sink in her thigh, smoking and crackling and hissing. It was a larger brand than
that of the four bosk horns; I made sure it marked her more deeply. We three,
Hassan, I and the girl, smelled the marked, burned slave flesh of her. Then,
swiftly, cleanly, I withdrew it. Her head was back. She was screaming and
weeping. “A perfect brand,” said Hassan, looking on. “Perfect!” I was pleased.
Such a brand would be envied by other girls. It would improve the sleek little
animal’s value.
I removed the locking device, and spun loose the twist handles, releasing her
thigh. I freed her of the snap bracelets. I carried her, naked, branded,
weeping, to the small cell where I had thrown her tiny garment, to be retrieved
later. I put her down on the straw. Her throat was bare, for I had had, the
preceding night, the collar of Ibn Saran removed from her throat.
“Assume the posture of female submission,” I told her. She did so, kneeling back
on her heels, her arms extended, wrists crossed, her head between them, down.
She was weeping.
“Repeat after me,” I told her, “‘I, once Miss Elizabeth Cardwell, of the planet
Earth-’ “
“I, once Miss Elizabeth Cardwell of the planet Earth-” she said.
“ ‘-herewith submit myself, completely and totally, in all things-’“
“-herewith submit myself, completely and totally, in all things-” she said.
“--to he who is now known here as Hakim of Tor-”‘
“-to he who is now known here as Hakim of Tor-” she said.
“ ‘-his girl, his slave, an article of his property, his to do with as he
pleases-’ “
“-his girl, his slave, an article of his property, his to do with as he
pleases,” she said.
Hassan handed me the collar. It was inscribed ‘I am the property of Hakim of
Tor’. I showed it to the girl. She could not read Taharic script. I read it to
her. I put it about her neck. I snapped it shut.
“ ‘I am yours, Master,’ “ I said to the girl.
She ‘looked up at me, tears in her eyes, her neck in my locked collar. “I am
yours, Master,” she said.
“Congratulations on your slave!” said Hassan. `She is lovely meat. Now I must
attend to my own slave.” He laughed, and left.
The girl sank to the straw, and looked up at me. Her eyes were soft with tears.
She whispered. “I am yours now, Tarl,” she said.
“You own me. You truly own me.”
“What is your name?” I asked.
“What ever master wishes,” she whispered.
“I will call you ‘Vella’,” I said.
“I am Vella,” she said, her head down. After a time she lifted her head. “May I
call you Tarl?” she asked.
“Only if given permission,” I told her. This was normal Gorean slave custom.
Generally, of course, such permission is not even asked, and, if asked, would be
denied. Sometimes a girl is whipped for even daring to ask this permission.
“A girl asks permission to call her Master by his name,” she said.
“It is denied,” I said.
“Yes, Master,” she said. I would not permit the slave girl to speak my name. It
is not fitting that the name of the master be soiled by being touched by the
lips of a slave girl.
I looked at her in the straw. “You were displeasing,” I told her.
“A girl has been punished by her master,” she said.
I took the chain and collar in the cell, and locked it on her throat, over her
close-fitting steel collar, that identifying her as mine. She was, thus, chained
to the wall.
“I have not begun to punish you,” I told her, looking down at her.
“I hate you,” she said, sullenly. “I hate you!” She looked up at me. “You caused
me much pain,” she said. “You whipped me. You branded me.” She turned her head
to one side. “I am confused,” she said. “I do not know what to think.”
“How is that?” I asked.
“It hurt terribly to be whipped, and branded,” she said.
“Yes?” I said.
“And yet, because of these things, I stand wonderfully and vulnerably in awe of
you, and of men in general,” she said.
“What thrills you,” I said, “is not the whip, not the iron, not pain, but
masculine domination. It is that to which you, unknown to yourself, are
responding. What is not important is whether the master whips you or not, but
that you know he is fully capable of whipping you, and will, if you are not
pleasing.”
“Yes,” she said, “that is it-not the pain-but my weakness, and the strength of
men, and that I am under their will, and that, if I am not pleasing, I know that
be is man enough and powerful enough to put me under harsh discipline, and,
should I not be pleasing, will, without a thought, do so.”
“Your body is now hot, Slave Girl,” I said.
“No!” she said.
I touched her and she writhed in the straw, turning away from me, pulling her
legs up. I touched her on the shoulder, and she shuddered. Every inch of her was
alive. “Slave Girl” I sneered.
“Yes, Slave Girl!” she cried, turning on her back, throwing her” body brazenly
open to me.
“You seem little of Earth now,” I laughed.
She spread her hair back on the straw. “I am only a slut of a slave,” she
laughed. “Treat me as such. I love you, Master!”
We heard soldiers in the hall outside.
“Will you give me to others?” she asked.
“If it pleases me,” I said.
“Yes,” she said, “You will if it pleases you.” She turned her head to the side.
“How vulnerable I am!” She looked up at me. Her head was back in the straw. “For
the first time in my life,” she said, “I know that I am a slave girl, only a
slave girl. It is such a strange, helpless feeling. No longer am I a woman of
Earth. I am now only a Gorean slave girl.”
I lifted her by the arms. “I do not know if I love or hate,” she said. “I know
only I am a slave girl, and that I am helpless, and that I am in the arms of my
master.”
I lifted her toward my lips, to claim her. “Have you forgotten Earth?” she
asked.
“I have never heard of that place,” I told her.
She lifted her lips, timidly, delicately, to mine. “Nor have I,” she said. She
whispered, very softly. “I love you, Master.” I did not let her kiss me. Rather,
I, suddenly, with a larl’s ferocity, thrust my lips to hers, cruelly, in the
raping kiss of the master, and pressed her savagely back into the straw, against
the very stones of the dungeon cell in which she lay slave, chained, beneath me.
She squirmed and then, held, cried out, a scream that must have carried to every
cell, through every corridor, of that grim level, startling the enslaved
beauties chained there, amusing the soldiers in whose arms they lay, a scream at
once of wild love and of a helpless slave girl’s total submission.
Near the front of the march I joined Hassan.
“One thing puzzles me,” I told him. “One thing I do not yet understand.”
“What is that?” he asked.
“In the house of Samos, at Port Kar,” I said, “there was a girl, Veema, a
mess
age girl. The message she bore was ‘Beware Abdul.’ Mistakenly I took the
Abdul of this message to be Abdul, the carrier of water, in Tor.”
“That is not a mistake which one of the Tahari would have made,” said Hassan. He
looked at me. “Was not Ibn Saran at that time in the house of Samos?”
“Yes,” I said.
“The timing is interesting,” said Hassan. “Perhaps he who sent the message
assumed that the information of the agents of Priest-Kings was sufficient to
identify Ibn Saran with Abdul, the Salt Ubar, or, at least, to link him with
that villain.”
“At that time,” it was not,” I said. Since the time of the Nest War the
intelligence and surveillance networks of the Priest-Kings had been severely
impaired. Even had they not have been, their information, they, seldom leaving
the Sardar, not being as humans, was little better than that of their human
agents, widely separated in space and time.
“But who sent the message girl, Veema, to the house of Samos?” I asked.
“I did,” said Hassan. “My brother told me to do this. He had had the message
placed months before. I merely transmitted her. He then entered the desert to
investigate rumors of a tower of steel. He must have been captured by men of Ibn
Saran. He was released in the desert with insufficient water.”
“He made it very far,” I said.
“He was very strong,” said Hassan.
“The Priest-Kings are fortunate,” I said, “that such men fight for them.”
“I knew another,” said Hassan, “quite as strong, who fought for Kurii.”
I nodded. I would not forget Ibn Saran, lithe, like a silken panther. He had
been a worthy foe. One gains a victory; one loses an enemy. I lifted my head to
the sky, wide and blue, with no clouds. Somewhere up there, beyond atmospheres,
beyond the orbits of Gor, and Earth and Mars, in a boulder-strewn enigmatic
blackness of space, in the silence of the fragments of the asteroid belt, were
the steel worlds, the lairs and domiciles of Kurii. A Kur had fought by my side
to save the Gorean world. It was desired not only by men, it was desired, too,
by Kurii. I did not think that Kurii, again, would be willing to sacrifice this
world, to achieve another. Already, in their remote past, they had lost one
world, their own. The political ascendancy of the party which bad been willing
to destroy Gor, to secure the Earth, had, with the failure of their project,
doubtless been brief. That a Kur had been sent to foil them was doubtless
significant. Further, Gor was the true prize of the planet rooting about the
sun, not the Earth, for, in the name of rights and liberty, and business, the
fools of Earth, confused by the rhetoric of law and morality, shielding short-
sighted greed and madness, had stood aside, permitting the poisoning of the air
they breathed, the water they drank, the food they ate. That the poisoners will
die with the poisoned will perhaps yield them some comfort. Priest-Kings, of
course, who are accustomed to think directly in terms of realities and
consequences, not words, had not permitted this same insane duplicity to be
practiced upon their gullibility. They do not shrivel before the moral fervor of
fanatics; rather they seek to look behind words, discarding them as largely
meaningless, to discover what is truly meant, what is wanted, what is being
striven for, and, if these programs and policies are implemented , what will be
the nature of the resultant world, and is that world acceptable or not. To
exploitation, to waste, to pollution, Priest-Kings had simply, in their
technological abridgments imposed on man, said, “No.” It is, in defense of their
tyranny, their despotism, you see, after all, lest you think too badly of them,
their habitat as well.
I looked up at the sky. The Kurii, I suspected, did not want Earth, but Gor.
Earth might be useful as a slave planet, but the true prize, the object of their
predation, would be Gor.
What then could be the next step? The uprising of native Kurii had been foiled
in Torvaldsland. I had been in Torvaldsland at the time. The destruction of Gor,
to rid themselves of the opposition of Priest-Kings Gor, had been foiled. When
this had occurred I had been at the steel tower in the Tahari, the half-buried
ship which had housed the destructive device. I gazed at the placid sky.
Surely Kurii must by now, sense the weakness of the Nest. The ship, for Tahari
which had housed the destructive device had penetrated the weakened defenses of
the Priest-Kings. But the Priest-Kings, after the Nest War, would be rebuilding
their power.
It might well seem to Kurii that they must strike soon. There was not a cloud in
the wide, bright Tahari sky. The invasion, I surmised, must be impending.
The drums of the march increased their beat. I turned on the kaiila, looking
behind me, at the long columns of riders, of kaiila, of slaves. I saw the
desert, the pennons. I saw the two kasbahs, which had been those of Abdul, Ibn
Saran, the Salt Ubar, and Tarna, once a proud desert chieftainess.
I felt the cheek of the girl tethered to my saddle press softly against the side
of my left boot, I looked down, and she looked up at me. “Master?” she asked.
“The march will be long,” I told her. “If you cannot make it,” I said, “you will
be dragged.”
She smiled up at me. She kissed the side of my boot. “A girl knows,” she said,
“Master.” She again kissed the side of my boot, in the stirrup, and again looked
up at me. “I know I deserved to be whipped,” she said, and she looked at me in
awe, and admiration, “and you whipped me.” She again kissed my boot, and again
regarded me, eyes smiling. “I was proud,” she said, “and arrogant, and insolent,
and contemptuous, and, when you were helpless, mocked you to my delight from
safety. You did not approve of this. You returned from Klima. You burned me with
the iron and made me your slave.” Her eyes shone. “You are magnificent!” she
said. With the back of my left hand I cuffed her from the side of the saddle.
I saw the pennons on the lances, I listened to the drums. I was eager to begin
the march.
Hassan, in swirling white, lifted his band. The drums stopped. I rode between
Hassan, Haroun, high Pasha of the Kavars, and, in the black kaffiyeh with white
agal cording, Suleiman, high Pasha of the Aretai. Near us were Baram, sheik of
Bezhad, vizier to Haroun, high Pasha of the Kavars, and Shakar, with
silver-tipped lance, a captain of the Aretai. With us, too, were other pashas.
In the march were Kavars and Aretai, Ta’Kara, Bakahs. Char, Kashani, Luraz,
Tashid, Raviri, Ti, Zevar, Arani and, holding the position of the rear guard,
with their black lances, Tajuks.
I looked back at the kasbahs which had been those of Abdul, Ibn Saran, the Salt
Ubar, and Tarna once a proud desert chieftainess. Their walls were bright, hot
and white in the morning sun.
Hassan lowered his hand. Pennons dipped and straightened. The drums began the
beat of the march. There was a jangling of kaiila harness, the movement of
weapons.
I began the march. Beside me, at my stirrup, my slave, was Vella.<
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Norman, John - Gor 10 - Tribesmen of Gor.txt Page 49