Prize of Gor (33 page)

“Surely you do not fear me, Master,” she said, “a half-naked, collared slave girl.”

He reached for the whip, but drew back his hand.

“Can it be that you fear yourself, Master?” she said.

“As I understand it,” he said, “you are now ready to beg.”

“Can we not speak further, Master?” she begged. She wanted to cry out that she loved him, with all the helpless, vulnerable love of a female slave, that she wanted to serve him, to love him, to live for him.

But of course she dared not do so. How he would then hate her, despise her, understand the lowly, groveling, needful thing she was!

He had laughed at her. And how preposterous it was, indeed, that any man might love such as she, might love a mere, worthless, abject slave!

She must not let him know that she was such.

And yet she must beg!

Or would she beg?

Not the laundry again, not for days, or weeks, or months, or years, or life, not that, she wept to herself. What does he want of me, she asked herself. I want to give him whatever he wants. I am his slave! He is my master!

“Are you ready to beg?” he asked.

“Surely you do not wish me to beg!” she cried.

“You may do as you wish,” he said.

“Surely you would want me as a free woman!” she cried.

“What makes you think I might want you as anything?” he asked.

“Forgive me, Master,” she said.

“Men, you should understand,” he said, “are lustful and possessive. You may like this or not, but it is the way they are. Those who do not seem so are glandular defectives, less than men, or are liars and hypocrites. Any man who truly desires a woman, who truly wants a woman, who wants her in the robust, vigorous fullness of powerful masculine desire, wants her wholly, all of her, wants to possess her, totally, wants to have her all to himself, wants to literally
own
her. Thus, what a man wants in a woman is the most precious, coveted and treasured of all possessions, the female slave.”

“Surely such things dare not be said,” whispered Ellen, frightened.

“You are not now on your old world of falsities and convention,” he said. “On this world the truth may be spoken.”

“I am a slave,” said Ellen.

“That is known to me,” he said.

“How can you respect me if I am a slave!”

“You are goods,” he said. “I do not respect you.”

“If I do not beg, what will be done with me?”

“You will be returned to the laundry,” he said.

“Please, please, no, Master!” she wept.

“Yes,” he said.

“And if I beg?”

“Then, too, you may be returned to the laundry,” he said.

“Of course,” cried Ellen, “it will be as Master decides!”

“Are you ready to beg?” he asked.

“Yes, Master,” she whispered.

Could he so humiliate her, having her perform this act, and then, amused, satisfied, simply return her to the misery of the laundry?

Yes, he could. He was master.

But I love him, she thought. I love him!

But of what interest or importance might that be, the foolish love of a helpless slave, to one such as he, a master?

“You understand,” he said, “that this begging has nothing to do with whether you are a slave or not. That is a matter of indisputable fact. Similarly, personally and psychologically, your condition is well-established and well understood. You are a natural slave.”

“Yes, Master.”

“That was apparent the first moment I saw you.”

“Yes, Master.”

“And now you have been fittingly embonded.”

“Yes, Master,” said Ellen.

“The begging then is for your benefit, slave girl. It is admonitory, and instructional. Still it will be amusing to hear you so beg.”

“You have such power over me!” she wept.

“Such is the relationship in which you find yourself,” he said, “slave girl.”

“Is it not a way, simply, for me to confess that I am a sexual creature, that I have sexual needs, and,” and here Ellen put down her head, and lowered her voice, “— and that I desire sexual experience?”

“You have not yet begun to understand your sexuality,” he said.

“Yes, Master,” she said.

“And do you, little Ellen, desire sexual experience?”

She was silent, in consternation.

“Speak up, now, loudly, clearly!”

“Yes, Master,” cried Ellen. “I desire sexual experience!”

In that moment it seemed as though a great burden had been lifted from her. She regarded her master, in terror.

“You need not fear you will be a stranger to sexual experience,” he said. “You are a slave girl on Gor.”

“Is the begging not some sort of test, Master?” asked Ellen.

“Perhaps, in a way,” he said.

He wants me, she thought. He wants me to beg, and then, when I have been so reduced, so humiliated, have so degraded and debased myself, he will be satisfied and keep me for himself. He will then keep me as the slave he wants and as the slave I long to be, worthless but helplessly his, helplessly devoted, helplessly loving. He will then, this test passed, keep me for himself, put me to his slave ring and own me, completely. At his slave ring, chained there by the neck, he will teach me undreamt of dimensions of my collar and begin the fuller mastering of a surrendered, conquered, helpless slave.

Perhaps, she thought, suddenly, wildly, I could pretend to be his slave; I could merely let him think that he is my master! Could I not keep myself a free woman, though branded, though in my collar? But then she almost choked with the silliness, the absurdity, the meaninglessness of this. How foreign to her reality would be such a pretense, how irrelevant to fact would be such a silly inward game! It would be a falsification of truth. Who cared if a dog or a pig pretended not to be owned? Reality remained unchanged. Too, how dishonorable to deny truth! How unworthy, as well as stupid, in the face of facts, to lie to oneself! No, she knew she was owned,
owned in fact, owned in perfect, clear, indisputable fact.
That was what she was,
slave
. And she knew, too, that that was what she had always wanted to be, to be owned, and to serve. She acknowledged that she was a natural slave, and that she had now been, as her master had called to her attention, fittingly embonded. Too, she did not believe that she could, even if she wished, even if it were possible, even if it were permitted, keep a corner of herself to herself. The masters seemed capable of looking through a woman, of understanding her better even than she understood herself. They seemed to have an uncanny sense of her emotions, of her thoughts and feelings. Could she hide nothing from their gaze? This had been brought home to her even in her training. Why could Gorean men not be more like the men of Earth, and look at a woman and not really see her? Perhaps that was because they did not own their women. It is hard to hide from men when one is stripped before them and fiercely questioned. Gorean men seemed interested, as Earth men were not, in paying attention to their women, in spending time with them and listening to them, and, in virtue of delightfully prolonged intimacies, understanding them, learning them, knowing them, truly understanding them, learning them, knowing them. Perhaps that is because they own them, and it is well known the attention and care, and the devotion of sorts, which men lavish on their possessions. Who does not wish to know everything there is to know about his property, about his treasure? Too, of course, this makes it much easier to master the female. The skilled master can read a woman like a book. One cannot hide from him. It seems there is no nook or cranny in a woman’s soul into which the master, whip in hand, cannot enter.

They make us slaves, and we are slaves.

Ellen, for whatever reason, because of her intelligence, or her dispositions, or whatever it might have been, had made the transition from freedom to slavery with relative ease. That is perhaps because she had been sensitive to the appropriateness of slavery for her, on some level or another, since puberty. On Earth she had been, in effect, like countless others, a slave without a collar.

In some women, of course, their slavery is more suppressed, more deliberately concealed, more desperately denied and hidden, than it is in others. They are perhaps more frightened of themselves, and more in ideological and cultural bondage, than an emotionally freer woman, more in touch with her deeper self and feelings. But it is said that even in such women there eventually comes a moment in their bondage when the emotional cataclysm occurs, when the breakthrough takes place, when the depths of the unconscious open up, when the surgent, rising earthquake of the liberated spirit totters and collapses the fragile, brittle walls of their psychological prisons, when the moment of truth blazes before them like sunrise, and shuddering and sobbing with gratitude and misery they understand themselves for the first time in their lives, understand that they are women, and belong to men, men who will see to it that they fulfill their natures. They must then accept what they are, with all its marvels, beauties and vulnerabilities. They are not men. They are quite different, quite wonderfully different. They can then no longer hide, either from themselves or others. How unfortunate that this insight comes so late for some women, say, as they lie sobbing, beaten, their wrists bound to a whipping ring anchored in heavy planks, or as they lie cold and hungry, curled up, clutching a tiny blanket about themselves, on the cement flooring of a kennel, or as they are drawn by the hair to the height of an auction block and find themselves displayed as an object for sale, displayed, and fully, to frenzied, bidding men.

“Are you ready to beg, slave girl?” he asked, severely.

“Yes, Master,” said Ellen.

He then turned to the side, where, some yards away, across the room, there was a narrow ancillary door.

“Ho!” he called.

In a moment or two there proceeded through the door two men, clad in blue robes. One carried a small rectangular board on which he held some papers. At his belt there hung a small case, containing at least pens, and a tiny horn, which, as Ellen later realized, was an inkhorn. Ellen had seen such papers before, when she had been examined in great detail, apparently partly to ascertain identifying marks, subjected to numerous measurements, and fingerprinted and toeprinted. She had little doubt that they were her slave papers. Such papers, as may have been mentioned, are unnecessary and are not kept on the vast majority of slaves. They can provide a convenience to buyers and sellers, however, as they will provide a good deal of information, with respect to background, caste, education, languages, training levels, physical descriptions, collar sizes, ankle-and wrist-ring sizes, and such, on the slave in question. Sometimes brochures and sales sheets for public postings are compiled from them by judicious selections. Such papers assume greater importance, of course, in the case of pedigree slaves or exotics. The bloodlines of some pedigree slaves go back several generations. Collectors, too, tend to be interested in the background of exotics, for example, who bred them, and where they were bred, and such.

Ellen had scarcely a moment to note the two entering men, in their blue robes, before she was ordered to first obeisance position.

She was then kneeling on the rug before the dais, on which reposed the curule chair, her head to the rug, the palms of her hands on the rug, too, on either side of her head.

“Are you eager to beg?” he asked.

She almost lifted her head but did not dare to lose contact with the rug. She wanted so much to look into his eyes, but she did not dare. She was aware of the two blue-robed men, to the left of his chair, to his left, as he was facing her.

“Yes, Master,” she said.

“Speak up,” he said.

“Yes, Master!” she said.

“Identify yourself, and your master, clearly, and specify, clearly, what you are doing,” said one of the blue-robed men.

“I am the slave girl, Ellen. My master is Mirus, of Ar. I kneel before him. I am eager to beg.”

“You may beg,” said her master.

“I am Ellen,” she said, “the slave girl of Mirus of Ar. I beg to please a man, any man.”

Tears burst from her eyes. She trembled. It was done! She had begged to serve a man, any man! How shamed she felt, how humiliated, how debased, how degraded. How worthless she was, she thought. How could she now be anything but the lowest and most worthless of slaves, in the eyes of her master, in the eyes of the witnesses, in her own eyes, in the eyes of anyone? She heard the pen moving on the paper. That she had so begged was now on her papers. The second man in blue robes added a note, or signature, or certification, to the papers.

This is what he wanted, she told herself. What more could he want? Scorn me now, Master, she thought. Now, she thought, you can hold me in contempt to whatever degree might please you. How could I be such now that you might despise me more? You have made me nothing! Your vengeance on me, my Master, if vengeance it is, is surely now complete!

“Thank you,” said Mirus to the two men who, shortly, withdrew.

“Position,” said Mirus.

Ellen struggled to first position, sobbing, her body shaking with misery. She wanted to throw herself to the floor, covering her face, sobbing.

First position, she thought. I must hold my head up.

He wants to see my face, she thought.

It must be red, and tear-stained. Does that please him?

She dared to look at her master. His expression seemed noncommittal. It was hard to read.

“I have begged,” she sobbed.

“As I knew you would, slave girl,” he said.

“Please be kind to a slave!” she wept.

“Why?” he asked.

She choked back a sob, and looked past him, past his shoulder, past the curule chair, to the wall several yards behind.

“May I speak, Master?” she sobbed.

“For the moment,” he said.

“I have begged,” she said. “Now I beg to please my Master.”

“In what way?” he asked.

“In any way he may desire,” she said.

“Oh?”

“I beg to be permitted to enter your arms.”

“You wish to please me —
sexually
?” he said.