Mercenaries of Gor Read Online Free PDF Page B

devastating new weapon, in effect, a field artillery, tubs of burning pitch and flaming naphtha, and siege javelins, and giant boulders, fell in shattering torrents upon the immobilized squares. The shield shed was broken. The missiles of archers rained upon the confused, hapless defenders. Even mobile siege towers, pushed from within by straining tharlarion, pressing their weight against prepared harnesses, trundled toward them, their bulwarks swarming with archers and javelin men. The squares were broken. Then again the ponderous, earthshaking, bellowing, grunting, trampling, tharlarion ground cavalry charged, this time breaking through the walls like dried straw, followed by waves of screaming, heavily armed spearmen. The ranks of the enemy then irremediably broke. The air howled with panic. Rout was upon them. Spears and shields were cast away that men might flee the more rapidly. There was little left to be done. It would be the cavalries which would attend to the fugitives.
    "I had thought rather," I said, "of perhaps joining the wagons for a time."
    "They need drivers," said the fellow. "Can you handle tharlarion?"
    (pg. 33) "I can handle high tharlarion," I said. Long ago I had ridden guard in a caravan of Mintar, a merchant of Ar.
    "I mean the draft fellows," said the driver.
    "I suppose so," I said. It seemed likely to me that I could handle these more docile, sluggish beasts, if I had been able to handle their more agile brothers, the saddle tharlarion.
    "They take a great deal of beating about the head and neck," he said.
    I nodded. That was not so much different from the high tharlarion, either. They are usually controlled by voice commands and the blows of a spear. The tharlarion, incidentally, at least compared to mammals, seems to have a very sluggish nervous system. It seems almost impervious to pain. Most of the larger varieties have two brains, or, perhaps, better a brain and a smaller brain-like organ. The brain, or one brain, is located in the head, and the other brain, or the brain-like organ, is located near the base of the spine.
    I looked down at Feiqa, walking beside the wagon, the rope on her neck. "Tharlarion," I told her, expanding on the driver's remark, "show little susceptibility to pain."
    "Yes, Master," she said.
    "In this," I said, "they closely resemble female slaves."
    "Oh, no Master!" she cried. "No!"
    "No?" I said.
    "No," she said, looking up earnestly, frightened, "we are terribly susceptible to pain, truly!"
    "Doubtless you were as a free woman," I said. "but now you are a slave."
    "I am even more susceptible to pain now," she said, "for now I have felt pain, and know what it is like, and now I have a slave girl's total vulnerability and helplessness, and know that anything can be done to me! Too, my entire body has become a thousand times more responsive and sensitive a thousand times more meaningful and alive, since I have been locked in the collar. I assure you Master, I am a thousand times more susceptible to pain now than ever I was before!"
    I smiled. Such transformations were common in the female slave. Just as their sensitivities to pleasure and feeling, sexual (pg. 34) and otherwise, physical and psychological, conscious and subconscious, were greatly increased and intensified by being imbonded, so too, concomitantly, naturally, were their sensitivities to pain. The same changes that so considerably increased their capacities in certain directions increased them also in others, and put them ever so more helplessly, and hopelessly, at the mercy of their masters.
    "Ah," she said, chagrined, putting down her lovely head, "Master teases his girl."
    "Perhaps," I said.
    She kept her head down. She blushed. She looked lovely, the light, locked, steel collar on her throat.
    I reached down and lifted her up, by the arms, swinging her up, and back, into the wagon. She would be weary from her walking. "Thank you, Master," she said, much pleased. She then knelt behind us, rather close to