Free Raiders of Gor by John Norman Page B

with ankles
    in delicious proximity and wrists lifted again together back to back above her
    head, palms out. But this time I expected that her ankles would not be as though
    chained, her wrists as though braceleted; rather would they be truely chained
    and braceleted; she would wear the linked ankle rings, the three-linked slave
    bracelets of a Gorean master; and I did not think she would then conclude her
    dance by spitting upon him and whirling away. Rather might she almost die with
    terror hoping that he would find her pleasing.
    “There!” cried Henrak, with the white scarf tied about his body, pointing toward
    us. “Get the girl! I want her!”
    Telima looked at him with horror, shaking her head.
    A warrior leapt toward us.
    We were buffeted apart by some five or six rencers. Telima, buffeted, turned and
    began to run toward the darkness. I stumbled and fell, and regained my feet. I
    looked wildly about. I had lost her. Then something, probably a club or the butt
    of a spear, struck the side of my head and I fell to the matting of rence that
    was the island surface. I rose to my hands and knees, and shook my head. There
    was blood on its side. A warrior of Port Kar, in the light of a torch held by a
    slave, was binding a girl near me. It was not Telima. More men rean past. Then a
    child. Then another warrior of Port Kar, followed by his slave with the torch. A
    man to my right was suddenly caught in a capture net, crying out, and two
    warriors were on him, pounding him, beginning to bind him.
    I ran in the direction Telima had taken.
    I heard a scream.
    Suddenly in the darkness before me there reared up a warrior of Port Kar. He
    struck down at me with the double-edged sword. Had he known I was a warrior he
    might not have used his blade improperly. I caught his wrist, breaking it. He
    howled in pain. I seized up his sword. Another man thrust at me with a spear. I
    took it in my left hand and jerked him forward, at the same time moving my blade
    in a swift, easy arc, transversely and slightly upward, towards him. It passed
    through his throat, returning me to the on-guard position. He fell to the
    matting, his helmet rolling, lost in his own blood. It is an elementary stroke,
    one if the first taught a warrior.
    The slave who held his torch looked at me, and stepped back away.
    Suddenly I was aware of a net in the air. I crouched slashing upward in a wide
    circle and caught it before it could fall about me. I heard a man curse. Then he
    was running on me, knife high. My blade had partially cut the net but was
    tangled in it. I caught his wrist with my left hand and, with the right, thrust
    my blade, tangled in the net, through his body. A spear flashed towards me but
    tangled in the net in which my sword had been enmeshed. I immediately abandoned
    the weapon. Before the man who had thrust with the spear had his sword half from
    its sheath I was on him. I broke his neck.
    I turned and again ran toward the darkness, toward which I had seen Telima run,
    from whence I had heard a girl’s scream.
    “Free me!” I heard.
    In the darkness I found a girl, stripped, bound hand and foot.
    “Free me!” she cried. “Free me!”
    I lifted her to a sitting position. It was not Telima. I threw her weeping back
    to the rence.
    Then, some twenty yards to my left, and ahead of me, I saw a single torch.
    I ran toward it.
    It was Telima!
    She had been thrown to her stomach. Already, with a binding fiber, her wrists
    had been tied tightly behind her. A warrior now crouched at her ankles. With a
    few swift motions he fastened them together.
    I seized him and spun him about, breaking in his face with a blow. Spitting
    teeth, his face a mask of blood, he tried to draw his sword. I lifted him over
    my head and threw him screaming into the jaws of the tharlarion churning the
    marsh at the edge of the island. They had feasted much that night, and would
    more.
    The slave who had carried his torch ran back toward the light, crying