“Yeah, yeah, old man,” she had said, taking herself airs given that, in his state, her rudeness would be at best ignored and at worst retaliated in the most inept of ways. “The great treasure of the great warrior of Ar. I say, what’ll they think of next?”

“It is true!” he insisted, slobbering on the dirty brown vest that hanged haphazardly over his shoulders and chest. “It is the treasure of all treasures. Ubars crave it. The Priest Kings send agents to deny it. It is the treasure of all kings. The answer to all questions. The beacon of power in its purest.” She had to give him that–the old man was strangely articulate, even with his ramblings. She walked away from the conversation amused. “The mountains!” he had shouted in her tracks, “the secret mountains!”

She should have continued to ignore the encounter, but as these things tend to go, after the opportunity to satiate her curiosity had passed, what remained was a gnawing thirst to know more–to discount that silly story. And then it grew to suspicion, to wonder, and then greed and obsession. Soon, she found herself all twisted up. Ar was her next destination.

She scoured the great library, consulted scribes, spent weeks and then months burying herself in scrolls until her eyes were strained and her mind was lulled with exhaustion. She was on the verge of giving up one morning, as she sipped tea in a small outdoor veranda, until an odd tune whistled by a peasant boy caught her attention.

Wings rustle in the sky

The day is warm and sunny

Yet the world will nevermore

be filled with bread and honey.

The dark men swooped and took

the only thing worth taking

and so this gloomy summer

shall be our last unmaking.

She rushed toward the boy. “What is that tune? What a dreary song for children to sing.”

“It’s just a rhyme,” he told her, frightened of the older (in his eyes, at least) woman’s interest. “All the boys sing it. Don’t mean nothing to me.” He shrugged and ran off into an alley.

The gloomy summer, she pondered. Folk songs usually were based in reality. A gloomy summer when something was taken from Ar. She rushed again to the library; again the search was not fruitful. And then, it came upon her. A war, a siege. Centuries ago, Ar had been sacked by flying tarnsmen. It was a massacre, a tragedy, but this stain on the city’s history was solely spoken of by new generations. It was as if the scribes had purposefully concealed a vital dark spot in Ar’s history. But why? Was there perhaps more to it than denial of tragedy and humiliation?

And who were these dark men? And the secret mountains? And perhaps, just perhaps, could it have been possible that the old man behind the tavern was telling the truth? That perhaps, just perhaps, a great treasure was indeed taken from Ar hundreds of years ago and hidden somewhere no one knew of–somewhere obfuscated by myth and darkness? And was it possible that perhaps, just perhaps, she could put her skills to use to search for this treasure? Her stomach flipped with delirious excitement. She was seduced by the promise of power, of the possibility, for the first time in her life, to be utterly and completely secure–to be the equal, no, the superior of a man–to be the ruler of the entire world? Gor at her feet!

But if the treasure was real, then it would be foolish to assume that no one else was searching for it either. She had to act fast. She had to get to the secret mountains, to the wings that rustled in the air. It was a place that was only rumored to exist, a place she had never been to in all her life, nor could easily enter unless hooded and collared. Treve. She had to get to Treve.

Men, what the hell is your problem? Seriously, explain it to me, please, because I’m starting to believe that your gender holds an inherent psychological condition that renders you innately incapable or at least unwilling to make a woman happy, at best, or desirous to make her miserable at worst. And it doesn’t matter who you men are. It doesn’t matter if you look like Josh Hartnett and make $200k a year or like Peter Griffith and live in your parents’ basement (and I’ve dated both, so I would know) you are both exactly the same.

Why would you tell a girl you love her, appease every one of her concerns, come at her with such trite declarations as “Why can’t you just be happy?” or “Why can’t you just trust me?” and as soon as she gets slightly happy, and as soon as she does come to slightly trust you, you turn around and say something along the lines of “Never mind.”

STOP it with that shit. Because it isn’t the first time it’s happened to me, and I’m angered to say that it won’t be the last. The biggest curse my gender has to deal with is that we depend on you for the satisfaction of our sexual want. Lesbians found a loop around the system. I envy them for that. But here I am, sitting here and thinking, cocks cocks cocks.

And the most annoying thing is, that when you do break a woman’s heart, you tend to replace her with just another version of the same thing. What you are in pursuit of is the illusion of novelty, and that fundamentally prevents you from developing anything real or worthwhile with anyone. And it’s exhausting. It’s exhausting as hell to go through this, over and over, ad nauseum, the same phases, the same words, the same eventual, sour conclusion. Cut that shit out, already. Stop telling me what you think I want to hear, because I don’t want to hear it if you don’t mean that. And if it is something as important, as deal-changing, and as eternal as an “I love you,” then make sure that you really do.

Make sure that what you mean to say isn’t “I want you” or “I want love” or “I don’t want to be alone.” And in the end, if you’ve really made the fatal error and completely obliterated the worldview of your romantic partner, don’t shrug your shoulders and say, with an oh-so-precious tear running down your cheek, “I was trying my best.”

And for the record, your admission of guilt doesn’t make it any easier for us. If anything, having you say, “I know I’m the asshole in this,” in that diplomatic, infuriating tone of yours, like you’re holding a business negotiation, only makes it hurt that much more for us. Don’t you realize that we want to Satanize you? Don’t you realize that we want to call you a little man? Don’t you realize that we want to beat you over the head with a baseball bat and that just isn’t feasible if you gently knock yourself out before we’ve even had the opportunity to swing?

And in the end, no matter how much we believed we loved you, what we really loved was the idea of you. See, the idea of you we loved was the idea you presented. You were the man we thought would never betray us, would always protect us. You were the man we pointed out to ourselves whenever our friends complained about their relationships. You were the one we bragged about, “Wow, look how lucky I got. He’s not like the rest. This one’s different. This one’s special.” But by the mere virtue of becoming one of them, you sterile inconsiderate jackass, you’ve broken only our idealism but not our hearts.

And if two weeks was all that it took me to get over you, then I was probably as callous about this thing as you were. But when you said, “What we had was love. What else could it have been?” all I wanted was to tell you everything I’ve ever thought about you.

Everything you ever were, was a lie. You are a coward. You are spineless, asexual, boring. You are Wonderbread. I never found your stories interesting. You were never a good lay and your physical sexual appeal was wasted, you impotent milktoast. You little man. Our relationship reminded you of a Tolstoy short story? How delicious. I hope you fall off the edge of the Earth. I hope you marry a fat girl that thinks she’s funny. I hope you cry. You fucking fuck. You didn’t deserve me. I was the best thing that happened to you in your 27 years on this planet and you should be grateful as all fuck to have dipped your prick inside of me. You waste. You aberrant. You idiot. Manipulative, self-absorbed, fickle, and stupid. I don’t like that picture. I never loved you or your stupid voice. I hated the way you smelled in the morning. Thank you for your exhalations and your never minds, and you calling it off a week before Valentine’s day. Because that night, I was in bed with someone else. And tonight, I’ll be in bed with him again. And it doesn’t even matter if you know about it, or even if you care. All that matters is that I’ve never given you anything of me that I wanted to keep. So enjoy the experience, Tolstoy fan. Let me be something that happened to you. In the end, I’m the one that got away, and you were the one I really needed to get away from.

“What is this place?” she asked him.

His response was vulgar and crude. He regarded her coldly, with a belligerance she could perceive, though not necessarily understand. But his rudeness was refreshing. He had asked her what a free woman, with no homestone, could possibly hope to accomplish by entering the gates of a foreign city. The question made perfect sense to her.

She had few coin in her pocket when she left Telnus. It was soon forfeited to a traveling troupe of actors, who promised in exchange to escort her to Ar. It was too bad that on the way the group was ransacked by outlaws–she wondered what became of them as she stole away from the commotion, dragging behind her only a trunk which she supposed held food and provisions, but was later discovered to contain only stage costumes.

The man laughed at that.

“It’s rough being a woman, especially free,” she remarked. “If only I were one of those invisible boys.”

It struck a chord. Invisibility, that is. The man, the tanner as she by then discovered, had read her mind. It was strange that she could instinctively trust him. She liked the way he seemed to scold the world just by looking at it; something about his crass and profane dialect calmed her. Men like him were separate from society, as she had been herself. It only seemed natural that he should trust her.

“Take me as your apprentice!” she had demanded of him. “You will have free labor, and I will have your word to conceal me! And a place to sleep, and a plate to eat from.”

He was hesitant; but he was also paranoid. This was a winning competition: for the price of two coppers and some checking up on the Administrator’s business, he would take her on. In the meantime, he permitted her only the luxury of his name. The tanner was not a bright man, however, for when she asked him what his name was, he refused to supply it.

She found out later it was Esau from a slave of the city after a fitting description of the man was supplied. Esau–and a story was concocted with it.

The trunk of costumes served its due. She bound her breasts to flatness with rep cloth and garbed herself in ostentatious clothing and cloaks–heavy garments for the weather, but necessary to divert the attention from her meager body. She sliced off her black hair with a sharp dagger. To her lips she affixed a makeshift mustache, created from her own locks.

Armed with her disguise, she ventured forward. There was much to be done.

In the center square of Telnus, a small round fountain jutted out from the unformit of the cobble. She liked to sit there, calm and observant, surrendered to the sound of the soothing water. Two men, a slaver and a physician, stood before her, gripped in an argument over a slave. A slave, she thought wistfully; wasn’t there rule about that? Men are not to fight over beasts of burden, so to speak. And yet they did. That a slave was meaningless was only a lie men told women. She had never really been fooled.

Only some minutes earlier, she had spoken to that slaver about Verity, who had assumed submitting to Yuliya was some step toward her destiny. He had revealed that once he was both, Verity’s master and her companion. She couldn’t quite comprehend why it made her angry. Regardless, the slaver, Jaxon, to whom surely slaves must have become disposable by now, still seemed to care greatly. Slaves as mere objects? Mere beasts of burden? Mere sluts? They could shout that lie from the rooftops, but it would never become true.

Slaves were always of use to her. Frequently she had felt closer to them in spirit than she did to the haughty, boring Free to whose ranks she supposedly belonged. But perhaps it was because she once had been a slave herself, though she did not stay a slave. She had known the jealousies of a Free Woman, but even then, even with him, she couldn’t really be that which Gorean men desired most.

She remembered one particular time when, in the breathless heat of her small baker’s hut, marinated in the fowl smell of a burning hearth, she served Kain his evening meal and rebuked him on all the money he was spending. Even then, when things hadn’t become their worst, she could already feel she was losing him. It was only that afternoon, after all, that she hired a slave to follow him and watch him in the tavern. She had loathed herself then.

She remembered briefly that moment, when she grabbed his half-finished plate out from under him, demanding, “Are you finished?”

“No,” he had said firmly and pressed her hard against the side of the hearth. She felt his strength and his warmth and his cruelty, but even then, if she had to point to a time, then would be the last time she could remember when he still loved her.

When they made love, she couldn’t even bring herself to be angry at him. She surrendered fully, despite a gnawing knowledge that perhaps he had wanted her to resist. It was the chase that attracted him to her first. It was the danger and uncertainty. What had they become now? A couple. And it had stopped being love then, because at the core, they were simply two people with nothing but loneliness in common.

The last time she saw him, he was unconscious on a rug, empty glass bottles of sul paga clinking together around his supine form as they rolled across the floor.  The ship was moving to the North, to Torvaldsland, but it had made another stop in Kar. She packed a small trunk, left him only a small amount of the money they had brought together, and got off onto the docks.

The notions of what may have gone through his head when he woke up to find her missing still haunted her. It had perhaps been unnecessarily cruel. How would she feel, after all, if he had done the same to her? But in the end, it was the fleeting nature of her presence in his life that had seemed to attract him so much. If anything, this was just an ironic way to end things.

So what would happen, she thought to herself, if someday down the line, she was to see Kain again? What if the horrible had occured and she belonged to someone else then? Perhaps Kain would find himself in the same situation Jaxon did with Verity. Perhaps her anger arose out of that, because it reminded her of her own lover. And at the core of everything between her and Kain was a vindictive loathing. She couldn’t forgive him for letting her go.

She straightened out her dirty brown dress and rebraided her oily, dirty hair. Her stomach grumbled, but she was used to hunger. Perhaps later that day she would cajole a slave girl to steal some bread for her, perhaps a sliver of meat too if she was lucky. But really, she needed to start thinking about what she would really do. She had skills of self sufficiency buried deep down somewhere, flattened perhaps by years of baggage–of slavery, of companionship. Had she really become like them, those fragile women who deluded themselves of their freedom? For freedom was the ability to survive independently, even if that notion did take a heaping portion of suspended disbelief.

In the middle of the square, she stopped in her tracks. A tall, slim woman stood alone some paces away. She seemed composed and still, yet magnetic, enigmatic. Her dress draped carefully the outline of the figure, all graceful lines and angles, like modern architecture.

It was Verity, she would recognize her even now, after what seemed like years. She stepped closer and remarked on the woman’s scarf–for she had, in fact, been wearing the same one.

They reconnected, even joked, as they exchanged their own stories of the past. Last Yuliya had seen Verity, the woman was still a blacksmith in the trading post of Parsit’s, which had now been deserted. After a shipwreck, Verity had lost sensation in her hands and, having been deprived of the most important tools in her caste work, now relied on singing to support a livelihood. Yuliya’s story, or at least as she told it, was less tragic. Her good for nothing sleen of a Companion drank and gambled away their baking business in Laura, and after an exhaustive travel to Torvaldsland and more disappointment when they arrived, she had chosen to leave.

And now here she was, destitute in Telnus without a single talent to her name–none that mattered anyway. “Forgery and espionage,” she had said quietly to Verity when they were alone, “just doesn’t pay what it used to.” Her old friend was coy at first, but soon, they reached a certain understanding, as if the memories of their past flooded back.

Where was it that she met Verity, the woman she would come to befriend and admire, who had at one time been her closest companion in the world? It must have been at a time when both women were in trouble. They worked together in the Umbra, following honestly Aashe’s convoluted ploys. Once, they had stolen the medical records of the Ubara of Rovere, in an effort to break its alliance with Fina. That had dire consequences in the end. Another time, they were commissioned to create a poison–they did not know at the time that Aashe required it for the planned kidnapping of Tharna’s Tatrix. Later, in their small sewing shop whose basement doubled as a gambling tavern and a forgery office, the heads of major Gorean cities–ranging from Kar to Treve, bid on the Tatrix, and by proxy, control of her silver mines. Once, they had been instruments in intrigues and wars, in epic circumstances. And now they stood in the square of Telnus, one a singer and another practically a she-urt. Yuliya, at least, felt nostalgic and depressed.

They pilfered Ka-la-na from the empty tavern and shared it beneath the Telnus docks. The city was alive with secrets, they hypothesized as they took large gulps of the bittersweet spirit. They could sing together, they could satirize whom it suited, they could involve themselves on “the inside.” They could leverage power. As they spoke and planned, Yuliya had felt almost hopeful again, almost like she could return something that seemed unreturnable–the past.

She looked out into the distance again, and the way the setting ruddy sun bled on the jolting indentations of the blue water. She wondered briefly where most of the Umbra had dispersed to. Were they, too, bakers and merchants and craftsmen now? And where was Aashe? Whatever happened to that old louse?

The far view, flayed by the streaks of the sun on the rippled water and the edge of the heavy wooden vessel tumbling toward the horizon, dissolved in a dizzying wash of light and distance. Yuliya Miles stood there dumbfounded, silent, and still, fingers clutched angrily into the heavy ruffles of her plain brown dress. An onlooker, some sailor or a passing she-urt, might have remarked on how her tiny figure on the dock that morning, arched slightly ahead toward the sea, would make a compelling puzzle piece to be found in the corner of a great cityscape painting. If they were poetic or insightful, which as a rule she-urts and sailors were not, they might even have thought she was about to jump.

She had been traveling to Ar, or at least that was the plan. Ar seemed far enough, loud enough, alive enough to distract her from him. He was just a bother anyway, she told herself in recollection of that sight of him, splayed out on the dirty wooden floor of their shack, like a hide rug with the head and paws still attached. He seemed empty to her then, and a little sad.

But mostly, she was angry. The bottles clinked on the ground in their sad percussion. It wasn’t really love, it couldn’t have been. Love was something wrapped up in a little box, on a shelf somewhere that she couldn’t reach because she was so short. Love was otherwordly and surreal, and sometimes hard, but what they had–it couldn’t have been love. She would have fought for love, if it were that, but it wasn’t. If anything, they were just two people with something in common.

It was only the memory, the rosy retrospection that haunted her. Not the last embers of something that was once on fire, but some vestigial habit. Her thoughts throbbed like phantom limbs. He was an annoying tune she couldn’t get out of her head. And so, she was running to Ar to forget.

Damned be that little cabin boy who had told her the ship was stopping in the Isle of Cos for two ahn. She wandered too far, fond as she was suddenly of fresh air and still ground after days on the tumultuous sea, until she found herself lost in a network of building sites. Telnus could commiserate with her, she had thought wistfully. It resembled then what she imagined her insides would be if she were to lay them out flat on some table.

By the time she reached that slab of concrete overhanging the water, the boat she had taken was dissolving in the distance. Her few belongings–dresses, veils, a book of old baking recipes, one of his shirts that she could not forgive herself for taking, and a set of lockpicks she had not used in a very long time, were all gone with it. Her coin purse and the dress on her back was all that remained, though the pittance of both combined could not even afford her passage on another ship.

The citizens of Telnus shuffled by. Sailors prepared for a journey. The bare feet of rushing slaves thudded on the cobblestone. The city was alive, like a breathing beast with its intricate anatomy, its grotesque organs and instinctive impulses. She felt like a tumor, like an acne spot. Ar was unreachable, and her heart was stomping around in her chest. She turned from the sea, for it was in the North that she left him, and it couldn’t have been real love.