Beasts of Gor (24 page)

“Yes,” she hissed, in English.

“That explains,” I said, “why you are unfamiliar with the dances of the Gorean slave girl.”

She looked at me in fury.

“But you might be taught,” I said.

She pulled the whip from her belt in a rage and hysterically, holding it with both hands, began to strike me with it. It was not pleasant, but she did not have the strength to make the blows tell. I had been whipped by men. Finally, angrily, she stepped back.

“You are too weak to hurt me,” I said. “But I am not too weak to hurt you.”

“I will have you whipped by my men,” she said.

I shrugged.

“What is your name?” I asked.

“Sidney,” she said.

“What is your first name?” I asked.

“That is my first name,” she said, not pleasantly. “I am Sidney Anderson.”

“‘Sidney’,” I said, “is a man’s name.”

“Some women have it,” she said. “My parents gave it to me.”

“Doubtless they wanted a boy,” I said. Then I added, “They were fools.”

“Do you think so,” she asked.

“Certainly,” I said, “both sexes are utterly splendid. One is fortunate to have either. Women are rich, and subtle and marvelous.”

“I did not think you respected women,” she said.

“I do not,” I said.

“I do not understand,” she said.

“The man who respects a woman does not know what else to do with her,” I said. “I meant only to indicate that women are inordinately precious and desirable.”

“We look well in collars,” she said, acidly.

“You belong in collars,” I said, “at the feet of men.”

She turned away, angrily. I could not see her face.

“Are you still attempting to be the boy your parents wished?” I asked.

She spun about, in fury.

“In such a task,” I said, “you will never be successful.”

“You will be lengthily and sufficiently beaten,” she said.

I looked away, at the room. It was high, and of wood, and with an arched roof. There was a dais at one end, on which, in a rough-hewn curule chair, she had sat. There was a rug of sleen skin beneath the chair, and another before the dais. A table was to one side, on which were some of my things. There was a hearth to one side, in which wood burned.

I turned my attention back to the auburn-haired girl.

“Are you well paid?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

“Do you understand the nature of the cause in which you work?” I asked.

“Of course,” she said. “I labor in the cause of Sidney Anderson.”

“You are a true mercenary,” I smiled.

“Yes,” she said, proudly, “I am a mercenary.” She looked at me. “Do you think a woman cannot be a mercenary?”

“No,” I said, “I see no reason why a woman cannot be a mercenary.”

She came over to me and touched me on the cheek with the whip.

“I will put you to work on the wall,” she said.

“What wall?” I asked.

“You will see,” she said.

“Are you a virgin?” I asked.

She struck me across the face with the whip. “Yes,” she said.

“I shall be the first to have you,” I told her.

She struck me again, savagely. “Be silent!” she said.

“Surely you are curious about your sexuality,” I said.

“Do not use that word before me!” she said.

“It is obvious,” I said. “Consider how closely you have fastened the belt on your furs. That is done, even if only unconsciously, to draw attention to your figure, accenting and emphasizing it.”

“No!” she said.

“Have you never considered,” I asked, watching her, “what it would be like to be naked on a slave block, being sold to men, what it would be like to be a nude slave, owned, at the command of a master?”

“No! No! No!” she cried.

“You have seen slaves,” I said. “Surely you are curious what it would be like to be one.”

“No!” she screamed.

The intensity of her responses had conveyed to me the in-formation in which I was interested.

“There is a slave in you,” I said. “I will collar her.”

I closed my eyes that I be not blinded by the blows of the whip.

Then she stopped and, angrily, fastened the whip at her belt.

“Sidney Anderson,” she said, “will never be a man’s slave. Never!”

“When I own you,” I told her, “I will give you a girl’s name, an Earth girl’s name, a slave name.”

“And what name would that be?” she asked, curious.

“Arlene,” I said.

Momentarily she trembled. Then she said, “That is only a girl’s name.”

“And you are only a girl,” I said.

“I see,” she said. She backed away from me a few feet, and regarded me. “You are clever,” she said. “You seek to anger me.”

“No,” I said, “I merely, in response to your request, informed you of the name I would give you, when I own you.”

“You are my prisoner,” she said.

“For the time,” I said.

“I will teach you to fear me,” she said.

“It is you who will be taught to fear me,” I said, “when I am your master.”

She threw back her head and laughed.

I saw that she, too, as had the Lady Tina of Lydius, knew too little of men to fear them. I supposed she had known only the men of Earth and, on Gor, those who were her subordinates in the discipline of the Kurii cause.

I saw the sense of the Kurii enlisting such women. They owed no Gorean allegiances. They possessed no Home Stones. They were aliens on this world.

Did they not know that they, not having a Home Stone, were subject to any man’s collar?

She looked at me. She had laughed, but I saw that she seethed with fury. Too, in her eyes there was another emotion. I think she was wondering what it would be like to be owned by me. She would learn.

“The mighty Tarl Cabot,” she said, “a manacled, kneeling prisoner.”

Too, such women, in their frustrations, so desperately fighting their femininity, made excellent agents.

“Where men have failed to take you,” she said, “I have succeeded.”

Too, their sex and alien origin, being from Earth, gives them an excellent distance from their subordinates.

She pulled the loops of rawhide rope from the ring at her belt, the same ring which held the hook on the whip, and tied one end of the rope about my neck, knotting it tightly.

Yes, I thought, such women would make excellent tools for the Kurii.

“There,” she said, “the feared Tarl Cabot is tethered, kneeling on a woman’s rope.”

I was puzzled only that the Kurii would enlist such obviously feminine, genuinely feminine, even beautiful, women in their cause. Surely they could find more masculine women upon Earth. Why did they not use harder, harsher, more manlike females?

I looked up at her. She jerked the rawhide rope, testing it.

“An interplanetary force,” she said, “unknown to the fools of Earth, lays siege to this solar system. Its programs will culminate in conquest. I, participating in this struggle, will find high place in the ranks of the victors.”

“Priest-Kings oppose them,” I said.

“I understand Priest-Kings are weak,” she said. “Do they move other than defensively?” she asked.

“Upon occasion,” I said.

Yet it was true, surely, that Priest-Kings were not an aggressive species. It did not seem to me, objectively, that it was unlikely they would eventually be supplanted in the system by a fiercer, more territorial, more aggressive form of life. Kurii, it seemed to me, were well fitted to become the dominant life form in the system.

“I shall be on the winning side,” she said.

“The mercenary speaks,” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

I regarded her. She was slim, blue-eyed, auburn-haired, delicately beautiful and feminine.

“Do you truly think,” I asked, “that if the Kurii are victorious you will stand high in the ranks of the victors?”

“Of course,” she said.

I smiled to myself. I now knew why such women had been brought to Gor. When they had served their purpose, they would be made slaves.

She jerked the rope. “On your feet, Beast,” she said.

I rose to my feet.

I looked down on the beauty. She had been brought to Gor, ultimately, to wear a man’s collar.

I determined that it would be mine.

“Come, Beast,” she said, leading me leashed from the room. “I will show you our work in the north. Later, as I choose and direct, you will labor for us.” She turned and looked at me. “You have opposed us long enough,” sue said. “Now you will, in your humble way, contribute, if only by carrying stone and wood, to our cause.”

“Impressive, is it not?” she asked.

We stood on a high platform, overlooking the wall. It extended to the horizons.

“It is more than seventy pasangs in length,” she said. “Two to three hundred men have labored on it for two years.”

Beyond the wall there milled thousands of tabuk, for it had been built across the path of their northward migration. They stretched for pasangs to the south, grazing.

On our side of the wall was the compound, with the hall of the commander, the long houses of the guards and hunters, and the roofed, wooden pens of the laborers. There was a cook shack, a commissary, smithy and other ancillary structures. Men moved about their work.

“What are in the storage sheds?” I asked.

“Hides,” she said, “thousands, not yet shipped south.” “The slaughtering,” she said, “takes place largely at the ends of the wall, to prevent animals from taking their way northward.”

“It seems many would escape,” I said.

“No,” she said. “The ends of the wall are curved, to turn the beasts back. When they mill the hunters fall upon them. We kill several hundred a day.”

“Can you skin so many?” 1 asked.

“No,” she said. “We content ourselves with prime hide. Most of the animals we leave for the larts and sleen, and the jards.” The jard is a small scavenger. It flies in large flocks. A flock, like flies, can strip the meat from a tabuk in minutes.

“Even the jards die, gorged with meat,” said the man near us on the platform.

“May I present my colleague,” said my lovely captor, “Sorgus.”

“The hide bandit?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

The man did not speak to me, nor look at me.

“Such men,” she said, “have been useful. No longer are they confined to robbing the hides of honest hunters. We give them harvests beyond the loots which might be reaped from a hundred seasons of thievery.”

“But I note.” I said, “that higher men aid you as well.”

I looked to the other fellow on the platform.

“We meet again,” he said.

“It seems so,” I agreed. “Perhaps now,” I said, “you might succeed in striking me with your dagger.”

“Release him,” said he to my captor, “that I may with blades, he, too, armed, dispatch him.”

“The silly pride of men offends me,” said she.

“Free him,” said he.

“No,” she said. “He is my prisoner. I do not wish for you to kill him.”

“It seems,” said he to me, “that you will live, if only for an Ahn longer.”

“It is you, perhaps,” said I, “whose life she thusly prolongs.”

He turned away, to look out over the railing on the platform, and out over the high wall, to the thousands of animals, like cattle, beyond.

“Can you truly do your own killing,” I asked, “or do you need, as in my house, to enlist the services of a female slave to aid you?” I recalled Vella. She had given him a jacket of mine, that he might use it to give my scent to the sleen. What a traitress she was! I had known she had once served Kurii. I had not known at that time that the pretty little slave, the former secretary on Earth, still licked their claws. She would no longer receive an opportunity to betray me. Death was too good for her. When I returned to Port Kar I would plunge her into a slavery deeper than she would believe possible.

The man, angry, did not respond to me.

“You are not Bertram of Lydius,” I said to him. “Who are you?”

“I do not speak to slaves,” he said.

My fists clenched in the manacles.

“Did you truly enlist the services of a female slave in his house?” asked my captor.

“I do not wish to speak before him,” said the man.

“Do so,” she snapped.

I saw him look at her, angrily. I read the look in his eyes. I smiled to myself. I saw that it had been to him that she, when her work was done, had been promised as a slave.

“I am waiting,” she said.