Players of Gor

by Norman, John;

  “It was six, not five,” I said.

  “Oh,” said Boots.

  “If I had anything to do with them,” I said, “to which I do not admit, of course, let us consider them merely as copper-bowl coins, coins such as might be gathered in the pursuit of your normal activities.”

  “But six silver tarsks,” he said.

  “You may consider them, if it makes it easier for you,” I said, “as a gratuitous contribution to the arts.”

  “I accept them, then, in the name of the arts,” said Boots.

  “Good,” I said.

  “You have no idea how that arrangement assuages the agonies of conscience with which I might otherwise have been afflicted,” said Boots.

  “I am sure of it,” I said.

  “Thank you,” said Boots.

  “It is nothing,” I said. “Happy carnival.”

  “To be sure,” he said. “Incidentally, did you enjoy the show?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I wonder if you forgot to express your appreciation,” asked Boots, rather apologetically.

  “No,” I said.

  “It was an excellent performance,” he said.

  “Here is another copper tarsk,” I said. “That makes three.”

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “You are quite welcome,” I said. I watched the tarsk disappear somewhere in his robes.

  “Now,” he said, “as I recall you were mentioning that you might be able to help me with some problem.”

  “Yes,” I said. “As I mentioned, I do not think I can help you with your Brigella problem, at least certainly not now, but I think I do know where you might be able to get your hands on a splendid candidate for a ‘golden courtesan.’”

  “A slave?” asked Boots.

  “Of course,” I said.

  “Can she act?” asked Boots.

  “I do not know,” I admitted.

  “My girls must double as tent girls,” he said.

  “About her potentiality as a tent girl,” I said, “I have no doubt.”

  “My girls, you must understand,” said Boots, “are not ordinary girls. They must be extraordinarily talented.”

  “She is blond, and voluptuous,” I said.

  “That will do,” said Boots.

  “You could always teach her to act,” I said.

  “That is true,” said Boots. “And fortunately I am a master teacher. And if she should prove sluggish in her lessons, I will unhesitantly encourage her with the whip.”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  “Where is she?” he asked.

  “Perhaps she has been sold by now,” I said. “I do not really know.” I was not being perfectly candid at this point. To be sure, she might have been sold by then. That was possible. That might have happened. On the other hand, I had tried to arrange it earlier in such a way that she would not be sold until the eighteenth Ahn, at least, by which time I expected to be able to get Boots Tarsk-Bit to look at her.

  “Where is she?” he asked.

  “One advantage to getting her,” I said, “is that I think that she, being a relatively new slave, may be fairly cheap. I doubt that she would cost you, at the most, even given her beauty, more than two silver tarsks. You would then have three silver tarsks left over.”

  “Where may I find this slut?” he asked.

  “She is for sale, I believe, at this very fair,” I smiled.

  “This is the Fair of En’Kara,” he said. “There are thousands of girls for sale here, in the care of hundreds of owners.”

  “I know the very platform on which stripped, and in her collar and chain, she awaits her first buyer,” I said.

  “Perhaps you would be so good as to impart this information,” said Boots.

  “It would probably be difficult for you, by tomorrow evening, by which time, I gather, you may be taking your leave from the fair, to locate her.”

  “Particularly,” said Boots, “if we are attempting to get in an extra performance or two.”

  “Precisely,” I said.

  “What do you want?” asked Boots.

  “You have a fairly regular itinerary in your travels, do you not?” I asked.

  “Sometimes,” said Boots, warily. “Sometimes not. Why?”

  “Surely you have some notion of your plans for the next few months,” I said.

  “In what way?” asked Boots.

  “You have some notion of the villages, the towns, the cities you plan to visit,” I said.

  “Perhaps,” said Boots.

  “I am interested particularly in one given city,” I said, “a port on the coast of Thassa, one south of the Vosk’s delta.”

  “Yes?” he said.

  “Brundisium,” I said.

  “She is a staunch ally of Ar,” he said. “We will be visiting her late in the summer.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “I am interested in joining your company,” I said.

  “What could you do?” he asked.

  “Odd jobs, heavy work,” I said.

  “Security at Brundisium is very tight,” he said. “They have become, in the last two years, for some reason, very suspicious of strangers. It is difficult to get access into the city, other than her closed-off wharves and trading places.”

  “A troupe such as yours might do so, however,” I speculated.

  “We have performed in the main square,” he admitted, “once even in the courtyard of the palace itself.”

  “Let me join your company,” I said.

  “You are merely interested in obtaining admittance to Brundisium,” he said.

  “Perhaps,” I said.

  “Where might I get my chain on this female,” he asked, “she whom you think might be found acceptable as a ‘golden courtesan’?”

  “Among the hundred new slaves of Samos of Port Kar,” I said, “chained on the Shu-27 platforms in the southwestern sections of the Pavilion of Beauty.”

  “Has she a name?” asked Boots.

  “Probably not now,” I said. “But she was given a name, or at least a house name, in the house of Samos, in Port Kar.”

  “What was it?” asked Boots.

  “Rowena,” I said.

  “Thank you,” said Boots. “You have been very helpful.”

  “Now, what about my proposal,” I said.

  “What proposal?” he asked.

  “About my joining your company,” I said.

  “That?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Out of the question,” he said.

  7

  The Tent;

  I Slip from the Tent

  “Oh!” she wept, clutching me, squirming, helplessly pressing her embonded flesh against mine. “Yes! No, don’t let me go!” she cried. “Don’t spurn me, I beg you. Hold me! Hold me! Please!” Her creamy flesh was hot. She was covered with sweat. Even her long blond hair, cut somewhat shorter now, half covering her face, was wet. Her body, broken out and mottled, was like a map, one recollective of my attentions. It was covered with an intense, irregular geography of scarlet patches, the capillaries near the surface of the skin swelled with blood, the red color suffusing upward as though from a light within her, as though fires raged within her, just beneath her exposed, yielding, eager softness, witnessing her excitement and arousal. She clutched me, helplessly. “What you can do to me!” she cried. “What men can do to me! I love it. I love it! Please, Master, do not stop!” She threw back her head, her lips parted, her eyes closed. “Ohh!” she gasped. “Yes! Ohhh! Yes! Yes! Oh! Oh! Yes, Master! Yes, Master! Continue, I beg you, with all my heart! I plead with you not to stop! Oh, Master! Yes, Master! Yes, Master!” I heard the sound of the chain on her ankle. “Oh, Master! Yes, Master!” she said.

  The chain was about a yard long. It ran between the ankle ring, locked snugly on her ankle, and a long, heavy stake. The stake was driven deeply into the ground. About five inches of it showed above the surface. It was
placed about a yard within, and to the left of, facing outward, the entrance to the small, striped tent. The girl was stripped, save for her ankle ring and collar. She lay on a mat, spread on a blanket, spread over the grass. She awaits within, to see who will open the flaps of the tent. That will be he who has paid her current use fee, that set by her master. We were some two hundred pasangs west of the fairgrounds, at the edge of the woods of Clearchus, just off the road of Clearchus.

  “Oh, yes,” she wept, clutching me. Her collar was a simple one. It read, “If you find me, return me to Boots Tarsk-Bit. Reward.” Boots used such collars for all his slaves. “Aii!” she cried, suddenly. My touch had been light. I saw that she was ready for more. She was in a condition of slave arousal. She looked at me, wildly. “Yes,” I said. “There is more.” She began to squirm and shudder. “We now begin again,” I said. “How can I feel more?” she wept. “You have not yet even experienced the fullness of a slave orgasm,” I said. Then, in moments, building on her earlier sensitivity, I conducted her perforce to a height where she might sense, but not yet experience, a new horizon. I held her there, on the brink, for a time, as it pleased me, sometimes permitting her to subside a bit, and then again, when I wished, with the cruelty of the master, almost as though beckoning her, a command she could not refuse, bringing her back to the edge, where, almost in madness, she quivered and pleaded for release.

  “Not yet,” I told her.

  “Yes, Master,” she wept. The decision was mine. She was totally in my power. She was a slave.

  “In any event,” I had said to Boots Tarsk-Bit, a few days ago, “let me show you the girl.”

  “That would be very nice of you,” he had said.

  “Perhaps, too,” I said, “you will change your mind.”

  “Never,” he had said.

  I had then conducted Boots to the area where the agents of Samos had his hundred girls on sale, sent out from Port Kar for vending during the Fair of En’Kara. I had checked the location earlier in the afternoon. It was among the southwestern sections of the Pavilion of Beauty, more specifically on the Shu-27 platforms. The girls were all on their hands and knees on the long, narrow platforms, uniformly positioned, facing outwards, a short chain on the neck of each, running down to individual rings anchored in the thick planks. They had been forbidden to speak among themselves. Agents of Samos walked here and there among them, with whips. “There is the girl,” I said. She had not yet been sold. A white “holding disk” was wired to her collar. Some of the collars which had held women near her earlier were empty.

  “You!” she had said, earlier, around noon, when I had first seen her there.

  “You remember me?” I had said.

  “A girl never forgets the first man who puts the whip to her,” she had smiled.

  “How are the sales going?” I had asked her.

  “I do not really know, Master,” she had said, “as we are kept in separate slave boxes, and are usually brought forth only to be exercised or exhibited. I myself was first put on display only this morning.”

  “I have seen some empty collars about, on the other platforms,” I said.

  “Perhaps the sales, then, are going well,” she said. “I dare not turn my head to look. One girl was beaten fearfully for that, only an Ahn ago.”

  The matter of the empty collars was not an easy one to interpret. If there are no empty collars then customers may think that no one else is interested in the merchandise, perhaps that something might be wrong with it, and then go elsewhere. If there are only a few girls left, and many empty collars, they may get the impression, perhaps mistakenly, that nothing much of interest is likely to be left. The ideal impression to convey to the customer is perhaps that you have marvelous merchandise for sale, that even now many people are interested and buying, that it is moving fast, and that if he sees a girl he wants, perhaps he should snatch her up before someone else does. If you see a female locked in her platform collar, with its chain, of course, and in a while you see the collar empty, it is not irrational to suppose that she has been sold. Sometimes a woman who has been sold is not immediately removed from the platform but only, in one way or another, marked “Sold.” There are several ways in which this can be done. For example, she may be placed in a white hood bearing the word “Sold” in red letters, a red tag, bearing the inscription, “Sold,” may be wired to her collar, or the word “Sold” may be simply written in grease pencil on her body, usually, by convention, on her left breast.

  “I think the sales are not going as well as they might,” I said.

  “Master?” she asked, frightened.

  “You were put out only this morning,” I said. “That suggests that the goods are not moving as rapidly as they might. Too, it is my impression, from what I have seen here and elsewhere, that there is an unusual amount of high-quality merchandise available this spring. I suspect that many of the lots, even large lots, literal bevies of luscious slaves, chained together forty or fifty in a lot, may end up being simply purchased by slavers at rock-bottom prices, for purposes of later speculation.”

  She groaned. “I am afraid the masters will be displeased,” she said.

  Her apprehension was understandable. She was a slave.

  “Are you interested in this slave?” asked one of the men on the platform, coming over, his whip in hand. I did not think he was of the house of Samos. I did not, at any rate, know him. He was probably a slaver’s agent, licensed for work at the fair. There are many fellows who, seasonally, do this work. At other times they normally work in slavers’ houses. He may, of course, have been one of the fellows on the fairs’ permanent staff. There are four such fairs, administered by the merchants, held annually in the vicinity of the Sardar, those of En’Kara, En’Var, Se’Kara and Se’Var. The girl was immediately very still, and very quiet, on all fours.

  “I think I can find a buyer for her,” I said.

  “Who?” he asked.

  “Come now,” I said. “Let us not be naive.”

  “Do you want a commission?” he asked. “We are very careful about that sort of business.”

  “No,” I said.

  “Ah,” he said, pleased. What he feared, of course, particularly since he did not know me, is the trick of two friends cooperating in the purchase of a slave. One attempts to obtain a finder’s commission from the merchant which he then, of course, turns back to his friend, the buyer. In this way, the slave is purchased more cheaply. As it was, since I was not bargaining for a commission with him, he presumably supposed that I would obtain a finder’s fee from the buyer. Some people actually make their living in this way, acting as buying agents, providing services such as locating rare slaves for collectors and filling the “want lists” of rich men.

  “I would appreciate it, however,” I said, “if you would put a ‘hold’ on her until, say, the eighteenth Ahn.”

  “Impossible,” he said. “Look at her. See the curves, the lines.” He tapped her with the whip. “Superb slave meat.”

  “I may not be able to get the buyer here until then,” I said.

  “Ten copper tarsks, to hold her until then,” he said.

  “Absurd,” I said.

  “It is refundable,” he said.

  “Under what conditions?” I asked.

  “That you bring your buyer to the platform before the eighteenth Ahn,” he said.

  “What if he doesn’t want her?” I asked. Actually, I was pretty confident he would want her.

  “You then sacrifice your holding fee,” he said.

  “And what if he buys her?”

  “Then, of course, your holding fee will be refunded.”

  “Fully?”

  “Of course.”

  “What if you cannot agree on a price?”

  “Realistic offers having been tendered, and such?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I will not hold you responsible for that,” he said. “I will still give you back your tarsks.”

  “Good,”
I said. I then gave him the ten copper tarsks. His reasonableness in this matter, I suspect, was due at least in part to the slowness of the market. Indeed, some of the girls in the market, I suspected, would go for as little as that same ten copper tarsks.

  “Hold still, Girl,” said the man to the girl. I watched him while he, crouching down beside her, wired a circular, white tag, a holding disk, to her collar. He had placed his whip behind her. Some men place the whip where the slave can see it, noting its heavy-leather blades or coils, that she may understand its menace. Others, like this fellow, place the whip behind her, where she does not know precisely where it is, but knows very well that it is there. The second placement is perhaps, generally, somewhat more to be dreaded by the female. There are no hard-and-fast rules in this sort of thing. Much can depend on the girl, on her intelligence and imagination, on the stage of her training, on the specific occasion in question, and so on. Sometimes it is desirable to have the female look very closely and clearly on the whip and, at other times, it is better for her merely to understand that it is in her immediate vicinity, somewhere, and that she may not, now, turn about to determine its specific location.

  The tag on its wire now dangled some four inches below her collar. It had been one of several such tags in a small bag hooked to his belt. It had an inked “Eighteen” on it. Some of the white tags were blank, and might be written on. The red tags carry the inscription “Sold.” A black tag is sometimes used to indicate that a girl is ill. A yellow tag sometimes indicates that a girl is not to be sold without prior consultation with the slaver. Tags are sometimes, too, used to indicate distinctions among slaves, at least among slavers themselves, being correlated to the classes or grades of slaves. For example, a brown tag commonly signifies a low slave, such as a mere kettle-and-mat girl or a pot girl, little more than female work slaves, and so on, whereas a gold tag commonly signifies a much higher grade of slave, usually a trained pleasure slave or a dancer. There is, however, to be perfectly honest, no absolutely uniform color coding in these matters. Different houses have their own conventions. It is unusual, incidentally, for a woman to be tagged in a regular market, except in so far as she might be marked “Sold” or have a “Hold” put on her. It is not hard in a Gorean market, for example, where the women are usually stripped, or will be stripped for the buyer’s inspection, to see who is most beautiful or interesting. Too, of course, women in such a market can be literally made to display their beauty and pose and perform in various ways for the viewers. This, too, makes it easier to make choices amongst them.