“Yes,” I said.
“And make some coins on me!”
“Yes.”
“And my will would be nothing.”
“Yes,” I said. “You are a slave.”
“Yes,” she said, “I am a slave. I well understand that.” She looked up at me. “I will try to please you.”
“That would be in your best interest,” I said.
“But I want to please you.”
“Good,” I said.
“Master.”
“Yes?”
“I love you,” she said.
“You are a lying slave,” I said.
“A slave girl is not permitted to lie to her master,” she said. “She must be open to him, in all things.”
“You are rather open to me now,” I said.
I sensed her blush, even in the half-darkness, on her chain.
“Perhaps I shall order you to split your legs,” I said.
“A slave must instantly obey,” she said.
But I did not choose to order her to this particular posture of readiness.
“I do not now want to love you as a noble free woman,” she whispered. “I do not know what you and the others have done to me. I hardly understand myself any longer.”
“It seems you are now willing to speak,” I said.
“I now want to love you helplessly, and wholly, irreservedly, withholding nothing, giving all,” she whispered. “I want to love you as—let me speak it, if I may, my Master—as a helpless slave loves her master!”
“Clever, cunning words,” I said, “from a clever, cunning slut of a slave.”
“Very well,” she smiled. Then she lay back and spread her hair back, about her, behind her on the straw. “I am only a slut of a slave,” she laughed. “Treat me as such. I welcome it. I belong to you. I am yours. Do with me as you please. I love you, my 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, “today, and now, 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 message 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 had 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 planets rotating 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, 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 example, 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, Guard of the Dunes, 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.
Several times, she, with Zaya, another slave, had waited upon me, nude, in collars, and bangles, serving the black wine and sugars, in what had been the kasbah of Tarna, while I had enjoyed the pleasures of one or more slaves, selected, as I wished, from the slave stock of the Kasbah, but usually Tafa.
It pleased me that this slave had so attended upon me.
But several times I had had her as well, and she must serve the black wine and sugars, and slave pleasures, alone.
I had found it true that she was pleasant on the cushions, and crawled well to a man.
I had often used the long leash with her.
In time her hair would grow again. Long hair improves the price of a girl.
One of the men of the kasbah put the sheet over her, in her turn, fully, to protect her from the sun; her head was then completely covered as well as her body; the sheet was then fastened in place, that it might not slip, with a cord, twice looped, tied closely about her neck; thus she, as the other slaves, was not only sheltered from the Tahari sun, but hooded. This, as an additional pleasantry for masters, keeps them the more ignorant, and helpless, on the march. Her feet, as those of the other slaves, had been wrapped in leather, to protect them from the hot sand.
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 hand. 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, Guard of the Dunes, 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, on a tether fastened to the pommel of my saddle, her feet protected in leather, her body covered with the white sheet, it serving as garment and head-enclosing hood, was a girl, a slave.
I was not sure what I would do with her, whether I would keep her for a time, or sell her.
I had picked her up, and claimed her for my own, in what had been the kasbah of Abdul, Ibn Saran, who had been Salt Ubar in the Tahari, the Guard of the Dunes. It was said she had been a high slave, even the preferred slave of Ibn Saran. It was not clear to me, however, that she was better than, say, a hundred of the other women acquired in the taking of the kasbah. She had been one then, of a splendid catch.
She had been a lovely enemy.
On the lowest level of the kasbah I had branded and collared her, and put her to my pleasure.
Women can be displeasing.
It is pleasant then, as one wishes, as one pleases, to make them your slaves.
I had named her ‘Vella’.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1976 by John Norman
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ISBN 978-1-4976-0098-0
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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Tribesmen of Gor Page 51