Blood Brothers of Gor (28 page)

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kneel, and beautifully and vitally. Too, they would have knelt with their knees widely spread, exposing the soft interiors of their open thighs, their vulnerability to male might and their submission to male power.

Gorean pleasure slaves, incidentally, are occasionally used hoooded. The hood, of course, can increase the female's sense of vulnerability and sexual helplessness. She does not know, for example, where she will be next struck or caressed. Similarly the hood is sometimes used when the master leads or consigns the slave to others, she being hooded, perhpas, before the guests arrive, or, perhaps, after she has served them their supper and liquers. She may then, perhaps with other slaves, hooded, too, be turned about, and then knelt at the feet of one or another of the guests. She, and the other slaves, too, of course, must then serve the guest, or guests, to whom they have been assigned with perfection. Too, their use may be gambled for, or lots drawn for it.

I crouched before the woman whom I took to be Turnip. I held her by the upper arms. She raised her head, in the sack.

"No," she said, "you are not Waniyanpi. I can tell by your touch."

"Oh?" I said.

"That you touch me, as they would not," she said, "but, too, how you touch me, how you hold me."

"How is that?" I asked.

"With authority," she said, "as a man holds a woman."

"I see," I said.

With my hands, and thumbs, then, gently, I pressed back the sack, closely, about her face, that the outlines of her features might emerge though the cloth.

"You are she," I asked, "who was once the Lady Mira, of Vanna?"

"Yes," she said, "yes."

"Formerly of the merchants?" I asked.

"Yes," she said. I saw her lips move under the cloth.

"Formerly a mercenary," I said, "formerly an agent in the service of Kurii?"

"Who are you?" she asked, frightened.

"You may respond to my question," I informed her. My thumbs, then, were at her throat. She felt their presure.

"Yes," she whispered. "I was formerly a mercenary. I was formerly in the service of Kurii."

"What are you now?" I asked.

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"Only a Waniyanpi slave," she said.

"It is true," I told her. I removed my thumbs from her throat.

"Who are you?" she asked.

"We met," I said, "a few weeks ago, in the vicinity of the field of battle. You had been stripped and yoked by your red masters. You were tethered to a wagon axle. It was before you were taken to a Waniyanpi compound."

"It was you," she said, "who struck me with a quirt and forced me to give you an account of the battle."

"Yes," I said.

"You were merciless," she said. "You made me speak as though I might have been a slave."

"It was appropriate," I said. "You were a slave."

"Even then?" she asked.

"Yes," I said.

She reached out her hand, timidly. She touched, and felt, the collar at my throat.

"You, too, now, are a slave," she said. "We are both the slaves of red masters."

"Yes," I said. "We are both perhaps fortunate to have been spared. It is their contry."

"Perhaps there could be a little tenderness between slaves," she said.

"I understad that you are now called 'Turnip,' " I said.

"Yes," she said. "I am Turnip."

"I am Tatankasa, Red Bull," I said. "I am the slave of Canka, Fire-Steel, of the Isbu Kaiila."

"You ahve at least a single master," she said. "We belong to the band, to the Isbu Kaiila."

"How are you faring?" I asked.

"What a silly question!" she laughed, rather pronouncedly. "I am faring very well, of course!"

"I am glad to hear it," I said.

"Becoming of the Waniyanpi has changed my life," she assured me, speaking clearly and a bit loudly. "I cannot tell you how fulfilled and happy I am. It has wrought a most wonderous transformation in my existence."

"I see," I said.

"We are joyful dung," she said. "We are sparkles on the water, making the streams pretty. We are flowers growing in the fields. We are nice, We are good."

"I understand," I said.

"I am now a convinced and happy Same," she said. "I am

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now not a not-the-Same. That must be clearly understood. I am not a not-the-Same. I am a Same."

"I understand," I said.

"I have fully and happily embraced the teaching," she said.

"It will not be necessary, as first it might have appeared, to put me out into the Barrens, without food and water. All is one, and one is all, and the same is the same. The teaching is the truth, and the truth is the teaching."

I glanced about, at the other Waniyanpi women kneeling near her. They were, I take it, her harness mates, resposible with her, I supposed, for drawing one of the travois.

"Are you happy?" I asked her.

"Yes," she said. "I am wonderfully and gloriously happy. That must be clearly understood."

"I understand," I said.

"Oh," she said, lifted in my amrs. I then carried her several yards away, among the lodges. I then lowered her to her knees in a quiet spot.

"Are we alone?" she begged.

"Yes," I said.

She began to sob inside her hood.

She reached out, desperately, and held me about the legs, I standing before her. She pressed her cheek against my thigh. I could feel the hood, hot and damp, soaked with tears, between her cheek and my leg.

"Save me from them," she wept. "They are lunatics. They foreswear the most obvious truths of human nature. Among them the males cannot be men and the females cannot be women. It is a sick, perverted world! They struggle against passion. They are afraid to feel. They are terrorized by desire. They pervert their reason. They deny thier senses. They are all mad, all of them!"

I crouched down and took the sobbing woman in my arms.

"They will make me ashamed of my body," she wept. "They may drive me insane, I do not want their dismal peace, their pathological tranquillity, their vacuous serenity. I am not a turtle. I am not a vegetable. I am a woman. I want to be what I am, truly. I do not want to be ashamed of my needs or my sex. I want to live, and feel!"

She was Gorean woman. This had made the transitision to a Waniyanpi community additionally difficult for her. The transition, presumably, because of their conditioning and upbringing, having acclimated them to what, in effect, were

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Waniyanpi values, would doubtless have been much easier for a woman from Earth.

"It is not wrong to want to be alive, is it?" she asked.

"No," I said, "it is not wrong to what that."

"They pretend to be happy," she said, "but they are not happy. They are miserable, and filled with hate."

"Let us rejoice," I said, "that their madness is confined to a handful of isolated compounds in the wilderness." How frightful it would be, I thought, if such an arid lunacy should infect a wider domain.

"Save me from them," she begged.

"It is not pracitcal," I said.

She sobbed anew, and I held her more closely.

"You were found with the soldiers," I said. "That is doubtless why you were sent to a Waniyanpi community. It is your punishment."

"A most just and suitable punishment," she said, bitterly.

"Yes," I said. It was a particularly terrible punishment, of course, for a woman such as she, one who had some idea of the possiblities of life and feeling.

"Better to be the lowest slave, naked and chained, of the cruelest master on Gor," she said.

"Yes," I said.

"Look," she said, drawing back, sobbing, putting her hands to the hood. "They are afraid even to let us see true men."

"It is perhaps moer merciful that way," I said. "That way perhaps, you will experience less distress and torment when you return to the Waniyanpi compound."

"But I have known true men," she said.

"That makes it much harder for you, of couse," I admitted.

"I hunger for the touch of a true man," she said. Waniyanpi males are weak, pathetic and meaningless."

"It may not be their fault," I said. "They may be only trying to fulfill the stereotypes of their culture."

"We were made to chew sip roots on the way to camp," she said, "to protect us, if our red masters should choose to seize and rape us."

"The precaution, however," I said, "proved unnecessary, did it not?"

"Yes," she said. "We are only Waniyanpi females. No man wants us."

I did not speak.

"They do not fear our men, do they?" she asked.

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"No," I laughed. "Even a boy would think nothing of usuing you in the presence of an entire work crew of Waniyanpi males, if he felt like it. They would not interfere."

"Why are we not desired?" she asked.

"You are taught, explicitly or implicintly," I said, "to behave and dress unattractively, even, so to speak, to think unattractively. Most males, thusly, assuming them to be vital and healthy, would not be likely to find a Waniyanpi woman of much intrest. They might tend to think of them as being, in some odd way, repulsively unnatural, or, perhaps, worse, as being mentally ill. Too, of course, in camps of our red masters you must realize that there are alernatives available."

"We are not really like that," she said.

"I do not suppose you are," I said.

"We have needs and hungers, too," she said.

"I suppose you do," I said. It did seem to me that the usual male assessment of the Waniyanpi female ws likely to be somewhat hasty and negative. Men are often too abrupt, t seems to me, in their judgments. They might profit from some instruction in patience. Such women, unfulfilled as females, starved for male domination, I supposed, taken sternly in hand, stripped and put to a man's feet, might prove to be grateful and rewarding slaves. In a matter of days, I suspected, it might be difficult to tell one, licking and kissing at one's feet, warmly, lovingly and gratefully, from a more normal slave.

"I suppose, if a man were suffciently desperate," she said, "he might find us of intrest."

"Probably," I said. Studies and case histories suggested that this sort of thing was true.

"The least desirable," she said, bitterly, "are the last desired."

"Perhaps," I said.

"It is so ironic!" she said.

"What?" I asked.

"When I was free, in Venna, and elsewhere," she said, "I was desired and could not be obtained. Now that I am a slave and can be obtained, I am not desired."

"I see," I said.

"It is a new experience for me, and one not to my liking, not to be desired."

"Oh?" I said.

"I had thought, when free," she said, "that if ever I fell slave, men would put me frequiently to their pleasure."

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"That is common with slaves," I said. "It was a fair assumption."

"And that I must needs fear only that I might not sufficiently please them."

"To be sure," I said, "a natural fear with slaves."

"But not once," she said, "have I been put to the service of my masters."

"Surely you have frightened fleer from the maize, gardened and picked produce," I said.

"But not once," she said, angrily, "have they put me to their intimate service, forcing me to perform with the skills and talents of the female slave."

"It is perhaps just as well," I said. "You were a free woman, and you have not had much training. If you did not do well, you might be whipped severly, or perhaps slain."

"Oh," she said.

"Being a slave girl is very different from being a free woman," I said. "From a free woman a man expects little, or nothing. From a slave girl, on the other hand, he expects, as it is said, everything, and more."

"I understand," she said.

"A free woman may be valueless and, if she wishes, account this a virtue. A slave, on the other hand, must be superbly pleasing. She must see to it, with all her intelligence and beauty, that she is her master's attentive, sensitive, skillful treasure."

"I would like to be such a treasure to a man," she said.

I did not speak.