Read The Super Barbarians for Free Online Page B

given Marijane to understand I did?
    It was never advertised, but everyone understood thatthere was one single reason for taking up a chance to go to Qallavarra. That was to get our own back on the Vorra.
    You didn’t have to say it aloud. You just realized that the people in the Acre weren’t there for the fun of it, or to make their fortunes before going back to Earth. They spent their time figuring out ways of getting at the conquerors and bringing them down. How well they’d succeeded already I’d seen for myself.—Pwill of the House of Pwill, Himself, leaving Olafsson’s office in a towering rage because, presumably, one of his demands had been refused.
    How could a handful of Earthmen exploit the weakness of the Vorra? I hadn’t seen it at the time, but once I could reflect about it I realized I’d just had firsthand experience of one possible technique: Kramer’s.
    I weighed the can of “love potion” in the folded cloak.
    Not to put a fine point on it, Shavarri was ignorant. She couldn’t read and write her own language, let alone an Earthly one. She was probably superstitious too. The Vorra went into battle with chants, charms and rituals; there were a dozen conflicting cults that claimed the loyalty of the tenants on the Pwill estate, as I myself had seen. Swallo, the gatekeeper, belonged to one of them and claimed it had save his life during the Battle of Fourth Orbit.
    The high-ranking nobles pooh-poohed such beliefs. Nonetheless, they might well be a trifle hesitant about dismissing them altogether. And their wives, far less educated and far less exposed to the outside world, had certainly heard of the indefinable regard their menfolk had for Earth and things Earthly—especially in the House of Pwill, whose head was so convinced that Earth held some secret he might use himself.
    I almost fell off the seat in my excitement. Fortunately,no one took notice of my start. Why, there were hundreds of ways you could exploit the superstitious attitude of a noble ladyl And indirectly that would work on her husband and his kinfolk; junior wives might not have much official status, but they undoubtedly had some influence.
    And here I was taking a ‘love potion” to Shavarri! For whom did she intend it? For some lover around the estate, a space crew officer perhaps? Or for Pwill himself? That wasn’t inconceivable; an ambitious younger wife, jealous of her longer-established sister-wives, might well try using a potion to make her husband lavish more attention on her.
    The more I thought of it, the more likely that seemed. It was quite a hobby of the junior wives to have lovers; only Llaq herself was able to travel about with her husband and have much to do with affairs of the world, whereas the rest, except when they were permitted to visit other houses, which was not often, generally remained at home in the seraglio and quarreled with each other to pass the time.
    No, it wasn’t likely that Shavarri would have to employ a drug to persuade a man she fancied to become her lover. She was youngest but one and by Vorrish standards one of the more attractive of the Pwill under-ladies. (In my Earthly view she was far and away the most attractive, but Vorrish tastes preferred the moon-faced type also favored by many harem cultures on Earth in the past; for the Vorra, Shavarri was too thin-featured, although shapely otherwise.)
    My wandering mind passed from Shavarri to Marijane, and a new peculiarity struck me. Marijane—and her brother and Gustav, for that matter—had been vehement in their disgust at people like myself in cushy jobs with the houses, calling us serfs and insulting us. How had that been back home? I frowned as I tried to recollect. Put it this way: Iwas a normal man as far as I knew—certainly normal enough to have had my imagination set working by Marijane after not seeing an Earthly woman since reaching Qallavarra. So presumably I’d not been completely celibate during the five years I’d