vol of Thentis sighed. Neither his pride as a warrior, nor the strange and stony compassion that underlay his nature, could allow her to escape; she would have no idea of his world's dangers, nor any defense against them, and for all that Tarl had said about the barbarian girls trying to imitate men in their dress until they were taught better, he thought her small bottom moved sweetly, cupped in the tight seat of her strange blue split-legged garment, and she had pretty hair. Vol of Thentis was a practical man, and so he admitted to himself that she would be a trouble and a hindrance, but he was also possessed of the soaring passion and fatalism of a Tarnsman, and- "There never was a girl who wasn't," he told himself wryly, and by the time he concluded this train of thought with an image of the little barbarian squirming and whimpering beneath him, pressed to his pleasure furs, instead of squirming and dying in the grip of a carnivorous leech-plant or beneath the jaws of a sleen or a tharlarion, he was moving, stalking quickly and lightly with the deceptive speed of a hunter.

He was weary, and ached from a long day in the saddle. Since he did not relish a long chase, he drew from his belt as he ran a leather cord and twisted it, without looking, in a matter of seconds, into a capture loop. In but a moment, he was within range to fling it, and the startled girl was jerked to a stop, her arms bound to her sides. With his left hand he searched his belt for a length of capture fiber or a pair of bracelets, swearing softly in disgust when he realized that chain luck, in the most bizarre manifestation he had ever experienced it, had let him down in that department, and he came up with only a short length of leather, never his preference. With his right he held the capture cord, allowing her to tighten the loop by her struggles and then taking up the slack to draw her to him.

Taken off her balance, she stumbled into him, hard, and he laughed and took her trembling body in his arms and stood her on her feet, brushing her dark wavy hair, tangled and disarrayed from her wandering, out of her face. His laughter faded; it was the most genuinely frightened face he had ever seen, wet with tears and bright of eye. She stared him straight in the face, and trembled like a sapling in a heavy storm. He had carried off free women, stripping them of their rich veils and throwing their fine robes to the winds even as he left their cities below, that his enemies might know the fate of their noble kinswomen; they had often wept, and lamented loudly at their fates- he had taken slaves in fights and raids, had taken many women by right of conquest, and they had trembled as girls do when faced with battle-lust, but this girl, he saw, was as purely afraid as a child faced with a cradle-story monster come to life, and he wiped her eyes like a little girl's. She jumped again and cried out miserably when he abruptly flicked the capture loop from about her arms, and he found himself stroking her hair, trying to soothe her with his right hand while he gathered her little wrists before her with his left, that he might bind her at his leisure.

There's no need to bind her wrists behind her, he decides; when she's stripped he'll find some fiber in the saddle-bags and bind her across the saddle when he's ready to fly again. Until his life took this strange turn, he hadn't been planning on making camp here, but now a part of him is thinking, why not, it will be dark soon enough and the morning is plenty of time, Thunder Bolt can fly off and hunt as soon tor-tu-gor is low in the sky, he'll like that. The men of Thentis pride themselves on their understanding of the great saddle-birds, bred in their mountains, and their connection with their noble mounts. And anyway, there's this girl. He has much to do before nightfall: there is the firewood to be gathered and the fire built; there is Thunder Bolt's grooming and his own; there is dinner to be hunted and cooked, and there is still the matter of the waterskins, from which errand he was so unexpectedly distracted. But he feels himself moving inexorably like a man bewitched, and suddenly his knife is in his hand, and the only sound that exists in the world is the somehow ominous purr of tearing fabric, and the only thought in his mind is his increasingly urgent desire to behold his little captive. It takes him perhaps two ehn to cut her out of her clothes, and it feels like as many years.

Vol of Thentis feels a little guilty about the way he's treating this girl, actually- his friends, his sword-brothers and drinking companions, would kill themselves laughing if they knew he hasn't even whipped her yet. But she scarcely has a mouthful of gorean, and he knows she thinks he speaks and understands her language much better than is in fact the case. What do you want? He thinks, I'm not a Tarsk-rutting slaver. He scowls. Of course he knows how to handle slaves. But this situation is not something his experience has prepared him to deal with, at least as regards women. He is of Thentis, and so he thinks, almost unconsciously, of Tarns- if you catch a wild Tarn, you can't just go at him with your tarn-goad. He'll either lose his spirit and become apathetic, or turn vicious- you have to develop a rapport with a wild thing before you can train it. The rules that apply to domesticated girls, he feels, will be of little use here, with this creature that starts and trembles like a wild thing new to captivity.

Now he's leaning over the fire, blowing up a cloud of smoke to hide his smile. The fire is hot, and he has to keep a close watch over the spit where his kill roasts slowly, but that's not the real reason he stripped to the waist- he's seen the way she looks at him, when he bathes in the river, how she drinks in his heavily scarred and muscled torso, and now she's at it again, staring so openly that one of those pretentious Ko-Ro-Bans would beat her 'til she bled.

He's taken more women than he can count in his arms, and he knows that look in her eyes, that look that betrays her increasing fascination, her confusion as her fear softens into passion.

It is precious to him, that look. He finds himself flaring up in anger at the thought of another man possessing her, and at these times he shakes himself back to reality to find his sword half unsheathed.

"You make my blood run hot, kajira," he remarks casually, laughing inwardly at the unshed tears that sparkle in her eyes, her body inclining towards him even as she trembles in fear. "You make my blade thirst." This double entendre can be understood in the vulgar sense in English, but in Gorean the meaning, while deeply sexual, has an added dimension. In a sense, albeit a thoroughly Gorean and barbaric sense, he has paid to her the highest compliment a Warrior might to a woman. He has not only said "I would kill for you," but "I long to kill for you."

Had she spoken Gorean, or understood even the most essential thrust of the language, he would never have said such a thing to a slave girl. But to this Barbarian, whom he should be raping every night instead of feeding by hand and bathing as if he himself were her silk-slave and she a fine Lady, he can unburden his soul. Here, in the wild, with a wild girl who mispronounces the words "Yes, master," when he describes her in situations even a paga slut would blush at, he is finally free to bare his heart.