Prize of Gor (18 page)

And so Ellen was now in attendance at table, waiting on her master and his guests in an unusual room. The linens, crystal and tableware, the tasteful appointments and gracious furnishings, the general decor, were all very much, as we have noted, as though of Earth. Surely as far as she could tell, they were indistinguishable in quality and nature from the finest which her former world might have offered. It would not have been surprising to have found such a room in the suburban mansion of a man of wealth and position. She wondered if it might not be a reconstruction of such a room. Perhaps its furnishings, and such, had been brought from Earth? Everything was much as it might have been on Earth. There was one anomaly, of course, as we recall, she, herself. Ellen, amongst fully clothed, elegantly attired guests, serving, was naked, and branded and collared.

This was doubtless as he wanted her, as it amused him to have her, as it pleased him to have her.

To be sure, men are fond of looking upon their properties, their houses, their works of art, their collections, their lands, their gardens, their forests, their dogs and horses, their women.

Too, men, the vain beasts, enjoy showing off their possessions.

Oh, she had little doubt that her master enjoyed showing her off, but his pleasure, she was sure, extended well beyond the simple pleasures and vanities of displaying a possession. It involved, as well, she was sure, a sense of exultant triumph, that had much to do with their biographies. It was not then simply a matter of display, but of triumph, of the sweet taste of total victory, as well. She was being paraded, if only the two of them understood that, rather as a subjugated antagonist, a conquered foe, a former fair opponent now vanquished and helplessly enslaved. Conceive, if you will, the analogy of a once-haughty, once-vain princess, her armies now scattered and crushed, chained naked to the chariot of a general, being led in triumph through jubilant crowds. How soon she would hope that this noise, this pressing and raucous clamor, might end and that she then, a lowly, unimportant slave, might be permitted to simply lose herself amongst other slaves, and become what she, in her chains, has now discovered herself to be, a female, and the rightful property of a man.

She wondered if he had sometimes, in the classroom, so long ago, pondered what she might look like, nude, so marked, so collared. Perhaps he had imagined her, long ago, in the classroom, as she moved about before the class, as being so, as being naked, and branded and collared. She no longer wore the anklet. But it had not been removed until she had been branded and collared. Thus, there had remained, at all times, some token of bondage on her body.

“Then, Ellen,” laughed the woman, “you are nothing but livestock, nothing but a pretty little piece of livestock, nothing but a domestic animal, nothing but a pretty little branded domestic animal!”

Tears sprang to Ellen’s eyes. But she must stand in her collar where she was. She flung a piteous, begging look at her master.

“Answer our guest, Ellen,” he said, kindly.

“Yes, Ma’am,” Ellen sobbed.

“Please forgive Ellen,” said Mirus, her master. “She has not been so long in the collar. Much is new to her. She may not yet fully understand the meaning of the band on her neck, the mark on her thigh.”

“But is it not unusual that you would have her serve naked?” asked the woman.

“Gorean feasts are often served by naked slaves,” said Mirus.

“Why?” demanded the woman, angrily.

“It improves the appetite,” said Mirus, smiling.

“Of course!” she said, angrily.

Her formally dressed companion, who had been muchly silent, but muchly, too, intent upon her, laughed.

“Do not encourage him,” she chided.

“If you were a man,” he said, “you would understand how it is very pleasant to be served by a naked slave.”

“I do not doubt it,” she said, coldly.

“It can be very pleasant for the slave, as well,” said Mirus. “It can give her many warm and delicious feelings, the honor of being permitted to approach and serve masters, the understanding that she is wanted, and desired, and owned, the gratification of being enabled to display herself, in the order of nature, as an acknowledged and total female before strong men, and so on.”

“Undoubtedly,” said the woman, angrily.

Ellen noted that the woman was very beautiful. She wore an off-the-shoulder evening dress, and her shoulders were sweetly wide and soft, perhaps alluringly so. The charms of her bosom were amply but subtly, not vulgarly, suggested. She was doubtless a woman of high intelligence and exquisite taste. Her companion seemed unable to take his eyes from her. About her throat there was a tasteful, close-fitting, single strand of pearls.

Ellen thought to herself, somewhat reluctantly, that she had perhaps not minded so serving as much as she might have supposed. To be sure, there had been an intense sting of humiliation as she understood what she was to do, and that she must obey unquestioningly, and that her helpless service and abject obedience would amuse and gratify her master, but, after her initial confusion, shame and blushings, and stumbling once, and almost dropping a plate, she was aware, bit by bit, that she did not mind, so much, what she was doing. She had begun to feel warm sensations, and a sense of her place in these things, and her specialness. She was pleased, too, to be naked before her master, and she did not doubt that he “found her flanks of interest,” and the gaze of the other man had certainly been, at the least, warmly approbatory. After their eyes had met once, fully, she had not dared to look at him again, not so openly or directly. But several times during the evening, when his attentions were not completely absorbed by his charming companion, she had sensed his eyes, those of a powerful male, on her youthful, well-turned, stripped body. So she did have some sense of what it might be to serve masters thusly, and she found herself, in her way, appreciated and prized. And so she served shyly, sometimes fighting strange sensations in her body. She could not deny that serving men as a naked slave called up from deep within her strange, surprising, unfamiliar feelings. It disturbed her in some very unsettling, but warm and pleasant, and deliciously troubling, way. It made her feel terribly feminine, helplessly and beautifully feminine. She wondered if this might be an erotic experience for her. What a strange thing, she thought, and so surprisingly beautiful, to begin to feel the warmth and wonder of one’s own sex. How few women, she feared, felt their femininity. It had been denied to them for centuries by one sort of fanatics and now it was again being denied to them, on her own world, by a new form of fanatics, building on the insanities, cruelties and envy of their predecessors, utilizing the poisons of the past in the interests of unnatural, self-serving political objectives. What are these strange feelings, she wondered, which I am beginning to feel, these enticing, delightfully tormenting feelings? Will I be able to resist them? Will they take me over, will they conquer me, will they put a rope on my neck and drag me zealously, helplessly, eagerly, panting after them? Am I to become their captive, their victim and prisoner? Am I to wear their leash, their bonds, as a helpless slave? Am I to become one of those low girls who whimper and scratch at the sides of their kennels? She was beginning, she feared, to feel sensations sometimes referred to vulgarly in Gorean as the burning, or the fires, in the slave belly. If she had been alone with her master, so serving, she would have begged for his least caress. Even had he impatiently cuffed her to the side, she felt that she might, in gratitude, have crawled back, begging to lick and kiss the hand that had administered the blow.

She loved him. He was her master. She was his slave.

“Surely you are aware,” said Mirus, her master, to the woman whom she did not know, she in the lovely off-the-shoulder gown, “that in the history of Earth, for thousands of years, slavery was an accepted, approved, and prized institution.”

“No longer,” she said.

“In certain parts of the world it still is,” he said, “but, more to the point, the intelligence of the ancients and medievals, and such, was not inferior to our own, and, in many respects, most would grant, many of them, perhaps the majority, were morally superior to large numbers of our lying, cheating, thieving, greedy, envious contemporary representatives of manufactured “mass man.” Most of them had no objection to slavery, and, indeed, saw its values. Certainly you can understand how it might alleviate many social problems, one among many being that of expanding, uncontrolled populations intent on transforming a once verdant, lovely planet into arid, sterile ecological garbage. To be sure, there are many ways of solving social problems, and Earth is clearly moving to imperialistic centralization, to statism, collectivism and authoritarianism, in which, to control matters, human beings will become in fact, if not in name, slaves of the state. An alternative to both a lying world in which it is claimed that all are free, when they are not, a world hastening to disaster, and a world in which all are slaves, would be a world in which masters are masters and slaves are slaves.”

“Such things are not possible on Earth,” she said.

“They were,” he said, “and may be again. Propaganda mills, as you know, may be quickly adjusted. Reality occasionally intrudes. Houses of cards do not well withstand the winds of a changing world. Obvious historical imperatives may dictate policy, at least to those capable of understanding them, and with the power to act upon them. The media will run like dogs to the whistles of their masters, whether it be their audiences, their advertisers or the state. What is seen as necessary will be adopted. Falsity and absurdity can be defended, so why not truth and practicality? If certain words are offensive, those particular words need not be used; I prefer them because I like to speak plainly; I prefer ‘master’ and ‘slave’ to ‘servant of the people’ and ‘citizen’.”

“You have never spoken to me like this before,” she said.

“This is a memorable night,” he said lifting his wine glass to her. “I do not think you will ever forget it.”

“For me?” she asked.

“For all of us,” said her companion, he, too, lifting his glass to her in a pleasant salute.

“Putting aside deeper matters,” said Mirus, “you expressed interest in Ellen and in the fact that she must serve naked.”

The woman looked at him. She, too, had lifted her glass of wine, though, to be sure, merely to take from it a tiny, dainty sip.

“We are all familiar with war,” he said. “In war, it is a familiar practice for the victors to despoil the conquered. They take from them what they desire, whatever seems of value. For example, in this fashion, it has been a familiar practice of victors to take the women of conquered men from them and make them their slaves. Surely you are aware of this.”

“Of course,” said the woman.

Ellen wondered if the woman was aware of her companion’s gaze, of how his eyes seemed to glitter upon her.

Would she not have screamed in terror, and fled?

“You are perhaps also aware that at the victory feasts of conquerors not unoften the women of the enemy, the women of the conquered, and, ideally, those formerly of the highest station, the most aristocratic of the enemy’s women, those of the richest and most exalted blood, the noblest and the proudest, the most envied, as well as the most beautiful, all now embonded, must serve their new masters.”

“I knew something of this, vaguely,” she said.

“But did you know,” he asked, “that they must serve their new masters naked?”

“Yes,” she said, reddening, “I knew something of that.”

“Well,” said Mirus. “That is much what is the case with our little Ellen here.”

“You have taken her from conquered men?” she asked.

“In a sense, I suppose so,” he said. “For the men of her world have for the most part been conquered by their women. Thus they are conquered men, or many of them. And all I have done is to take one of those “conquering women” and bring her here, to return her, for my amusement, to her place in the order of nature. I thought I might let her see what it is like to be among true men.”

Ellen trembled.

She was a slave — utterly —
and on Gor
.

“Ellen, of course,” said he, “is not of the upper classes, or such, such as yourself, though we occasionally take in such, but she makes an excellent example of a type. She was a feminist, and was accordingly, in a sense, engaged in a war with men. To be sure, not an open war, not an honest, war. That war, however, for her, is over. And so she is for me a prize of war. She lost. To the victor belong the spoils. I have made her mine, as a slave. Thusly, compatible with historical precedent, I have her serve at my feast, my victory feast, naked.”

“Bravo!” said the other man.

“Have we not business to attend to?” asked the woman.

“But supper is not yet over,” said her companion. “Surely you would not deprive us of further courses, nor of our dessert?”

“No,” she laughed. “Of course not!”

“Ellen,” said Mirus.

“Sir?” said Ellen.

“You will continue to serve,” he said. “After dessert, we will have the coffee and liqueurs at the coffee table.”

“Yes, Sir,” said Ellen.

****

“It is beautiful,” said the woman, she in the off-the-shoulder white gown, admiring the twenty weighty double ingots of gold.

They had been carried in, ingot by ingot, and stacked on the rug, near the coffee table, by two guards.

“These, too,” said the woman’s companion, “were, as I recall, a part of our arrangement.” He produced a small leather pouch and, loosening its draw strings, opened it. Into the palm of his hand he poured a small shower of scintillating diamonds.

“Lovely!” she exclaimed.

He returned them, carefully, to the pouch, and handed them to her. She put them into her small, white, matching dress purse.

“Thusly are you paid,” said her companion.

“Even were you not heretofore a rich woman,” said Mirus, “you would be now.”

“You are surely generous,” laughed the woman.

Tutina stood nearby, smiling.