by John Norman
I smiled. Whereas the frightened, deferential slave had not recognized me sitting regally with Policrates and Kliomenes in the feasting hall, in the robes and mask of the courier of Ragnar Voskjard, I did not doubt but what she might quickly recognize my voice.
“I have it, Master,” she said, happily. “If you do not speak to help protect your identity, touch me once upon the left shoulder. If you do not speak because you regard me as only a contemptible slave, unworthy to be spoken to, touch me once upon the left arm.”
She lifted her body, tensing to see where she might be touched.
“Please, Master!” she begged.
But I did not move.
She then knelt back; on her heels. “I see, Master,” she said, miserably. “Not even that is to be made known to me.” She shuddered. “Do you not know how terrifying it is to be in a room, blindfolded, with one who does not speak to you? Ah, perhaps you do!” She smiled. “You well know how to treat a slave, Master,” she said.
I was interested to note that she spoke of herself, naturally, as a slave.
“But yet,” she said, “you are permitting me to speak. You have not struck me to silence, nor put a block of wood in my mouth, or gagged me. I may gather, then, that at least until I feel your blow, or the lash of your whip, that you wish to hear me speak. But why would this be? What could I, a mere slave, have to say that might interest you?”
She pulled at the cord loops. She seemed genuinely puzzled.
“How am I different from the other girls?” she asked herself, aloud, thinking.
“Of course!” she said, suddenly, delightedly. “Now I have it! I am the only Earth girl in the holding! They old you I was from Earth, didn’t they! You are not familiar, with Earth girls. That intrigued you! They must have told you. You did not take me in your hands and force open my mouth to look for bits of metal in my teeth. I do not think my accent betrayed me, for there are many barbarian accents on Gor, and I speak Gorean excellently.”
I smiled, the vain little thing, but it was true that she did speak a liquid, fluent Gorean. Her linguistic skills in this respect, and I have unusual aptitude in such matters, approached my own.
“That my masters call me ‘Beverly’,” she said, “would not in itself tell you that I was from Earth. Not unoften Gorean girls, particularly if they are to be consigned to a low slavery, are given such names. Perhaps, then, you might have seen the tiny scarring high on my left arm. It is called a ‘vaccination mark.’ “
I smiled. Such marks, and fillings in the teeth, are used by slavers as almost infallible signs of Earth origin. And woe to the girl who has them, for she is almost certainly then to be marked out for heavier chains and more ruthless treatment.
“But, on the whole,” she said, “I think it most likely that you were merely told that I was from Earth. This, then, you found of interest. You decided, then, that it was to be I who would come to your chambers this evening. Did you wish merely to see if we, being lower, were juicier puddings than our Gorean sisters, or, beyond this, as a matter of curiosity, did you wish to learn something of our nature?”
It amused me that Miss Henderson had used the graphic Gorean expression that she had, an expression almost always applied to a slave, a hot and helpless lay. From my own experience I did not think Earth girls were juicier puddings, so to speak, than Gorean girls, nor, really, that Gorean girls tended to be juicier puddings than Earth girls. It is true, of course, that the slave tends to be a far juicier pudding, so to speak than the free woman of either world. Some Earth girls are marvelous in the furs, and some Gorean girls are. Much depends on the individual girl. This is to be expected, of course, for all Gorean girls, as far as I know, have ultimately an Earth origin.
I think it is true, however, that an Earth girl may sometimes have an extra dimension of lovely, yielding slavishness in her, which is perhaps natural, considering the sexual desert from which she has been rescued. She can remember her loneliness and frustration, how she, a slave, languished in a world where she could find no masters. Such women, in time, find themselves overwhelmed in gratitude for the collar. For the first time, in spite of the world from which they come, they are forced to become true women. Thus they find fulfillment, and joy.
To the Gorean free woman the joys of the slave girl, though they may be despised and disparaged, are at least culturally not unknown, and are the envy of such free women. To the Earth woman, on the other hand, who finds herself in the collar, of a Gorean master, such joys come as a revelation. Only in her wildest and most secret dreams had she dared even to suspect their existence. Then she finds herself a slave girl.
“I think,” said Miss Henderson, “that it is your intention to try me, to try me out, to sample an Earth girl, to see if we might be of interest, but as of yet, in spite of my helplessness before you, you have not done so. Further, you have permitted me to speak. I gather, thus, that you will use me when it pleases you and, in the meantime, that I, though only a slave, am to speak before you.” She smiled. “I shall do so, Master.”
It was natural for her to think that I, whom she believed to be Gorean, would be interested to hear of her world, and of the nature of the female slaves taken from it. Earth slave girls are controversial on Gor, though I think they are now more accepted than formerly. Some men have a taste for Earth females. Other men will not even own them.
A not uncommon task for an Earth female on Gor is to attempt to secure the affections of a Gorean master who regards her as nothing and despises her. For months, through assiduous application, through attentiveness and study, through a selfless love and service, such a woman may labor to convince the brute who owns her that she is worthy to wear his collar. Then perhaps one day he looks down upon her kneeling before him. His hand touches the side of her head. Was it a gentle gesture? She takes his hand and presses her lips, sobbing, fervently to it. He takes her by the arms and presses her back, gently, to the tiles, a love slave. When he is finished with her he takes his whip and orders her to her knees. Perhaps he strikes her, perhaps he puts the whip to her mouth, and she kisses it. Well then does she know she is still a slave. He turns away. She, kneeling, her head down, smiles shyly, happily.
“My name was Beverly Henderson,” she said, “and I am from a world called Earth. Doubtless you have heard something of it. I assure you that it exists. I was captured there by slavers and brought to Gor, that I might wear a collar and learn to serve true men such as you, Master, who are so strong that you have stripped me, and bound me and put me at your feet, your slave.” She smiled. “No man of Earth,” she said, “is strong enough to do that.”
I smiled.
“The women of Earth,” she said, “are starved for strong men. I cannot tell you the restlessness, the misery and frustration they feel. The men of Earth are not true men. Perhaps once they were, long ago, but that is now history. Now they are weak and ineffectual. Manhood among them is measured by its lack. No longer are they capable of true manhood.”
I doubted what she said, but, surely, I had no intention of explicitly gainsaying her. I thought it best to let her speak.
“Females,” she said, “are the natural property of men such as Goreans, not of men such as those of Earth. It is men such as Goreans, and not men such as those of Earth, who recognize the meaning of our beauty and simply take us, and make us serve them. But I have bathed Master and now kneel naked and bound before him. I tell him nothing.”
She squirmed in the close confines of the loops of braided yellow cord. They held her well.
“I was taken to the House of Andronicus, in Vonda,” she said. “There, with other girls from Earth, more than fifty of us, I was branded. I remember one of the girls, pulled sobbing and in pain from the rack, crying out, joyfully, ‘I am a slave girl!’ How startling, and strange, seemed her cry. Yet I, too, later, after I had screamed and sobbed, and had been pulled, my thigh stinging from the iron, from the rack, and found myself alone, chained on the straw by the damp wall, was filled with
strange emotions. Though I could scarcely admit it to myself I knew, with wild, strange feelings, that I was glad that I, too, had been branded. ‘You were born for the brand,’ I whispered to myself, ‘and now, incomprehensibly, wonderfully, on this strange world, it has at last been put upon you. In your pain, rejoice, Slave Girl. You are now publicly marked, clearly and incontrovertibly, as what in your secret heart you have always been. Serve your masters well, Slave Girl.’”
I sat on the couch. My fists were clenched. Did she not know she was from Earth!
“Most of us, of course, including myself, dared not yet admit we were pleased with our brands. We lamented together, pretending to bemoan the misery of our plights. Our masters, of course, did not give us a great deal of time to indulge our self-pity. We must be prepared for markets. We were then separated and sent to different training rooms. There I was forced to kneel, and was put in a house collar. I was then chained at a ring and given my first whipping. Thus did I learn what the lash might feel like upon me, and that I was under discipline. My slave reflexes were tested and found, as is the case with most Earth females, initially inert. Held on my knees, my head held back, my nose pinched shut, my mouth forced open, slave wine was poured down my throat. I must needs swallow. I was then hooded and men were called in, who abused me, as it pleased them. Then, a day later, still hooded, I was returned to the central dungeon.”
She paused. “I have not been struck,” she said. “Therefore I gather that I have Master’s permission to continue.”
“How beautiful you are,” breathed a girl in the dungeon to me, when I had been unhooded. “How beautiful you are,” I whispered, seeing her. “Were you whipped?” she asked. “Yes,” I said. “I, too,” she said, head down.
I looked about the dungeon, at the girls there. How soft, and beautiful they were, in their collars. The collar, as Master well knows, considerably enhances the beauty of a woman.
“Were you raped?” asked the girl, a lovely blonde. “Yes,” I said. “They used me well.”
“I, too,” she said. “I enjoyed my rape,” said a redhead, collared, in an ankle ring, and chain, lying near us in the straw. “Slave!” hissed another girl to her. “Yes, slave,” smiled the redhead.
My intimacies sprang aflame when I heard her words. How bold she was! I myself would not have dared to admit such a thing to another woman! What might she think of me? I had not even, scarcely, dared to admit to myself, or recall, that in the arms of the fifth man my body had clasped his, and my arms, and I had, in the darkness of the hood, a moaning slave, subdued, cried out with pleasure. Then, too soon, they had been finished with me. That night I had lain in the darkness of the hood, hungry, recollecting the sensations they had induced in me. Now, though I could scarcely admit this to myself, I feared, and fear correctly, that the first fires of a slave’s passion had been ignited within me. I had known that I was a slave, and a true slave, before they had touched me, but I had not known until they took me in their arms, how helpless and low a slave I could be.”
I could scarcely believe my ears. It seemed that Miss Henderson, without thought, before me, was confessing herself a slave. She was from Earth!
“What is to be done with us?” asked one of the girls. “I think we are to be readied for markets,” said another girl. There was then a beating on the bars of the dungeon and we knelt. A man entered, with a whip. Our training began.”
She smiled at me. “We were taught to kneel, and to crawl, and to move and walk. We were taught the use of our hands, and of our total body, and our hair, and of our mouth and tongue. We were taught many things. The first words of Gorean I learned were ‘I am a slave girl.’ But our masters did not waste much time on us. Our new masters, those who would buy us, could teach us more.
The night before we were to be sold, we were permitted to speak to one another. We kissed one another, and cried, for we knew that we might soon never see one another again, and we did not know what lay before us, outside the confines of the House of Andronicus, in the harsh world of Gor. None of us, of course, had been sold before. Interestingly, however, we were looking forward to our sales. It was not just that we wished to be out of the House of Andronicus. It was rather, I think, that we were now eager to belong to masters.
You see, Master, in the past few days, a startling transformation had come over us. Few of us mentioned this, but I think there was not one among us who did not clearly recognize it. We had become, honestly, female slaves. Here we may distinguish between two concepts of slavery, that which can be imposed and constitutes an absolute and legal condition, and that which is instinctual and innate, which, under certain conditions, can be manifested and released. The fullest slave, of course, is she who is a natural slave, and then, beyond this, truly wears the collar, that slave who is a slave by nature and whose slavery, released, is then confirmed and fixed upon her openly, publicly, by all the sanctions of custom and law, for all the world to see.
What we discovered, Master, all of us, in the dungeons and training rooms of the House of Andronicus, was that we were natural slaves. There our slavery had been, by such devices as brands and collars, and whips and hoods, fully, for the first time, released in us and made manifest. Many of us were timid and thrilled to discover that we were natural slaves. At last there could be an end to the lies and pretenses. At last we could stop fighting ourselves and pretending to be what we were not. We now, though women of Earth, could admit to ourselves what we were. This gave us great joy. Beyond this, of course, we knew we were, categorically and absolutely, legal slaves, lovely properties which might be bartered and sold, and who might figure in transactions which would be upheld in any court of law.
This we found frightening, but absolutely thrilling. It so confirmed our slavery upon us! There was no escape for us! Even if we should pull at our chains, or cry or rebel, we would still be only troublesome slaves, who might then be disciplined and brought swiftly into line. Any person on the street, seeing us, would know what we were. Even children would know us as mere slaves, for, categorically, and legally, that is what we would be. Owned animals, that is what we would be! You are a man, Master, so perhaps you cannot understand, or fully understand, how exciting it is for a woman to be owned, to find herself a slave. But I am a slave, and a natural slave, and a legal slave. I am fearful. But I am joyful!”
Angrily I rose from the couch. I seized up the whip. I thrust it to her mouth. “I kiss your whip, joyfully, Master,” she whispered.
I looked down at her, enraged. Beverly Henderson had kissed the whip.
“Master?” she asked, frightened. She was very beautiful, bound before me, on her knees.
I returned to the couch, angry, and sat down upon it. I again regarded her.
She smiled, uncertainly. “I have kissed Master’s whip,” she said. “Does he not now wish to use me? Does he not now wish to try out an Earth girl?”
I did not respond.
“Surely I have told Master enough, now, about girls of Earth,” she said. “Is his curiosity not now satisfied? Does he not understand us now to be natural slaves, the rightful properties of men such as he?”
I did not respond.
“After that night,” she said, “we were divided into smaller lots and distributed throughout various markets. I think they did not wish, for some reason, to sell too many Earth girls in a given market. I found my own sale indescribably thrilling. I was exhibited naked. I was forced to perform lasciviously on the block, as a female slave. Even my slave reflexes were exhibited to the crowd. I was auctioned. I was sold to the highest bidder.” She smiled. “I have had various Masters, and various names. Eventually I came into the possession of the holding of Policrates, wherein you find me. There is little more to tell.”
I did not respond.
“Here I am called ‘Beverly’,” she smiled. “It was my name originally, on Earth, as you may recall I mentioned earlier. Now of course I wear it only as a slave name, by the whim of Masters. Still it pleases me. I
think it is an excellent slave name.”
I, too, thought so, looking upon her.
“You understand, of course, Master,” she said, “that I would not have spoken to a man of Earth, those pathetic and ineffectual fools, with the intimacy, the frankness and honesty with which I have addressed you, a man of Gor.”
I said nothing.
“What miserable weaklings they are,” she said.
I said nothing.
Suddenly she leaned forward. She strained against the loops of yellow cord which confined her wrists behind her body. Her knees moved on the furs, among the chains. I saw the steel at her throat. “The slut in me desires to serve a Master,” she whispered, suddenly, intensely. “Please, Master!”
I rose to my feet, and looked down at her.
“I am the slave of a man such as you!” she said.
I then, suddenly, savagely, seized her by the upper arms. I dragged her to the center of the room. I lifted her high above me, bound, her dark hair, unbound, loose and wild about her. I then, slowly, lowered her, to where her toes could just touch the floor. Then, suddenly, angrily, I shook her. “Master!” she cried out, miserably. I then dragged her back before the couch, where I stood her on her feet, before me. She felt the furs beneath her feet, the chains. I regarded her, in fury. I snapped my fingers. Immediately she knelt before me, bound, among the chains. She looked up, though she could see nothing in the confines of the blindfold.
I looked down at her.
Beverly Henderson, a self-confessed slave, and the most desirable woman I had ever seen, was at my feet. She was naked and bound, mine!
I was filled then with emotions so powerful, so primitive and exultant, so ancient, so overwhelming, so mighty and glorious, that I knew then I had caught the scent of the meaning of man, and of woman. Could I again deny my blood? Could I again repudiate the heritage of my manhood? How could it be? The meat of the mammoth roasted then again upon the greenwood spit. Once again, after an interim of ten thousand years, sparks were struck from blue flint, as heavy, hairy hands shaped the head of a spear. Once more were heard the love whimpers of the thonged female, who had been displeasing, begging to be released that she might lick the thighs of her master.