by John Norman
I had no hope of returning to Earth. The men in the silver ship had doubtless been of another world, not this one. I had seen no ships, nor men, such as they, on this world. Besides, for all I knew, they might be even more terrible, and fierce, than those of the black ship. I had no desire to meet them. I was also frightened by the memory of the huge golden creature who had accompanied them. Such men, and such a creature, I was sure, would not be likely to return me to Earth. I had seen their power, when they had destroyed the black ship. I was frightened. And, I mused, the men of the black, disklike ship, who had brought me here, were not such that I would expect them, even if they should find me, which I regarded as unlikely, to return me to Earth. I had learned I could not bargain with them. In the hut I had learned what I was to them, only the most abject of female slaves, a girl fit only to kneel at their feet and beg to be commanded. And even if I should serve them, might I not then, that I might not fall into the hands of their enemies, or reveal their plans and plotting, be slain? And even if I did serve them, and they, in their lenience, spared me, I knew that I would be kept by them only as a girl, another slave, to be sold or disposed of as they saw fit. I was pleased that I had escaped in the forest. They would have little hope of finding me again. The chances that I might have found my way back to Targo's chain, or had been returned to him, were not high. Indeed, it would have been probable that I, naked and bound, alone, defenseless in the forest, would have died of exposure or fallen prey to panthers or sleen.
My thoughts strayed back to that terrible night, when I fled from the hut, into the darkness, leaving the beast feeding on the carcass of the destroyed, bloodied sleen.
I shuddered.
I had run madly away, through the dark trees, stumbling, falling, rolling, getting up and running again. Sometimes I ran between the great Tur trees, on the carpeting of leaves between them, sometimes I made my way through more thickset trees, sometimes through wild, moonlit tangles of brush and vines. I even found myself, once, when passing through the high Tur trees, at the circle, where the panther girls had danced. I saw the slave post to one side, where I had been tied. The circle was deserted. I fled again. At times I would stop and listen for any indication of pursuit, but there was none. The man, too, fearing the beast in its feeding frenzy, had fled. I most was afraid that the beast itself might follow me. But I was sure that it would not soon do so. I do not think it was even aware I had fled the hut. I expected it to feed until it was gorged, and then perhaps it would sleep. Once I nearly stumbled on a sleen, bending over a slain tabuk, a slender, graceful, single-horned antelopelike creature of the thickets and forests. The sleen lifted its long, triangular jaws and hissed. I saw the moonlight on the three rows of white, needlelike teeth. I screamed and turned and fled away. The sleen returned to its kill. As I fled I sometimes startled small animals, and once a herd of tabuk. I tried, in the moonlight, to run in the same direction, to find my way from the forest, somehow. I feared I would run in circles. The prevailing northern winds, carrying rain and moisture, had coated the northern sides of the high trees with vertical belts of moss, extending some twenty to thirty feet up the trunks. By means of this device I continued, generally, to run southward. I hoped I might find a stream, and follow it to the Laurius. As I ran through the darkness I suddenly saw, before me, some fifty or sixty yards away, four pairs of blazing eyes, a pride of forest panthers. I pretended not to see them and, heart pounding, turned to one side, walking through the trees. At this time, at night, I knew they would be hunting. Our eyes had not met. I had the strange feeling that they had seen me, and knew that I had seen them, as I had seen them, and sensed that they had seen me. But our eyes had not directly met. We had not, so to speak, signaled to one another that we were aware of one another. The forest panther is a proud beast, but, too, he does not care to be distracted in his hunting. We had not confronted one another. I only hoped that I might not be what they were hunting. I was not. They turned aside into the darkness, padding away. I nearly fainted. I felt so helpless. I pulled at my bound wrists, but they were uncompromisingly secured behind my back.
Then, to my joy, I felt a drop of rain on my naked body, and then another. And then, suddenly, with the abruptness of the storms of the Gorean north, the cold rains, in icy sheets, began to pelt downwards. In the forest, tied, bound, in the icy rain, I threw back my head and laughed. I was overjoyed. The rain would wipe out my trail! I might escape the beast! I doubted that even a sleen, Gor's most perfect hunter, could follow my trail after such a downpour. I laughed, and laughed, and then, crouching, hid in some brush, trying to protect myself from the rain.
After some two hours the rain stopped and I crawled out from the brush and again continued my way southward.
I no longer feared pursuit, but I was now more aware than I had been of my predicament in the forest itself. I tried to rub through the binding fiber that held my wrists, rubbing it against the trunk of a fallen tree, but I could not loosen it, or rub through it. Gorean binding fiber is not made to be so easily removed from a girl's wrists.
After an hour I was bound as securely as before.
I decided I had better keep moving.
I felt helpless, vulnerable and futile. I was like an animal without hands, a four-footed animal, save that I had no hide to protect me, but only the softness of my flesh, and I did not have the delicate senses, the smell and the hearing of such animals to protect me, and I did not have their swiftness, the fleetness of their flight. I was ripe quarry.
I pulled at my wrists, helplessly.
I fled southward.
I was hungry.
At bushes I stopped and nibbled at berries.
Then, shortly before noon, I stumbled onto a small stream, which could only be a tributary of the Laurius.
I flung myself down on the pebbles of its shore and lapped the fresh water, slaking my thirst.
Then, rising, I entered the stream, feeling its cold waters on my ankles, and waded downstream. I wished to take this further precaution against leaving a trail behind me, a stain of odor on a twig, a dampness of perspiration on a leaf.
I followed the stream for an Ahn, sometimes stopping to lift my head to overhanging branches, to nibble at hanging fruit.
Then the stream joined a larger stream, and I followed that further. I had little doubt that this larger stream would join the Laurius.
As I waded in the water, bound, I asked myself if I should try to make my way to the Laurius, and thence to Laura. There I would be fed. But there, too, as I was a slave, I would doubtless be immediately remanded into the care of authorities. I asked myself if I should not rather try to find a hut in the forest, where there might be a slave girl, who would unbind me, and give me food. She surely would not want her master to see me, for I was beautiful. Then I was frightened, for what if the girl would slay me, or sell me herself secretly, to hunters, or give me to panther girls, who would make me their slave, or sell me. They might even return me to the man and the beast in the hut, for more arrowpoints!
I did not know what to do. I was in misery.
Also, recalling that I had been sold for only one hundred arrowpoints, for some reason, irritated me. It made me furious. Surely I was worth much more. As girls went, I was valuable. I should have brought pieces of gold! Not arrowpoints!
In my anger, I did not notice the man, standing back in the brush, near the shore of the stream.
Suddenly a leather loop fell about my neck. I was startled, and turned. It drew tight. I was snared.
Bound, naked, helpless as a tabuk, I was snared.
He drew me toward him.
I was pulled from the edge of the stream, where I had waded. I felt the pebbles of the shore under my feet, and then grass, and then, whether from hunger, or exhaustion, or fear, everything went black, and I fainted.
I awakened sometime later. I was being carried in a man's arms. I wore his shirt. It was longer than a common female slave tunic. The sleeves had been rolled back. It was warm. My han
ds were no longer cruelly bound behind my back. A loop of binding fiber had been tied about my belly and knotted in back. My hands were confined in front of me by slave bracelets. The binding fiber, in its center, had been knotted about the chain of the bracelets, so that my hands were held close to my belly. As my hands were braceleted before me, and held in place by the binding fiber there, and the loose ends of the binding fiber had been knotted behind my back, by no movement could I bring the back knot within reach. Goreans know how to bind women. Such things, I have been told, are even taught to male children, as part of their education. They are apparently given young slave girls on which to practice. The bracelets were not tight, but I could not slip them. I did not care.
"You are awake, El-in-or," he said.
It was one of Targo's guards, he who had guarded me at the physician's.
"Yes, Master," I said.
"We thought that we had lost you."
"I was stolen by panther girls," I said. "They sold me to a man. There was a beast. He fled. I escaped."
I was conscious of the strength of his arms. They frightened me.
"I am still white silk," I told him.
"I know," he said.
I reddened.
"Fortunately for you," he said.
I looked down.
Suddenly he dropped me.
"You are awake," he said. "You can walk."
Sitting on the grass, in pain, displeased, I looked up at him.
"No, I cannot walk," I said. "I cannot even stand."
He tied up the shirt in the back, sticking it into the binding fiber. He then went and cut a switch.
When he returned I was on my feet.
"Good," he said. He pulled down the shirt and threw away the switch.
I walked before him.
"Targo has already left Laura," he said. "We will join him across the river, at the night's camp."
We walked on.
"If you had left Laura with Targo," he said, "you might have seen Marlenus of Ar."
I gasped. I had heard of the great Ubar.
"In Laura?" I asked.
"Sometimes he comes north, with some hundred tarnsmen, for the hunting in the forests," said the guard.
"What does he hunt?" I asked.
"Sleen, panthers, women," said the guard.
"Oh," I said.
"He hunts for a week or two," said the guard, "and then returns to Ar." He pushed me ahead with the flat of his foot. I had been dallying. "The duties of a Ubar," said he, "are pressing, and Marlenus looks forward to his hunting."
"I see," I said.
"When he is finished he sends his catch back by caravan," he said.
"Oh," I said.
We walked on.
"Is he after anything in particular?" I asked.
"Yes," said the guard, "Verna, an outlaw girl."
I stopped.
"Do not turn around," he said.
I was irritated. I knew him, and he liked me, but he was my captor. He had not given me permission to face him. In his shirt, I pulled at the slave bracelets, tied against my belly with the binding fiber.
"It was Verna and her band who captured me," I said.
"It is said she is beautiful," said the guard. "Is it true?"
"Ask," I said, "the men at the camp, whom she captured and bound, when she stole me."
His fist was in my hair, bending my head back. "Yes," I said, "she is beautiful. She is very beautiful!"
He released me.
"Marlenus will capture her," he said, "and send her in a cage to Ar."
"Oh?" I asked, archly.
"Yes," he said, "and in his pleasure gardens, she will feed from his hand."
I put my head back. "You seem to think any woman can be tamed," I said.
"Yes," he said, from behind me. I felt his hands on my shoulders.
I was not displeased that Marlenus was hunting Verna, and her girls. I hoped that he would capture her, and them, and strip them, and put the blazing iron to their bodies, and lock them in collars, and whip them, and make them slave girls!
"Any woman," he said.
"I am white silk," I whispered. I pulled against his hands, and he released me. I hurried on.
I continued to walk ahead of him, in his shirt, my wrists confined before my body.
"Stop," he said.
I did.
He came behind me and, lifting the shirt some inches, tucked it into the binding fiber that was knotted about my waist. He wanted to see more of my legs.
"Continue," he said. He pressed me forward again with the flat of his foot. I stumbled forward, and was now again walking before him.
"Posture," he said.
And so I walked well, as he wished, before him.
From time to time, as we walked, he gave me food from his pouch, which he shoved into my mouth.
In the late afternoon, we rested for an Ahn. Then, at his command, I rose to my feet, and we continued on our journey to Laura, I preceding him, as before.
I was acutely conscious of his watching me. I could not turn to look, of course, but I knew that every movement of my body was his to see.
"I shall be interested to see," he said, "how you train as a pleasure slave in Ko-ro-ba."
"You find me pleasing, do you not?" I asked. Then I was sorry I had asked.
"You have interesting possibilities as a female slave," he said. "I find myself curious to taste you."
I hurried on. "We must hurry," I said. "We must join the wagons!"
"White-silk she-sleen," he said. "Wait until you are red silk!"
I hurried ahead.
Actually I was not displeased. When, that night, after taking a barge across the Laurius, loaded with lumber, we found Targo's encampment, I was happy. Ute and Inge were there and the other girls I knew. Even Lana. Targo was pleased that I had been returned to his chain. That night, stripped in the slave wagon, lying on the canvas, my ankles chained to the ankle bar, fed, I slept soundly, happily.
We were on our way to the city of Ko-ro-ba, where we would receive training, and from thence we would journey in a southeastern direction toward the great city of Ar.
* * * *
"What are you thinking, El-in-or?" asked Ute.
I lay on my belly, in the straw, in the cage in Ko-ro-ba, poking with a bit of straw at the steel plating.
"Nothing," I said.
I wondered about the man in the hut, and the beast. They would not have been able to follow my trail after the rain. They would probably not suppose I could have been returned to Targo. Indeed, Targo had left Laura before I could have reached the city. I supposed that the man and the beast would look for me, if at all, in the vicinity of Laura, or northward, or even in the forest. I supposed they would regard it as likely that I had never escaped the forest. They would regard it as likely that I had fallen to beasts, perhaps, or perhaps had died of exposure.
I was safe.
A slave girl in a pen in Ko-ro-ba.
I had no hope now of returning to Earth. I knew now that on this world I would wear a collar and serve a master.
Further, I had now come to see myself as a slave girl. The panther girls in the forest, and the man in the hut, had taught me that I was slave. I now knew that even on Earth, even when I had been rich, even when I had dwelled in Park Avenue, when I had owned the Maserati, even before I had been branded, I was a slave girl, a wench who, from the Gorean point of view, was fit only, and rightly so, for silk, and the whip. And I had been found out! The Goreans had found me out, and would treat me accordingly.
They have a way with such women.
I supposed that Gorean slavers, on Earth, discerned slave girls, natural slaves, those who belonged in collars, and, making discriminating selections, arranged for their transportation to the markets of Gor. I wondered how many of these women understood that they were slaves, and should be slaves. I had not understood this until I had come to Gor. On the other hand, there is a Gorean saying, not voiced I suppose before free w
omen, but heard among men, that all women are slaves, and it is merely that not all of them are in collars. I did not know if this were true or not. I thought of the older woman, who had been the instructor in French. I could imagine her nude, in a kitchen, shackled, blissful, looking forward to her binding and use later in the evening, preparing supper for a master.
But if not all women were slaves, I knew one who, to her fury, and chagrin, was, Elinor Brinton!
I struck the steel plating in fury, with my small fist.
I was a slave, a fitting slave, a natural slave, and I had learned this, but I did not want it! I did not want to be a slave!
Yes, I thought, Goreans have indeed a way with women such as I. We are categorically and helplessly embonded. They bring us to heel, teach us to obey, and to serve, and deliciously!
I wished that I was on Earth again, where slave girls might go free, live luxuriously, pamper themselves, and even, should it please them, command the weak men of Earth.
But what most I now feared, and most hysterically rejected, was the suspicion that there might lurk in my deepest being a profound turning, a sudden, cataclysmic transformation of my consciousness, the possibility that I might admit to myself, confess to myself, a truth I dared not even articulate. This was the suspicion that I might not only accept the fittingness of slavery for one such as myself, for I had now come to recognize myself as a slave, but that I might come to find my fulfillment in it, that I would rejoice in it, and would come to love it. How fearful! I feared I might become such that I would not for the world relinquish my condition, my state, my bondage, that my bondage would become more precious to me by far than my freedom had ever been. I suspected what might be the joys of love and service, the pleasures of kneeling and obedience, the pleasures, too, of being a will-less, subjugated, helpless sexual toy, forced, a writhing slave, to endure whatever lengthy, maddening raptures might be inflicted upon me, a rightless property and possession, the ecstasies of belonging to a man, the joys of being owned and dominated by him, by his strength, his intellect, and his will, the joys of subjection to a master. These thoughts frightened me. I feared, and yet desired, to find myself kneeling before a man at whose feet I would have no choice but to admit to myself not only what I was, but what I wanted to be. I wanted to belong to a man, I feared, who would find the true me, drawing her forth and exposing her, as brutally, as callously, as one might a stripped slave, and one who would then, with the whip and collar, if he saw fit, allowing me no escape, brooking no objections, teach me to myself.