Assassin of Gor

by Norman, John;

  Following some two weeks of these discussions, which seemed to me at the time, at any rate, to be a waste of training time, Virginia Kent, who had feared men, had come to weigh seriously, if not to accept, certain of the theories of Flaminius, Phyllis to fight them and reject them as hateful slanders, and Elizabeth to regard them as an entertaining and stimulating hodgepodge of sophistry, reality, nonsense and propaganda. All three girls, in the last week, were taught certain standard answers to certain standard questions put to them by Flaminius, whether they agreed with them or not. These questions, to which simple, standard, memorized answers were to be promptly volunteered, were put to them over and over, until they, even Phyllis, responded without thinking. Certain of these questions and answers, suggesting their nature, would be:

  Q: What are you?

  A: I am a slave girl.

  Q: What is a slave girl?

  A: A girl who is owned.

  Q: Why do you wear a brand?

  A: To show that I am owned.

  Q: Why do you wear a collar?

  A: That men may know who owns me.

  Q: What does a slave girl want more than anything?

  A: To please men.

  Q: What are you?

  A: I am a slave girl.

  Q: What do you want more than anything?

  A: To please men.

  There is, beyond these, an entire set of questions and answers, some of them considerably more detailed, and involving standard responses to simple questions pertaining to such matters as history and psychology.

  The truly sinister aspect of even this portion of the girls’ training did not become evident to me, or to Elizabeth, until the entire next week was spent again before the mirror, seeing themselves as slave girls, and repeating, aloud, these questions and answers, as though putting them to themselves; as though, with Flaminius gone, it was they themselves, the girls, who were putting these questions to themselves, and responding with almost hypnotic automatism; it was probably easiest on Elizabeth, who knew that she was playing a part, that she would be, sooner or later, carried to safety, but even Elizabeth, more than once, awakened with a cry in the night, clutching me, whimpering, “No, no, no.” The sixth week of the training was spent, as several of the former, before the mirror, but this time repeating over and over, aloud, “I love being a slave girl. I love being a slave girl.” At last, after this cruel and almost interminable repetition, utilizing simple psychological principles, intended to brand into the girls’ psyche the identity of a Pleasure Slave, the girls began the period of exercises, many of which would, for certain periods of the day, be carried through the next months. During the next weeks and months the lessons of Flaminius were never again touched upon, except occasionally, for her amusement, by Sura, who would suddenly cry to one of the girls, at the same time brandishing the slave goad, such a query as “What do you want more than anything?” to which the girl, to her shame and astonishment, would find herself crying out in fear, “To please men!” Then Sura would say, “Then learn what I am teaching you,” and they would respond, fearing the goad, “Yes, Mistress!”

  In the hours that Virginia and Phyllis were not in training, and the training hours are only five Ahn a day, they were, particularly in the beginning, intensively drilled in Gorean. Elizabeth, on the other hand, usually assisted Caprus in his office. Later, when the girls became reasonably proficient at Gorean, they were permitted the freedom of the House baths, which they enjoyed, and the liberty to move about the House rather as they pleased, saving that they must be locked in their cells by the eighteenth bar. The foods given them also changed with the advance in their training, and the desire to have varied, tasty fare, and sometimes a small bowl of Ka-la-na with their supper, drove them to perform well. Further, each must eat the same, so pressure was brought on each to come to a given level, for the food of all remained the same until each had attained the desired next level of training. By the end of the twelfth week of their training they were eating well, and by the end of the fifteenth, very well, generally low-calorie foods, nourishing, a good amount of protein, diets supervised as carefully as those of racing tarns or hunting sleen; Elizabeth was the only girl who had, so to speak, a compartment of her own, with a door that might be shut, rather than simple bars, and so the three girls often, when possible, would come to the compartment, for some moments of privacy. At these times they would, as well as possible, converse in Gorean; Elizabeth taught them much; she did not permit them to know she spoke English; I would often leave the compartment at these times but sometimes I would remain. Elizabeth led them, to some extent, not to fear me, leading them to believe that she had so well served me that she had, to some degree, engaged my affections. I think she did not realize how true her words were.

  In the beginning, when moving about the house, the girls had been permitted only the garb customarily worn in the sweat and motion of the training, a rectangle of silk, about a foot long, thrust into a silken string knotted about the waist; Virginia and Phyllis would not even leave their cells so clad until Elizabeth called upon them, so clad herself, ordering them forth; Phyllis had been tearfully furious that she should be so seen, Virginia terrified; but, on the orders of Elizabeth, who spoke with authority, they followed her forth, frightened, but heads high and shoulders back, and soon they were delighting in the sights of the house, for they had seen little but the kennels, the training room and their cells; it had been a good day for them; each was female and Elizabeth had taught them that this was a permissible thing to be.

  “These men are slavers,” Elizabeth confided to them. “They have seen women before.”

  Later, in the eighteenth week of their training, they were given brief silken slave livery, sleeveless, fastened by the loop on the left shoulder. Virginia and Phyllis were given white livery, Elizabeth red. It was at this time also that Virginia and Phyllis had been given their lock collars, white-enameled, and that the slave anklets, the identification bands, had been removed from their left ankles. Elizabeth, at the beginning of her training, had simply exchanged her yellow collar for a red one. She had already been a lock-collar girl.

  By the twentieth week of their training the girls could converse rather adequately in Gorean, and Virginia and Phyllis continued to improve. Elizabeth, of course, was totally fluent in the language. Elizabeth’s accent was interesting, for it was, in effect, Tuchuk; the accent of the girls was that of Ar. I noted, however, that Sura had insisted that the girls not refine their accents overly much, for it must remain clear they were barbarians; further, Virginia and Phyllis were encouraged to slur and lisp certain sounds, it being thought appealing in female slaves; on the other hand Sura, who did not slur and lisp these sounds herself, did not insist on it, for some reason, with the girls; accordingly Elizabeth, Phyllis and Virginia, not being forced to do so, did not adopt this affectation. I learned independently, from Ho-Tu, that this particular form of speech defect was, however, no longer in style; perhaps if it had been Sura would have been more adamant.

  Once Virginia had, in our compartment, with Elizabeth and Phyllis, shyly looked up at me, and asked if I knew the name of the blond guard, he with blue eyes, who came upon occasion to observe the training.

  “Relius,” said I.

  “Oh,” said she, dropping her head.

  “The fellow with him often,” I volunteered, “is Ho-Sorl.”

  “The ugly one?” asked Phyllis. “The one with the black hair and the scar on the side of his face?”

  “I do not think he is ugly,” I said, “but I think you mean the same one as I. He does have black hair and there is a scar on the side of his face.”

  “I know him,” said Phyllis. “He keeps looking at me. I detest him.”

  “I thought,” said Elizabeth, “you were dancing to him this morning.”

  “I was not!” snapped Phyllis.

  “And yesterday,” laughed Elizabeth, rocking back, clapping her hands, “when Sura asked him to stand forth that one of us might appro
ach him to administer the First Kiss of the Captive Slave Girl, it was you who first sprang to your feet.”

  “I have scarcely ever seen anyone move so fast,” commented Virginia.

  “It’s not true!” cried Phyllis. “It’s not true!”

  “Perhaps he will buy you,” suggested Elizabeth.

  “No!” cried Phyllis.

  “Do you think we will be sold at the Curulean?” asked Virginia of me.

  “It is apparently the plan of Cernus,” I said.

  “I wonder,” said Virginia, “if someone like Relius will buy me.”

  “Perhaps,” said Elizabeth.

  “I doubt it,” said Phyllis. “You are too skinny and your face has pocks.”

  “I am not ugly,” said Virginia. “And I cannot help it that I do not have a body like yours.”

  Phyllis tossed her head, sniffing.

  “I was afraid of men,” said Virginia, her head down. “But now I find I am curious about them. I did not know what to do, or how to act with men. But now I am a slave, and I am being taught. I am being shown what to do. I am not so afraid of men now.” She looked at Phyllis. “I want a man,” she said.

  “Slave!” jeered Phyllis.

  “Don’t you want a man?” asked Virginia, tears in her eyes.

  “I will have nothing to do with men,” said Phyllis.

  “Oh yes you will, Pleasure Slave,” Elizabeth assured her, “oh yes you will!”

  Phyllis cast her a withering glance.

  “I wonder what it would be like to be in the arms of a man,” said Virginia.

  “Like Relius?” asked Elizabeth.

  “Yes!” said Virginia.

  Phyllis laughed.

  Virginia dropped her head. “I am ugly,” she said. “I am unworthy of being sold at the Curulean.”

  “You’re a slave!” laughed Phyllis. “Only a slave! Virginia the little slave!”

  “I am a slave,” said Virginia. And she added, “And so are you!”

  “I am not a slave!” cried Phyllis.

  “Pretty little slave!” laughed Virginia, pointing her finger at her.

  “Never say that to me!” screamed Phyllis, leaping to her feet.

  “Pretty little slave!” screamed Virginia.

  Phyllis leaped upon her and in an instant the two girls were rolling and scratching on the stones, screaming at one another.

  “Stop them!” cried Elizabeth. “Stop them!”

  I spoke calmly. “Free men do not much interfere in the squabbles of slaves.”

  The two girls stopped fighting. Phyllis stood up, breathing heavily. Virginia rose to her feet, and stepped back. She brushed back her hair with her right hand. Both girls looked at me.

  “Thank you,” said Virginia.

  “It is time that you returned to your cells, Slaves,” said I.

  Virginia smiled. Phyllis, not speaking, turned and went to the door, but there she turned once more, looking at me, waiting for Virginia.

  Virginia regarded me. “You are a man,” she said. “Does Master find the slave Virginia ugly?”

  “No,” I said, “the slave Virginia is not ugly. The slave Virginia is beautiful.”

  There were tears in her eyes. “Could such a man as Relius, do you think,” she asked, “desire such a slave as Virginia?”

  “Doubtless,” I said, as though irritated with her question, “were the slave Virginia not White Silk the man Relius would have asked for her long ago.”

  She looked at me gratefully.

  It is, incidentally, one of the perquisites of employment in the house of a slaver that a member of the guard or staff may ask for, and generally receive, the use of whatever Red Silk Girls he pleases. Elizabeth had not been bothered in this particular because she was, by general recognition, solely mine while I remained in the house.

  “And,” I said, rather loudly, looking at Phyllis, “were the slave Phyllis not White Silk she would have found herself used frequently, and well, by the man Ho-Sorl.”

  Phyllis looked at me in fury and turned, leaving the room. She walked beautifully, sinuous in her rage.

  “The slave Phyllis,” I said, rather loudly again, “has learned much from Mistress Sura.”

  Phyllis cried out and turned in the hall, her fists clenched. Then she spun about with a cry of rage and ran weeping down the corridor.

  Elizabeth clapped her hands and laughed.

  I glared at Virginia, who still stood in the room. “Go to your cell, Slave,” I said.

  Virginia dropped her head, smiling. “Yes,” she said, “Master,” and then turned and left. She, too, walked beautifully.

  “It is hard to believe,” said Elizabeth, “that she once taught classics and ancient history in a college.”

  “Yes,” I said, “it is.”

  “On Earth,” said Elizabeth, “I do not think a woman would dare walk so beautifully.”

  “No,” I said, “I do not think so.”

  The training of the slave girls progressed. It had begun, following the period entirely consumed with exercises, with such small things as instruction on how to stand, to walk, to kneel, to recline, to eat, to drink. Grace and beauty, following Sura, and I would scarcely dare dispute such an authority, is mostly a matter of expression, both that of the face and body. I could, week to week, see the change in the girls, even Elizabeth. Some of the things they were taught seemed to me very silly, but I, at the same time, found it difficult to object.

  One thing of that sort I recall is a trick where the girl feeds the master a grape held between her teeth. She may or may not have her wrists braceleted behind her back for this particular feat. One leg is folded beneath her and the other is extended behind her, toes pointed, and then she lifts the grape delicately to your mouth. Elizabeth and I used to laugh heartily over this one, but I think it was effective, as I seldom got beyond the third grape.

  “Observe,” once had said Elizabeth to me, to my amusement, in the secrecy of our compartment, “the twelfth way to enter a room.”

  I had observed. It was not bad. But I think I preferred the tenth, that with the girl’s back against the side of the door, the palms of her hands on the jamb, her head up, lips slightly parted, eyes to the right, smoldering at just the right temperature.

  “How many ways are there,” I asked, sitting cross-legged in the center of the compartment, on the stone couch, “to enter a room?”

  “It depends on the city,” said Elizabeth. “In Ar we are the best; we have the most ways to enter a room. One hundred and four.”

  I whistled.

  “What about,” I asked, “just walking straight through?”

  She looked at me. “Ah,” said she, “one hundred and five!”

  A good deal of the training of the slave girl, surprisingly, to my naive mind, was in relatively domestic matters. For example, the Pleasure Slave, if she is trained by a good house, must also be the master of those duties commonly assigned to Tower Slaves. Accordingly, they must know how to cut and sew cloth, to wash garments and clean various types of materials and surfaces, and to cook an extensive variety of foods, from the rough fare of Warriors to concoctions which are exotic almost to the point of being inedible. Elizabeth would regularly bring her efforts back to the compartment, and the nights were not infrequent when I longed for the simple fare at the table of Cernus, or perhaps a bowl of Ho-Tu’s gruel. One dish I recall was composed of the tongues of eels and was sprinkled with flavored aphrodisiacs, the latter however being wasted on me as I spent, to Elizabeth’s consternation, the night lying on my side in great pain. Elizabeth was, however, to my satisfaction, taught a large number of things which, to my mind, were more appropriate to the training of slave girls, including a large number of dances, dozens of songs, and an unbelievable variety of kisses and caresses. The sheer mechanics of her repertoire, theoretically outfitting her to give exquisite pleasure to anyone from an Ubar to a peasant, are much too complex and lengthy to recount here. I do not think, however, that I have forgot
ten any of it. One thing that I thought was nice was that Elizabeth had asked Sura about the dance she had begun to perform but could not finish, when we had first come to the house of Cernus, the dance which is accompanied by the Tuchuk slave song. Sura, who seemed to know everything, taught the rest of it, song and all, to her, and to the other girls. For good measure she also taught them the independent dance, sometimes called the Dance of the Tuchuk Slave Girl, which I had once seen performed at a banquet in Turia.

  “Know that you are beautiful,” Sura had once said to them. “Now I will teach you to dance.”

  My own duties during these months in the House of Cernus remained light, consisting of little more than accompanying Cernus on infrequent occasions on which he left the house, a member of his guard; in the city Cernus traveled in a sedan chair, borne on the shoulders of eight men. The chair was enclosed and, under the blue and yellow silk which covered it, there was metal plating.

  The night that Phyllis Robertson, under the torches in the hall of Cernus, while we supped, performed the belt dance, was the last day of the Eleventh passage hand, about a month before the Gorean New Year, which occurs on the Vernal Equinox, the first day of the month of En’Kara. The training of the girls, over the months, had been substantially completed, and would be for all practical purposes finished by the end of the twelfth passage hand. Many houses would doubtless have put them up for sale in En’Kara, but Cernus, as I had heard, was saving them for the Love Feast, which occupies the five days of the fifth passage hand, falling late in the summer. There was a variety of reasons why he was postponing their sale. The most obvious was that good prices are commanded on the Love Feast. But perhaps more importantly he had been spreading rumors throughout the city of the desirability of trained barbarians, of which he now had several in training, those who had been brought to Gor with Virginia and Phyllis, some who had been brought to the pens earlier and not sold off immediately, and a large number who had been brought in subsequent trips to the Voltai by the ship of the slavers; I had sometimes but not always accompanied Cernus on these missions; to the best of my knowledge one or another of the black ships had come seven times to the point of rendezvous, since the one I had first seen; the House of Cernus now, altogether, had better than one hundred and fifty barbarians in training, under the tutelage of various Passion Slaves; I gathered that the reports of Sura and Ho-Tu on the progress of the first group, that of Elizabeth, Virginia and Phyllis, had been extremely encouraging. In postponing the sales until the Love Feast, of course, there would be time to complete, at least substantially, the training of a large number of barbarian girls. Also, as Cernus doubtless intended, the delay would give his delicately seeded rumors, pertaining to the desirability of barbarians, time to circulate, time to stimulate the imagination and inflame the curiosity of potential buyers. I gather his planning must have been successful, for sales generally in Ar during the first two months of the New Year were down somewhat from seasonal norms, as though Ar’s gold for slaves was being held somewhat, in anticipation of the Love Feast.