Guardsman of Gor (23 page)

She knows that she is exposed to the view of masters, or available for their viewing, whenever they might please to do so, at any hour, either of the day or night. She may be looked in upon, she knows, and is sometimes certain that she is, even when she sleeps. This is similar, too, of course, to the situation of the man of Earth and his dog. He, too, may look upon his dog whenever and however he pleases, even when, if he wishes, the animal, curled in its place, is asleep. That is his privilege.

The analogy, incidentally, between the dog of the man of Earth and the slave girl of the Gorean male is a quite close one. Of course, the analogy is not perfect. It is, for example, far more delicious to own a slave girl than a dog. To be perfectly candid, however, the slave girl is a lovely, vulnerable, highly sensitive organism; the rational master commonly, unless she chooses to be troublesome, handles her with deli-

cacy and afection; if she is displeasing, of course, even in small ways, she must expect to be shown little or no. mercy; on the other hand, if she is obedient and loving, her life is likely to be a joy almost incomprehensible to the neurotic, masculinized, egotistical women of Earth.

The slave girl, subject to male domination, surrendered to service and love, branded and collared, serving and kneeling, is, under the institutional enhancements of a civilization, fixing her condition upon her with uncompromising (clarity, in effect, the primitive woman, the biological woman, the selected-for woman, the woman in her place in nature, the fulfilled woman. It is little wonder then that slaves, in a situation where their condition is scarcely unique, and in a supportive, appropriate cultural matrix, where they are free, without being subjected to envious, vicious, hysterical criticism, to be themselves, tend, once the right master is found, to be relieved and happy. The collar, in effect, has returned them to themselves. They have become women. And, to be sure, the Gorean men will have it no other way.

"Am I to be presented to my Master clothed?" asked the kneeling girl.

"At least in the beginning," said the girl with the switch.

"I see," said the kneeling girl.

"Stand," said the girl with the switch.

Immediately, gracefully, the girl stood.

The girl who was serving as keeper went to a large chest at the side of the room. She hung her switch on a hook on the wall and opened the chest. "When your Master wishes you to enter his presence," she said, "you will be summoned by the sound of a gong."

"Yes, Mistress," said the girl standing near the mirror. She had not been given permission to turn about.

The girl who was serving as the small brunet's keeper withdrew from the chest, and shook out, a flimsy, tiny, diaphanous snatch of yellow pleasure silk. It was the sort of garment which, commonly, would be worn only by the most lascivious of dancing slaves writhing before strong, rude men in the lowest taverns on Gor. Free women had been known to faint at the sight, or touch, of such cloth. In many cities it is a crime to bring such cloth into contact with the flesh of free women. It is just too exciting, and sensuous.

As the girl before the mirror shuddered the garment was

brought forward and placed upon her. The girl regarded herself in the mirror. She smiled, wryly. "Is this the 'clothing,"' she asked, "in which I am first to be presented to my Master?"

"Yes," said the other girl.

"It is like being more naked than naked," said the girl before the mirror.

"In the presence of your Master," said the girl who was serving as her keeper, "you will find yourself grateful for even these few threads."

"Yes, Mistress," said the girl.

"Feel them," ordered the larger girl, sternly.

The girl, between her fingers, felt the cloth that clung about her body. I saw her tremble.

"It is a slave's reflex," sneered the girl who was serving as her keeper.

"It is so exciting," said the girl before the mirror.

"It is nearly time for you to be belled," said the girl who was serving as her keeper.

"When this garment is removed from me," asked the smaller girl, "am I then to be whipped?"

"That is the Master's decision, is it not?" asked the larger girl.

"Yes, Mistress," said the exquisite, small, ravishing brunet.

The girl who was acting as the lovely slave's keeper then went again to the chest and, with a sensuous jangle, withdrew from it bellings suitable for a slave. Before the mirror, then, was the exquisite slave belled. Her ankles were belled, and her wrists, and, lastly, about her neck, was closed a belled collar.

"I am now ready to be presented before my Master," said the exquisite brunet.

"Yes," agreed the other girl.

"When will I be presented before him?" asked the exquisite brunet.

"When the gong sounds," said the other girl.

"But when will the gong sound?" asked the exquisite brunet, in misery.

"When the Master wishes," said the other girl, "and, until then, you will wait, as befits a slave."

"Yes, Mistress," whispered the small brunet, in misery. When she moved there was a sensuous jangle and rustle of

the slave bells locked upon her body. I resisted the impulse, almost overwhelming, to thrust aside the curtain, declaring myself to her, seizing and throwing her to the very tiles of the cosmetics room, there subjecting her to delicious slave rape. I controlled myself. I conquered my impulses, not that they might be unhealthily and indefinitely suppressed and frustrated, in the manner of Earth, but, rather, in the manner of Gor, that they might later be the more sweetly and fully satisfied. "Before the feast, go hungry." So say the Goreans.

"You will kneel now, head down and knees widely spread, to await the summons of your Master," said the girl who had held the switch.

"Yes, Mistress," said the exquisite brunet, obeying.

Silently I withdrew then from my position behind the curtain. I would leave the house and, at a paga tavern, purchase supper. I would return after my repast, later, sometime in the early evening, at my leisure.

I sat upon a great curule chair, on a broad, three-stepped, carpeted dais in the house which I had borrowed from a friend, a citizen of Victoria, for the past few days.

I wore a mask identical to that which I had worn when I had first gained admittance to the holding of Policrates, when I had, long ago, pretended to be an agent of Ragnar Voskjard, he who was the bearer of the topaz. I remembered well the feast at which I had been entertained. The slaves in the holding, as I recalled, many of them former free women, had been quite beautiful. I well remember one of them, in slave steel, a small, exquisite brunet, who had knelt before me, lifting fruit cupped in her hands for my delectation, and, in this, of course, as the pirates wished, presenting herself as well for my survey and consideration. Later she had been sent to my room.

I had amused myself thoroughly with the small beauty. Indeed, in that night, I gathered, she had been, for the first time, taught the full meaning of her collar. When she had entered the room she had been a woman who had been enslaved; when I had left the room she knew herself to be a woman who was a slave. She had piteously begged to be bought, and to be taken with me, and kept as my own. I had learned later in the holding, when I had been captured, that she was owned in her heart by that brutal, anonymous master

who had so abused her; that her love, the helpless love of a tormented, yielding slave, was his. How she had contrasted the audacity and glory of that unknown Gorean master with the timidity and weakness of the males of Earth, such as, at that time, she took me to be.

Then, last night, on the rude stones of the Street of the Writhing Slave, she helpless in my arms, locked in the chain collar of a Coin Girl, with the flattish bell and coin box, I had instructed her, and thoroughly, in the respect due, did he but assume his mastery, to one who was once of Earth. By morning she had learned this lesson well. We did not relate to one another in the perverted modality of unisexual identicals but in the order of nature, she as woman, and slave, I as man, and master. When I, finished with her for the time, had sent her fleeing from me, she had been riven with conflict. Two men, it seemed, she loved, he whom she had served in the holding of Policrates, he who had treated her with the insolence commonly accorded an Earth-girl slave by Gorean masters, and he whom she had served on the stones of the Street of the Writhing Slave, he who had treated her as a full and lowly slave, who once, perchance, had been an Earth girl.

I reached to my left and, from the rack on the gong frame, picked up the slender stick which reposed there. On this stick was mounted a rounded, fur-wrapped head. I struck the gong once, smartly, replaced the stick, and leaned back in the curule chair.

Before the reverberations of the gong had subsided I heard, hurrying towards the room, from deep within the house, the sound of slave bells.

A curtain was thrust aside at the end of the long room, and I saw her in the threshold, barefoot, her ankles belled, her feet almost lost in the piling of the deep carpet leading to the dais.

She seemed startled, stunned. How beautiful she was in the bit of yellow pleasure silk.

The other girl, who was serving as her keeper, and had now retrieved her switch, thrust her forward.

Timidly, and as though she could scarcely believe what was occurring, the girl in the yellow pleasure silk approached the dais.

She could not, it seemed, take her eyes from the mask which I wore.

Then she stopped at the foot of the dais, trembling, belled, looking up at me.

"A slave, Master," explained the girl with the switch, standing behind her.

Immediately the girl in the yellow pleasure silk fell to her knees and put her head to the carpet at the foot of the dais.

I gestured to the girl behind her, she with the switch, that she might leave. She smiled, and withdrew. I, too, smiled. Lola had done a good job with her. Lola, too, of course, bad been her keeper as a Coin Girl when I had, as Jason of Victoria, by apparent accident, encountered her on the Street of 'the Writhing Slave. I was pleased with Lola. She had served me well. Perhaps I could reward her, by giving her to a suitable master.

I snapped my fingers and the girl kneeling before the, dais lifted her head.

Furtively she looked about. She then realized that she was alone with me. She looked up at me.

"Is it you, my Master?" she whispered. "Is it truly you, my Master?"

I did not respond to her.

"If I may not speak," she said, "by your least gesture or movement of irritation, warn me to silence. I have no wish to displease you in the slightest."

I indicated, with a movement of my fingers, that she should discard the pleasure silk. She did so, dropping it behind her.

"You won my heart is the holding of Policrates," she said. "Since that time I have been yours. Never did I dream that my fortune would be such that you would even remember me, let alone see fit to bring me into your own house. Thank you, my Master! Thank you, my Masterl"

I looked down upon her.

"It is my hope that you will find me pleasing," she said. "I will endeavor to be a good slave to you."

I smiled.

"Of course I must, I know," she said, "for I am your slave. I am not a fool, Master. But it is more than that. It is not only that I am afraid of being fed to your animals, or of being whipped and tortured, if I am not pleasing. No, it is more than that." There were tears in her eyes as she looked up at me. "You see, my Master," she said, "your Earth-girl

slave loves you." She put her head down. "She has loved you ever since that night in the holding of Policrates. She is thus, my Master, more your slave than you could ever know." She lifted her head. "Did you make me love you that night, or were you only such that I could not help loving you. It does not matter, for I loved you then, and love you now, with the total helplessness of a slave's love for her master. You are my Master, and I am your slave, and I love you." She brushed a tear from her eye. It smeared the mascara.-type compound which had been put on her lashes, making a dark smear on her cheek. "I love you, my Master," she said.

I looked down upon her. It pleased me to hear the former Miss Henderson confess her love for me, in my guise as her Gorean master.

"I do not ask that you love me, even a little, my Master," she said, "for I am nothing, and a slave. I know well, and need not be taught, that I am owned. I know that I am only an article of your property." She put her head down. "Just as you own some piece of clothing, or the thongs to your sandals, so, too, do you own me. To you, too, I am doubtless of far less value than a pet sleen. I do not ask, accordingly, nor would I be so presumptuous or bold as to ask, or beg, that you care even a little for me. No, my Master. I am only your slave." She then lifted her head again. Tears were in her eyes. "But know, my Master," she said, "that my own love, undesired though it might be, worthless as it doubtless is, that of a slave, is yours-"

With my finger I indicated a place upon the mask I wore. With her fingers she reached to her own face. She touched her face, beneath her left eye. On her fingers, she saw, was the stain of the smeared cosmetic. She looked at me, frightened. She rubbed her cheek and then, her head down, rubbed her finger tips on her right thigh.

From beside the curule chair I picked up a five-stranded Gorean slave lash. I threw it to the carpet, in front of the girl.

She looked down at the lash and then, frightened, up at me. "Am I to be whipped, my Master?" she asked.

I gestured that she should return the whip, and then, briefly, placed four fingers, downward, on the arm of the curule chair. The whip would be returned, then, in the manner of the naked slave.

"Yes, my Master," she whispered.

She fell forward, to her hands and knees, with a jangle of slave bells, and put her head down. She took the staff of the whip, which is about an inch and a quarter to an inch and a half in diameter, gently between her teeth, and looked up at me. The staff of the
whip
was crosswise in her mouth. Her mouth, by the
whip,
was held widely open. I snapped my fingers. Head down, then, on all fours, to the small sounds of the slave bells on her wrists and ankles, and collar, she slowly ascended the three broad steps of the carpeted dais. She was then before me, on all fours, the lovely, obedient slave, the former Miss Henderson, before the curule chair on which I reclined. She lifted her head, and, extending her slender, closely collared neck, delicately tendered the whip into my grasp. I took the whip from her, and she looked at me, frightened. Was she now to be whipped? The decision, of course, was mine. I folded the blades of the whip back against the staff, and held out the staff and blades to her. Suddenly, gratefully, tears in her eyes, sobbing, and half gasping and choking with relief, kneeling before me, grasping my calves, her head over my thighs, she covered the whip, that symbol of masculinity, and of the authority of men over her, and specifically of my own authority over her, with