Not only does the flesh of the bask and the milk of its cows furnish the Wagon Peoples with food and drink, but its hides cover the domelike wagons in which they dwell; its tanned and sewn skins cover their bodies; the leather of its hump is used for their shields; its sinews forms their thread; its bones and horns are split and tooled into implements of a hundred sorts, from awls, punches and spoons to drinking flagons and weapon tips; its hoofs are used for glues; its oils are used to grease their bodies against the cold. Even the dung of the bask finds its uses on the treeless prairies, being dried and used for fuel. The bask is said to be the Mother of the Wagon Peoples, and they reverence it as such. The man who kills one foolishly is strangled in thongs or suffocated in the hide of the animal he slew; if, for any reason, the man should kill a bask cow with unborn young he is staked out, alive, in the path of the herd, and the march of the Wagon Peoples takes its way over him.
Now there seemed to be fewer men and animals rushing past, scattered over the prairie; only the wind remained; and the fires in the distance, and the swelling, nearing roll of dust that drifted into the stained sky. Then I began to feel, through the soles of my sandals, the trembling of the earth. The hair on the back of my neck seemed to leap up and I felt the hair on my forearms stiffen. The earth itself was shaking from the hoofs of the bask herds of the Wagon Peoples.
They were approaching.
Their outriders would soon be in sight.
I hung my helmet over my left shoulder with the sheathed short sword; on my left arm I bore my shield; in my right hand I carried the Gorean war spear.
I began to walk toward the dust in the distance, across the trembling ground.
2. I Make the Acquaintance of the Wagon People
As I walked I asked myself why I did so-why I, Tarl Cabot-once of Earth, later a warrior of the Gorean city of Ko-ro-ba, the Towers of the Morning, had come here. In the long years that had passed since first I had come to the Counter-liarth I had seen many things, and had know loves, and had found adventures and perils and wonders, but I asked myself if anything I had done was as unreasoning, as foolish as this, as strange.
Some years before, perhaps between two and five years before, as the culmination of an intrigue enduring centuries, two men, humans from the walled cities of Gor, had, for the sake of Priest-Kings, undertaken a long, secret journey, car- rying an object to the Wagon Peoples, an object bestowed on them by Priest-Kings, to be given to that people that was, to the Goreans' knowledge, the most free, among the fiercest, among the most isolated on the planet-an object that would be given to them for safekeeping.
The two men who had carried this object, keeping well its secret as demanded by Priest-Kings, had braved many perils and had been as brothers. But later, shortly after the com- pletion of their journey, in a war between their cities, each had in battle slain the other, and thus among men, save perhaps for some among the Wagon Peoples, the secret had been lost. It was only in the Sardar Mountains that I had learned the nature of their mission, and what it was that they had carried. Now I supposed that I alone, of humans on Gor, with the possible exception of some among the Wagon Peoples, knew the nature of the mysterious object which once these two brave men had brought in secrecy to the plains of Turia and, to be truthful, I did not know that even I should I see it-would know it for what I sought.
Could I, Tarl Cabot, a human and mortal, find this object and, as Priest-Kings now wished, return it to the SardarA return it to the hidden courts of Priest-Kings that it might there fulfill its unique and irreplaceable role in the destiny of this barbaric world, Gor, our Counter-Earth?
I did not know.
What is this object?
One might speak of it as many things, the subject of secret, violent intrigues; the source of vast strifes beneath the Sardar, strifes unknown to the men of Gor; the concealed, precious, hidden hope of an incredible and ancient race; a simple germ; a bit of living tissue; the dormant potentiality of a people's rebirth, the seed of godsAan eggAthe last and only egg of Priest-Kings.
But why was it I who came?
Why not Priest-Kings in their ships and power, with their fierce weapons and fantastic devices?
Priest-Kings cannot stand the sun.
They are not as men and men, seeing them, would fear them.Men would not believe they were Priest-Kings. Men con- ceive Priest-Kings as they conceive themselves.
The object the egg might be destroyed before it could be delivered to them.
It might already have been destroyed.
Only that the egg was the egg of Priest-Kings gave me occasion to suspect, to hope, that somehow within that mys- terious, presumably ovoid sphere, if it still entwisted, quiescent but latent, there might be life.
And if I should find the object, why should I not myself destroy it, and destroy thereby the race of Priest-Kings, giving this world to my own kind, to men, to do with as they pleased, unrestricted by the laws and decrees of Priest-Kings that so limited their development, their technology? Once I had spoken to a Priest-King of these things. He had said to me, "Man is a larl to man; if we permitted him, he would be so to Priest-Kings as well."
"But man must be free," I had said.
"Freedom without reason is suicide," had said the Priest King, adding, "Man is not yet rational."
But I would not destroy the egg, not only because it contained life, but because it was important to my friend, whose name was Misk and is elsewhere spoken of; much of the life of that brave creature was devoted to the dream of a new life for Priest-Kings, a new stock, a new beginning; a readiness to relinquish his place in an old world to prepare a mansion for the new; to have and love a child, so to speak, for Misk, who is a Priest-King, neither male nor female, yet can love.
I recalled a windy night in the shadow of the Sardar when we had spoken of strange things, and I had left him and come down the hill, and had asked the leader of those with whom I had traveled the way to the Land of the Wagon Peoples.
I had found it.
The dust rolled nearer, the ground seemed more to move than ever.
I pressed on.
Perhaps if I were successful I might save my race, by preserving the Priest-Kings that might shelter them from the annihilation that might otherwise be achieved if uncontrolled technological development were too soon permitted them; perhaps in time man would grow rational, and reason and love and tolerance would wax in him and he and Priest-Kings might together turn their senses to the stars.
But I knew that more than anything I was doing this for Misk, who was my friend.
The consequences of my act, if I were successful, were too complex and fearful to calculate, the factors involved being so numerous and obscure.
If it turned out badly, what I did, I would have no defense other than that I did what I did for my friend for him and for his brave kind, once hated enemies, whom I had learned to know and respect.
There is no loss of honor in failing to achieve such a task, I told myself. It is worthy of a warrior of the caste of Warriors, a swordsman of the high city of Ko-ro-ba, the Towers of the Morning.
Tal, I might say, in greeting, I am Tart Cabot of Ko-ro-ba; I bring no credentials, no proofs; I come from the Priest-Kings; I would like to have the object which was brought to you from them; they would now like it back; Thank you; farewell.
I laughed.
I would say little or nothing.
The object might not even be with the Wagon Peoples any longer.
And there were four Wagon Peoples, the Paravaci, the Kataii, the Kassars, and the dreaded Tuchuks.
Who knew with which people the object might have been placed?
Perhaps it had been hidden away and forgotten?