by John Norman
Beneath the haik, I supposed her collared, naked. The use of a light walking chain, tethering the ankles, meant to be worn abroad, accompanying the master, incidentally, is not uncommon in the regions of the Tahari. A beautifully measured gait is thought, in the Tahari, to be attractive in a woman. There is dispute as to the desirable length of the stride, and the chain may be adjusted accordingly. To me it seems obvious that one must experiment with the given girl. Height and hip structure vary. I resolved to obtain such a set of chains for Miss Blake-Allen. I was curious to see what measure of stride would best suit the slave in her. Free women, in the Tahari, incidentally, usually, when out of their houses, also measure their stride. Some fasten their own ankles together with silken thongs. Some dare even the chain, though they retain its key. Free girls, not yet companions, but of an age appropriate for the companionship, sometimes signal their availability to possible swains by belling their left ankles with a single “virgin bell.” The note of this bell, which is bright and clear, is easily distinguished from those of the degrading, sensual bells of the slave. Sometimes free girls, two or more of them, as a girlish lark, obtain slave bells and, chaining their ankles, dress themselves in their haiks and go about the city. Sometimes their girlish amusement does not turn out as they expect. Sometimes they find themselves being sold in markets at obscure eases.
There was a great shouting, and, passing through the market gate, I had turned into the nest of market streets.
I brushed away two sellers of apricots and spices. “Come with me to the cafe of Red Cages,” said a boy, pulling at my sleeve. They receive a copper tarsk for each patron they bring through the arched portal of the cafe. I gave the boy a copper tarsk, and he sped from me.
I made my way carefully through the crowds.
The vendors come early to the market, leaving their villages outside of Tor in the morning darkness, that they may find a yard of pavement, preferably near the market gate, to display their wares. I was jostled to one side by two men in djellabas. My ankle stung. I had nearly stepped into a basket of plums. Not even looking up, a woman had cried out, and, with a stick lashed out, protecting her merchandise. “Buy melons!” called a fellow next to her, lifting one of the yellowish, red-striped spheres toward me. A boy passed, spitting out the seeds of a tospit. The thought of Kamchak, of the Tuchuks, passed through my mind. I smiled. Only the rare, long- with melted cheese and nutmeg; hot Bazi tea, sugared, and, later, Turian wine. I did not forget the slave, of course. Crusts of bread did I throw to the boards before her. It was slave bread, rough and coarse-grained. The beauty ate it eagerly. She had not known if she was to be fed that day. Sometimes the slave is not fed. This might occur for aesthetic reasons, as, for example, if her measurements, which are generally carefully kept, should minutely depart from her master’s conception of her ideal curvatures; sometimes merely to remind her of on whom she depends, totally, for her very life; sometimes as a training or disciplinary measure; sometimes merely to startle or puzzle her; what has she done; she is not told; has she not been sufficiently pleasing; she is not told; the girl, frightened, anxious, redoubles her efforts to please in all the thousand spheres of her slavery, intellectual, physical and imaginative; no master, it is said, who has not denied his girl food knows her; pleasant indeed are the surprises which such a fellow, who thought thitherto he knew his girl, upon the completion of the simple experiment, receives: the girl’s wits are sharpened; she becomes resourceful, helpless, desperate, attentive, inventive; “Feed me, Master,” she begs. “Feed me!” at the conclusion of such an experiment, when she is fed, it is always, kneeling naked, from his hand. The lesson is not soon forgotten. Few things so impress the dominance of a male on a woman, and her dependence on him, as his control of her food. This dominance, provided it is absolute, thrills a woman to the core.
I had, from time to time, kept Miss Blake-Allen hungry, giving her only sparing rations. I had not, however, by means of food, truly impressed her slavery on her. I did not want to bring her to her belly at my feet. That pleasure I would deny myself, that it might be reserved for her first full, true master. I wanted to keep her, save for some refinements, a free woman of Earth, wearing a collar, until she was sold. The delights of making her a true slave girl, completely, in the full sense of the word, I would accord to the fellow to whom I would give or sell her. I could imagine her, blue-eyed, fairskinned, angry, proud, rebellious determined to be untamed, standing naked on his submission mat in his tent.
After a week I wondered what she would be like.
I turned from the market streets into a street of shops and stalls, the bazaar, which, in Tor, is most commonly reached through the market gate.
“The Aretai will act,” I beard one man telling another.
I paused before a given stall, where light, walking chains were being sold. They were strung over racks rather like parrot perches. Without much haggling, I bought one, which seemed to me pretty. They are adjustable, with rings, from a length as small as two inches, for security, to a stride length of about twenty inches. Two keys are provided, each of which fits both ankle-ring locks. I also purchased a set of slave bells, of the thong as opposed to the lock variety.
They are less expensive than the lock variety; also, they may be tied at various places on the body, about the neck, the wrist, the ankle, about the thigh, about the arm, etc.; it is delightful to bell a girl; she may not remove them, of course, without her master’s permission.
I passed by the door of a slaver’s house. High in the house, through one of the narrow windows, I saw a girl, looking out. She smiled, and put her arm out through the window, waving. Her face pressed against the bars. She was collared.
I blew her a kiss in the Gorean fashion, brushing it upward to her with my fingers.
I looked into a shop where pottery was being turned. To one side of the wheels, along a wall, sitting among many bowls and vessels, a boy, with his finger, was carefully applying bluish pigment to a large, two-handled pitcher. When the pitcher was placed in the kin this pigment would be burned, hardened, into the glaze. The kilns were in the back of the shop.
“The Kavars, even now, are hiring lances,” I heard.
The rugs of Tor are very beautiful. I paused to look upon several of them, hanging in stalls, many others, lying on top of one another, in great, shaded piles. It takes five girls more than a year to make certain of these rugs. The patterns, memorized by the callers, some of them blind, are intricate, and passed down through families. They are made on simple looms and the pile is knotted onto the warp and weft. Some of these rugs have as many as four hundred knots per square hort. The hort is approximately an inch and a quarter in length. Each knot, by a girl, a free woman, is tied individually by hand. There are many varieties of such rugs. Almost all are incredibly beautiful. The dyes used in the malting of these rugs are, on the whole, natural dyes, vegetable dyes, some made from barks and leaves, and roots and flowers, others from animal products, crushed insects, etc. At various places in the bazaar, from a latticework laid between the buildings, numerous skeins of wool hung, dyed in various bright colors, drying. The carders and the dyers, incidentally, are subcastes separate from the weavers. All are subcastes of the rug makers, which, itself, interestingly, perhaps surprisingly, is accounted generally as a subcaste of the cloth workers.
Rug makers themselves, however, usually regard themselves, in their various subcastes, as being independent of the cloth workers. A rug maker would not care to he confused with a maker of kaftans, turbans or djellabas.
I looked up at skeins of wool hanging from the wooden poles between the flat roofs. They were quite colorful. The finest wool, however, is sheared in the spring from the bellies of the verr and hurt, and would, accordingly, not be available until later in the season. The wool market, as was to be expected, was now slow.
I passed the door of another slaver’s house. I swung the light walking chain casually in my hand. It would look well on the slim ankles of the lovely Miss Bl
ake-Allen.
I passed a fellow inlaying wood, and the shop of a silversmith, and stalls filled with baskets, some of which, grain baskets, were large enough to hold a man. In another place tanned, dyed leathers were hanging, purple, red, yellow. I passed a boy in a shop using a bow lathe. He spins the wood with bow and string, held in his right hand. He uses his left hand and his right foot to guide the cutting tool. Djellabas and burnooses, sleeveless, hooded desert cloaks, were being sold in another stall. The burnoose can, as the djellaba cannot, because of the sleeves, be thrown back, freeing the arms. One who rides the swift kaiia, who handles the scimitar and lance, chooses the burnoose.
I passed another stall, in which mats were being sold. These are used for various purposes, sometimes vertically for screens, more normally, horizontally, for sitting and sleeping. They can be tightly rolled and occupy little space.
Among them I saw rough-fibered slave mats, and among those, the coarsest of all, submission mats, on which the female slave may be forced to perform for her master.
There were sellers of scarves and sashes, veils and haiks, chalwars and tobes, and slippers and kaftans, and cording for agals. Too, there were cloth merchants, with their silks and rolls of rep cloth. Cloth is measured in the ah-il, which is the length from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger, and the ah-ral, which is ten ah-ils. I saw sleeve daggers. I brushed a mat salesman away.
In another stall a slave girl was being vended. I watched her for a time dance before me, then I turned away.
I smelled veminium oil.
The petals of veminium, the “Desert Veminium,” purplish, as opposed to the “Thentis Veminium,” bluish, which flower grows at the edge of the Tahari, gathered in shallow baskets and carried to a still, are boiled in water. The vapor, which boils off, is condensed into oil. This oil is used to perfume water. This water is not drunk but is used in middle and upper-class homes to rinse the eating hand, before and after the evening meal.
At one place, on a stone shelf, under awnings, several girls, chained naked, were for sale, interestingly, at set prices. It was a municipal sale, under the jurisdiction of the courts of Tor. One brown-skinned girl, black-eyed, no more than fifteen, kneeling, her wrists and ankles tightly chained, looked up at me.
She was being sold to pay her father’s gambling debts. I purchased her, and freed her.
“Where is your father?” I asked.
“At the gaming tables of the Golden Kaiila,” she wept.
I looked at her. She was comely. I looked to the discarded chains on the stone shelf. Other girls there held out their hands to me. I looked again at the girl.
“In another year,” I told her, “you will kneel again on the stone shelf, beneath the awnings.” I regarded her. “Then,” I said, regarding her, “you will be too beautiful to free.”
“I must hurry home,” she said, “to prepare supper for my father.”
I watched her run, shamed, through the streets. She was lovely. I had little doubt that, in time, she would wear slave bells. Even if she were not to be sold by the magistracy of Tor I thought it not unlikely that she would fall to the noose of a slaver.
“Buy us! Buy us, Master!” cried the other girls on the shelf.
“Be slaves,” I laughed to them, turning away.
They wept. I heard the lash fall among them.
Here and there in the bazaar I made purchases.
Twice I was passed by pairs of guardsmen, in white robes with red sashes and scimitars, the police of Tor.
Not five paces behind them I saw a ragged cutpurse cut the wallet of a merchant, dropping its contents into his hand and, bowing and whining, twist away in the crowd. The merchant huffed away. The fellow had done it neatly. I recalled a girl named Tina, once of Lydius, now of Port Kar. She, too, had been an excellent thief. My own coins I kept in belt pockets, within my robes, save for a small wallet at my side. I went about Tor now as a traveler from Turia, a small merchant. I checked the wallet at my side. It was intact.
Some other thieves had not done so well in the bazaar. Several right hands, severed, were nailed to a board on which salt prices were affixed.
There were no feminine hands on the board. A female thief in Tor, even on the first offense, is immediately reduced to slavery.
I glanced behind me. For the second time I saw four men, the same four. But they were only four.
I stood aside as a chain of male slaves was herded by, with spear butts. They were bound for the brine pits of the Tahari, whence comes most of the caravan salt. I expected that less than half of them would reach the pits. Heavy collars, with rings, they wore about their necks. A heavy chain, running through the rings, linked them together by the throat. Their wrists, manacled, were behind their backs. They were naked. Men spit at them as they were herded past.
Miss Blake-Allen was no longer in my compartment. She was now in the public pens of Tor. On the morning of the second day, in the process of my work for Priest-Kings, I had entered the shaded offices of the municipal slave master of Tor.
“Stand here,” I told Miss Blake-Allen, indicating a place in the center of the floor, before the desk of the slave master. She stood where I had indicated.
“Remove your slippers,” I told her. She slipped from the slippers, black with silver thread. She was now barefoot. The slave master came around to the front of his desk. He leaned back against it, sitting on its edge. “Remove the haik,”
I told the girl. She removed the garment. She stood between us, nude.
The slave master regarded her. Then he walked about her, slowly. She stood straight, a female examined by a man. She did not look at him. The slave master looked at me. I nodded. Her body stiffened, and she shut her eyes, as his hands, those of a Gorean flesh appraiser, informed, sensitive, professional, proficient, made swift assessment of the textures of her skin, varying at different points on the body, the tensilities of her musculature, the varying softness and firmness of her, the sweet, complex delights of her lines, the obvious exciting contours of her, the more subtle contours, too, the curve at her hip, at her shoulder, her instep, the back of her neck; he, too, made test, to her helpless, recoiling horror, of the latent pleasures of her, swiftly revealing, then passing over, it noted, the promise of an incredible responsiveness; there were tears in her eyes; how precious and beautiful, I thought, is a woman, how unsurprising that a vital man, without compromise; simply wishes to own such a fantastic, delicious creature, how unsurprising that he wishes in the full and glorious heat of his blood to overwhelm, devour, dominate and master her. On Gor, of course, men have their will, at least with lowly slaves, such as was, against her will, the lovely, unfortunate Miss Blake-Allen.
The slave master stepped back from the slave.
“Kneel,” I told her. She knelt.
“Blond,” said he, “apparently determined to try to remain frigid, blue-eyed, not yet tamed, an incredible potential for helpless sexual heat, an incredible potential for helpless slave submission, excellent. Do you wish to sell her?”
“Straighten your body Slave,” I told her.
Frightened, Miss Blake-Alien straightened her back, and lifted her head. She knelt back on her heels, knees wide, hands on her thighs. It was the position of the Pleasure Slave. I had taught her the position. It is one of the first things a good-looking woman, fallen slave, is taught on Gor.
“Do you wish to sell her?” again inquired the slave master of Tor.
I knew I would not obtain the best price from this office, for the municipal pens usually buy cheaply and sell cheaply. They exist primarily as a service for caravan masters, buying unsold girls, later retailing them to other merchants, who may be short of flesh for the oasis traffic. The municipal pens exist primarily to perform a service, not to make profit.
“What would you offer?” I asked.
“Eleven silver tarsks,” he said.
I knew I could get twice that much from a private house.
“Fifteen?” he inquired.
/> “No,” I smiled, “but your bids are reassuring.”
He smiled. “I did not think you wished to sell her,” he said. “That is why I was as honest with you as I was. Now that I know you do not wish to sell her, I will tell you that, in my opinion,” he looked down at the kneeling girl, “her potentiality is fantastic.”
“I am glad to hear it,” I said. Miss Blake-Allen, in the position of the Pleasure Slave, was looking about the room. She could not understand us, for we spoke in Gorean. It is perhaps just as well.
The usual buying price of the municipal office was two or three silver tarsks per wench. I had learned that Miss Blake-Allen was valuable in the Tahari. This pleased me.
I looked at her. She was beautiful. I agreed with the slave master. Doubtless, someday, for someone, she would make an excellent slave.
“I wish,” I said, “to board her, and purchase her some training.”
“We cage a wench for a copper tarsk per day,” he said. “Training is extra, but, I think, reasonable.”
“She does not speak Gorean,” I told him.
He smiled. “She will learn swiftly,” he said.
Then the officer and I discussed details of training. He would include in her training the regime of the stimulation cage. For the first five nights, following my recommendation, she would wear the rope harness. After that it would be used, if necessary, for discipline.
“Let her, however,” I said, “meet the eyes of her trainer, and of other males. I do not wish her to become the love slave of the first man into whose eyes she is permitted to gaze.”