At last I stood before the towering gate of black logs, bound with its wide bands of brass.The fair lay behind me and the Sardar before.My garments and my shield bore no insignia, for my city had been destroyed.I wore my helmet.None would know who entered the Sardar.
At the gate I was met by one of the Caste of Initiates, a dour, thin-lipped, drawn man woth deep sunken eyes, clad in the pure white robes of his caste.
'Do you wish to speak to Priest-Kings?' he asked.
'Yes,' I said.
'Do you know what you do?'
'Yes,' I said.
The Initiate and I gazed evenly at one another, and then he stepped aside, as he must have done many times.I would not be the first, of course, to enter the Sardar.Many men and sometimes women had entered these mountains but it is not known what they found.Sometimes these individuals are young idealists, rebels and champions of lost causes, who wish to protest to Priest-Kings; sometimes they are individuals who are old or diseased and are tired of life and wish to die; sometimes they are piteous or cunning or frightened wretches who think to find the secret of immortality in those barren crags; and sometimes they are outlaws fleeing from Gor's harsh justice, hoping to find at least brief sanctuary in the cruel, mysterious domain of Priest-Kings, a country into which they may be assured no mortal magistrate or vengeful band of human warriors will penetrate.I suppose the Initiate might account me noe of the latter, for my habiliments bore no insignia.
He turned away from me and went to a small pedestal at one side.On the pedestal there was a silver bowl, filled with water, a vial of oil and a towel.He dipped his fingers in the bowl, poured a bit of oil on his hands, dipped his fingers again and then wiped his hands dry.
On each side of the huge gate there stood a great windlass and chain, and to each windlass a gang of blinded slaves was manacled.
The Initiate folded the towel carefully and replaced it on the pedestal.
'Let the gate be opened,' he said.
The slaves obediently pressed their weight against the timber spokes of the two windlasses and they creaked and the chains tightened.Their naked feet slipped in the dirt and they pressed ever more tightly against the heavy, obdurate bars. Now their bodies humped with pain, clenching themselves against the spokes.Their blind eyes were fixed on nothing. The blood vessels in their necks and legs and arms began to distend until I feared they might burst open through the tortured flesh; the agonised miscles of their straining knotted bodies, like swollen leather, seemed to fill with pain as if pain were a fluid; their flesh seemed to fuse with the wood of the bars; the backs of their garments discoloured with a scarlet sweat.Men had broken their own bones on the timber spokes of the Sardar windlasses.
At last there was a great creak and the vast portal parted a hand's breadth and then the width of a shoulder and the width of a man's body.
'It is enough,' I said.
I entered immediately.
As I entered I heard the mournful tolling of the huge, hollow metal bar which stands some way from the gate.I had heard the tolling before, and knew that it signified that yet another mortal had entered the Sardar.It was a depressing sound, and not made less so by my realisation that in this case it was I who had entered the mountains.As I listened it occurred to me that the purpose of the bar might not be simply to inform the men of the fair that the Sardar had been entered but to inform the Priest-Kings as well.
I looked behind myself in time to see the great gate close. It shut without a sound.
The journey to the Hall of Priest-Kings was not as difficult as I had anticipated.At places there were well-worn paths, at others even stairs had been cut in the sides of mountains, stairs worn smooth in the millenia by the passage of countless feet.
Here and there bones littered the path, human bones.Whether these were the remains of men who had starved or frozen in the barren Sardar, or had been destroyed by Priest-Kings, I did not know.Upon occasion some message would be found scratched in the cliffs along the path.Some of these were obscene, cursing the Priest-Kings; others were paeans in their praise; some were cheerful, if in a rather pessimistic way.One I remember was: 'Eat, drink and be happy.The rest is nothing.' Others were rather simple, and sometimes sad, such as 'No food,' 'I'm cold,' 'I'm afraid.' One such read, 'The mountains are empty.Rena I love you.' I wondered who had written it, and when.The inscription was worn.It had been scratched out in the old Gorean script.It had weathered for perhaps better than a thousand years.But I knew that the mountains were not empty, for I had evidence of Priest-Kings.I continued my journey.
I encountered no animals, nor any growing thing, nothing save the endless black rocks, the black cliffs, and the path cut before me in the dark stone.Gradually the air grew more chill and wisps of snow blew about me; frost began to appear on the steps and I trudged past crevices filled with ice, deposits which had perhaps lain as they were without melting for hundreds of years.I wrapped my cloak more firmly about myself and using my spear as a staff I forced my way upward.
Some four days into the mountains I heard for the first time in my journey the sound of a thing other than the wind, the sighing of snow and the groaning of ice; it was the sound of a living thing; the sound of a mountain larl.
The larl is a predator, clawed and fanged, quite large, often standing seven feet at the shoulder.I think it would be fair to say that it is substantially feline; at any rate its grace and sinuous power remind me of the smaller but similarly fearsome jungle cats of my old world.
The resemblance is, I suppose, due to the mechanics of convergent evolution, both animals having been shaped by the exigencies of the chase, the stealth of the approach and the sudden charge, and by the requirement of the swift and devastating kill.If there is an optimum configuration for a land predator, I suppose on my old world the palm must go to the Bengal tiger; but on Gor the prize belongs indisputably to the mountain larl; and I cannot but believe that the structural similarities between the two animals, though of different worlds, are more than a matter of accident.
The larl's head is broad, sometimes more than two feet across, and shaped roughly like a triangle, giving its skull something of the cast of a viper's save that of course it is furred and the pupils of the eyes like the cat's and unlike the viper's, can range from knifelike slits in the broad daylight to dark, inquisitive moons in the night.
The pelt of the larl is normally a tawny red or a sable black.The black larl, which is predominantly nocturnal, is maned, both male and female.The red larl, which hunts whenever hungry, regardless of the hour, and is the more common variety, possesses no mane.Females of both varieties tend generally to be slightly smaller than the males, but are quite as aggressive and sometimes even more dangerous, particularly in the late fall and winter of the year when they are likely to be hunting for their cubs.I had once killed a male red larl in the Voltai Range within pasangs of the city of Ar.
Now hearing the growl of such a beast I threw back my cloak, lifted my shield and held my spear ready.I was puzzled that I might encounter a larl in the Sardar.How could it have entered the mountains?Perhaps it was native.But on what could it live among these barren crags?For I had seen nothing on which it might prey, unless one might count the men who had entered the mountains, but their bones, scattered, white and frozen, were unsplintered and unfurrowed; they showed no evidence of having suffered the molestation of a larl's gnawing jaws.I then understood that the larl I had heard must be a larl of Priest-Kings, for no animal and no man enters or exists in the Sardar without the consent of Priest-Kings and if it was fed it must be at the hand of Priest-Kings or their servants.