“I see,” said Ellen, skeptically.
“To be sure,” said Laura, “if a tarnsman did settle for you, I do not think that afterwards, when he had you squirming naked in his ropes, bound hand and foot, he would be at all disappointed with the nature of his catch.”
“Do tarnsmen exist?” asked Ellen. “Really?”
“To be sure,” said Laura, “you are only a slave. And yet, what is the first thing they do with their exalted, aristocratic, noble, precious, prestigious free woman? They brand her, put her in a collar, and make her a slave, too!”
“You are teasing me,” said Ellen. “Tarnsmen do not really exist.”
“If a tarnstrike should be upon us,” said Laura, “and you cannot get below, just throw yourself to your belly on the roof. That makes it hard to get you, hard for the tarn, hard for the net, hard for the capture loop.”
I shall certainly keep that in mind,” smiled Ellen.
“They have broken through!” cried the girl on the height of a nearby rack, she who had originally called their attention to the agitation in the distance. Ellen looked up at her, wildly. The girl’s hair streamed behind her, the wind whipping her gown back against her body. She clung to the rack, fiercely.
“They will have the wind behind them!” said Laura. “The defenders must fly against the wind. They may be easily eluded, and then they must turn to pursue. They will have lost the tempo of the passage. Intruders may be through and beyond the city in a matter of Ehn!”
“I want to see!” said Ellen.
In the distance one could hear the ringing of a great metal bar, struck repeatedly.
“Get below!” called Laura.
“It is locked!” cried a girl, tugging at the ring that might otherwise have lifted and opened the hatchlike portal that led to the interior of the cylinder.
Another girl joined her, trying to lift the ring.
“There are prize slaves below, and riches,” said Laura. “They do not want to risk them! Stay down, everyone! Stay down!”
Ellen, standing among the flapping clothes, amongst the lines, between racks, shaded her eyes, straining to see into the distance. She could see, in the distance, what appeared to be a flock of birds. It seemed, again, that the perspective was oddly awry. They should be no more than a hundred yards or so away, and yet, at the same time, it seemed they were scarcely within the distant walls. Other birds seemed to rise from her side of the wall, lifting momentarily against the darkness of the wall and then suddenly appearing in the sky, hastening specks, the hills and fields beyond.
“They are coming this way!” called Nelsa, pointing, she, too, on a rack, but lower than the other girl.
“Get down!” cried Laura.
The first girl, she who had first alerted the slaves to the phenomenon in the distance, climbed down from the rack, and crouched near it, amidst the flapping clothes. Nelsa, in a moment, had joined her.
Most of the girls were crouched down. Some lay on their stomachs under the racks, their hands covering their heads.
“I can’t see,” said Ellen, brushing aside clothes, which had blown before her. She fought the laundry shaking and snapping in the wind about her.
“Get down!” called Laura.
“I want to see!” said Ellen.
Then suddenly she flung her hands before her face and screamed, and the world seemed madness about her. There was a wild cry, piercing, at hand, not more than fifteen feet above her, surely the loudest and most terrifying sound she had ever heard, as of some living, immense, monstrous creature, and she was in shadow and then not in shadow, in a shadow that moved and leapt and was shattered with bursts of sunlight, and then darkness, and clothing was torn from the lines by the blasts of wind from the smitings of mighty wings, and one of the racks, seized in monstrous talons, broke into a thousand pieces, and, lifted, fell in a shower of sticks, raining down to the roof. Ellen could not believe what she saw. Above her, now darting away, was a gigantic bird, an enormous bird, a saddlebird, its wings with a span of thirty or more feet, and, seemingly tiny on its back, was a helmeted man!
Ellen had heard an angry cry from the man above her, and words in Gorean she did not recognize, words that had certainly never been taught to her, a slave girl. She had no doubt that the man was cursing, and richly, the failure of his strike.
Then they were away.
To be sure, how could he have hoped to make a catch when the girls were hidden by the laundry, protected by the lines, could take refuge under the racks, and such?
Ellen was now on her knees amidst the lines, her hands lifted, as though she might fend away blows.
Nelsa sped past her, laughing, and clambered to the height of the nearest undamaged rack. She went to its very height, and stood there, balanced, outlined against the sky, her hair shaken in the wind, her gown whipping about her body.
“Clumsy oaf!” she screamed after the retreating rider. “Who taught you your work? Go home and play with vulos! You have the skill of a tharlarion!”
“Come down!” called Laura.
“Down with Treve!” cried Nelsa, shaking her fist after the rider in the distance. “May her walls be razed and her wealth plundered. May her women be put in collars! May they, and her other slaves, be herded away! May her towers be burned and salt cast upon their ashes!”
The approach of the second tarn, soaring, borne on the wind, its wings still, was silent.
Nelsa, of course, did not see it, as she was facing away from it, crying out, shaking her fist at the retreating figure of the other rider, now muchly in the distance.
It was, accordingly, a simple thing, to drop the capture loop about her standing body.
She must, suddenly, her fist still in the air, angry, shouting, have become aware of it, light and soft as a whisper, dropping about her. Then the tarn was past her and the resistance of her own body to the loop caused it to tighten about her. It took her beautifully, and skillfully, at the waist. It might have snared even a man, so neatly and quickly it was slipped on its quarry, before he could thrust it from his straight, muscular, linear body, but, positioned as it was on Nelsa, a woman, nicely centered, between the flare of her hips and the swelling of her bosom, she could not even have begun to hope to elude its grasp, nor could any beautifully bodied female, no more than Ellen, for similar reasons, could slip the iron belt from her body, whose outline was visible, even now, beneath her gown. In this sense, some Goreans speculate that the bodies of women were designed for bonds. And, perhaps in some minor, contributory evolutionary sense, in addition to more obvious biological considerations, this is true, given selections and such, women with bodies unable to elude such constraints being more susceptible to capture, mating and mastering. Certainly the females of many animal species, and even of many primate species, do not have such hip structure, such fullness of bosom, and such. Regardless of the interest or value of such speculations, the truth of which would in any event be veiled in the mysteries and darkness of the past, the fact of the matter was obvious, the fact of the congeniality of such bodies to the convenience of binding and tethering, as obvious as the perfection of the bond on Nelsa, who, clutching at the air, kicking, frantic, screaming and crying out in terror, was now being drawn rapidly away from the roof, swinging, dangling, wildly, twenty feet below a speeding tarn, between the towers, hundreds of feet above the streets of the city.
“It is the strategy of the second strike,” said Laura. “The first apparently bungles his strike and then, silently, the derisive, or unwary, quarry off guard, revealing herself, thinking herself safe, the cohort approaches, and makes the actual play for the game. Nelsa, it seems, is not as clever, or wise, as she thought.”