Home Stone of Castus
Welcome to the home of Castus, Rarius of the City of Laura.
Visitors from Gor and those wishing to know more of Gor may rest and enjoy the comforts of my home, safe in the knowledge that I will brook no unruly behaviour. If you seek to disturb my peace or that of my guests then be prepared to answer to my steel.
"Gor," he said, "is the name of this world. In all
the languages of this planet, the word means Home Stone." He paused, noting my lack
of comprehension. "Home Stone," he repeated. "Simply that."
"In peasant villages on this world," he continued, "each hut was originally
built around a flat stone which was placed in the centre of the circular dwelling. It was
carved with the family sign and was called the Home Stone. It was, so to speak, a symbol
of sovereignty, or territory, and each peasant, in his own hut, was a sovereign."
"Where a man sets his Home Stone, he claims, by law, that land
for himself. Good land is protected only by the swords of the strongest owners in the
vicinity."
"Swords?" I asked.
"Yes," said my father, as if there was nothing incredible in this admission. He
smiled. "You have much to learn of Gor," he said. "Yet there is a hierarchy
of Home Stones, one might say, and two soldiers who would cut one another down with their
steel blades for an acre of fertile ground will fight side by side to the death for the
Home Stone of their village or of the city within whose ambit their village lies."
This love of their city tends to become invested in a stone which is
known as the Home Stone, and which is normally kept in the highest cylinder in the city.
In the Home Stone - sometimes little more than a crude piece of carved rock, dating back
perhaps several hundred generations to when the city was only a cluster of huts by the
bank of a river, sometimes a magnificent and impressively wrought, jewel- encrusted cube
of marble or granite - the city finds its symbol. Yet to speak of a symbol is to fall
short of the mark. It is almost as if the city itself were identified with the Home Stone,
as if it were to the city what life is to man. The myths of these matters have it that
while the Home Stone survives, so, too, must the city.
But not only is it the case that each city has its Home Stone. The simplest and humblest
village, and even the most primitive hut in that village, perhaps only a cone of straw,
will contain its own Home Stone, as will the fantastically appointed chambers of the
Administrator of so great a city as Ar.
