Outcast and outlaw. I am unto myself. No Homestone, no family. Rootless like a reed: pliable, swaying in the breeze, bowing beneath the wind. Yet defying it all the while. Springing back upright when the gust has blown itself out – as it always will. I am Manifest Irony. My fortune is misfortune; woe is my joy. Pleasure, pain.
Even before, it was ever thus. This is how it was and is. I am of the Sardar, . . .
Among the initiates who serve as the sentinels of the towering Sardar gate, a high initiate named Abat, is chief. Too, he heads the council of initiates charged with overseeing the ritual festivities, ceremonies, and sacrifices at the Sardar Fairs. Unnoticed from the periphery, long before the first tent is pitched on the street of coins and well after the last wagon of the last caravan rumbles, rattles and bumps westward, Abat keeps stoic watch.
En' Karas ago, surveying the rubble and trash aftermath as he did at the close of every fair, Abat, glanced out to the perimeter of the fairgrounds, toward the Girl Catch field, and glimpsed the slightest movement from the corner of his eye, at the far end, just below the horizon of the low stockade. Approaching the retaining wall for a closer look, he discovered a squalid boy of about 3 or 4, or maybe 5, apparently lost, abandoned, or strayed. He was hunched down in one of the girl pits, gathering up castoff binding fibers in silent fascination. The waif froze as Abat called to him, blinking and gawking at the bald man in white, quietly ignoring his demand to come out; holding perfectly still, even at the initiate's ominous threat of incurring wrath of the Priest-Kings' if the wretch continued to defy one of their anointed. Across the Girl Catch field, they regarded one another at an impasse.
Now, as an initiate, Abat had made a life of spurning Gor's more profane pursuits, and he would not deign to step over the low wall and on to the field himself. Instead, he retrieved a discarded hock of roast tarsk, all but putrid from the sun, and lured the hungry child out with it. This is how I came to be amidst the initiates. Or so I'm told.
As an acolyte, I thrived with Abat among the blessed caste. Of course he fed me a far more palatable fare than rotten tarsk flesh (in fact, living with the initiates, I ate no meat at all), and all the meals were lavish. My mind's belly too, he filled with delectable fodder: most of it esoteric learning such as “Old Gorean;” though he also cultivated in me an aptitude in letters and logics, magics and maths. Ravenously, I devoured the religious texts and pored through the sacred scrolls and tomes, and I savored the most complex calculations and sums.
Surely I must have been born of high caste, Abat surmised, to have been equipped with such an eager mind and keen hunger for the Second Knowledge. Regardless of my parentage, he told himself and me, it must have been a destiny ordained by the Priest-Kings, that brought me to the Sardar and to the initiates. A malleable, personal gift from the Priest-Kings to Abat, their own high initiate. Ironically and horrifically, he would eventually find that he was mistaken. Much to his chagrin, and to my abject shame.
By the Initiates I was raised, and I flouted them. In caste, I went from highest to none at all. I fell from blessed to cursed. My candle was snuffed. And my life begins.
I exchanged my sullied, bloodied white robes for the garb of an outlaw, and I ventured forth from the Sardar with a prayer ring hanging from a thong tied about my neck. A 26in gladius and a 15in sleen knife are wound up in the tatterd old blanket slung down across my back from my lft shoulder to my rt hip. This is how it will be.