Prize of Gor (24 page)

Ellen did not know what an urt was.

There are several varieties of lock-gags. One common variety consists of a short, leather-sheathed metal chain which, at its center, passes through a heavy ball-like packing. The packing is thrust back in the slave’s mouth, over the tongue, filling the oral orifice, making it impossible for her to do more than moan or whimper. The two ends of the short chain are then drawn back, tightly, back between the teeth, this holding the packing in place. The ends of the chain are then taken back about the sides of the neck and brought together behind the back of the neck where they are fastened together with a small padlock. The gag’s dislodgment must then, since it is locked on the slave, await the master’s pleasure. Another common variety of lock-gag involves a pair of narrow, rounded, curved, hinged rods, the hinge embedded in a heavy, leather, ball-like packing. This packing, as before, is inserted into the slave’s mouth and thrust back, over the tongue, denying her any capacity to speak. The rods, which are back, between the teeth, holding the packing in place, curve back about the sides of the face and meet behind the back of the neck, where the ends may lock together, or, if a padlock is used, be locked together. An advantage of a lock-gag is, of course, that the slave, while totally unable to speak, may yet attend to whatever other duties her master may set her. To be sure, a simple tie gag, which the slave is forbidden to remove, has the same effect. Too, of course, her mouth may be simply taped shut. Similarly, more mercifully, and at greater convenience to the master, she may be “gagged by the master’s will.” In that case she is simply forbidden to speak, save perhaps for moans and whimpers. She may, of course, speak later, once she has received permission to do so. If the slave is in lock-gag, one understands, there are certain pleasures she is unable to give the master. Doubtless it was with respect to these pleasures that the remark of Nelsa had reference.

“I do not think that master would approve,” whispered Ellen, frightened.

She would have loved to have pleased her master in this intimate fashion, and had dreamed of begging to do so, but Gart, or another, would surely be a different matter.

Giving the master such pleasures, and many others, is fitting for a slave.

“So you think I wriggle well?” said Nelsa.

“It seemed so to me, Mistress,” said Ellen.

“And how do you wriggle, little belted pudding?”

“I have never wriggled, Mistress,” said Ellen.

“Men can teach you to wriggle,” said Nelsa.

Ellen put down her head.

“So you think I am a slave?” asked Nelsa.

“Yes, Mistress,” said Ellen, shyly.

“Do you think I can help how I now am?” asked Nelsa.

“I am sure I do not know, Mistress,” said Ellen.

“Do you not understand, you stupid little virgin, how men can enflame a woman, can make her helpless, can make her crave their least touch?”

“Perhaps if she is a slave,” said Ellen.

Nelsa’s hands tightened on the handle of the ewer.

“Do not hurt her,” said the redhead.

“She was off her mat,” said Nelsa. “I will tell!”

“You, too, have been off your mat when Gart was not in the room,” said the redhead. “And if you tell, we, too, can tell!”

There was assent to this from several of the slaves at the tubs.

One was an auburn-haired beauty who claimed to have once served the pleasure of Chenbar of Kasra, Chenbar the Sea-Sleen, Ubar of Tyros. More likely, some said, she had served in a prison on Tyros, and had been periodically cast to the prisoners, and handed about, amongst them, to reduce their unruliness. Ellen supposed both stories might be true. Perhaps the woman, who was very beautiful, had once served in the pleasure gardens of Chenbar, but had then in some small way displeased him, or perhaps he had merely tired of her. Later, as others might replace her in her prison duties, she might be sold on the mainland, and thence south. Another was a lovely slave of mixed blood, whose eyes bore the epicanthic fold. Another was a black woman with a chain collar and disk. It was said she had already been spoken for by a black merchant. Two others were sisters from a city called Venna, taken when returning from a pilgrimage to the Sardar Mountains. They would presumably be separated in the markets.

“You, too, will learn to beg and scratch, little tasta,” said Nelsa to Ellen.

Ellen did not know what a tasta was. Later she learned that it was a confection, a small, soft candy mounted on a stick.

Ellen pulled back, suddenly, softly crying out, shielding her face as Nelsa, in a sudden, plunging stream, too close to her, water splashing and hissing, emptied the ewer into the tub.

“Get to work, slave,” sneered Nelsa.

“Yes, Mistress,” said Ellen. Then she cried out with pain. “It is too hot, Mistress,” she said. “I can not put my hands in the water!”

Nelsa had turned away.

Another slave, an exotic, bred for stripes, put more laundry beside her.

Ellen looked up in misery. There was so much!

She shrank down beside her tub, on her mat. She wished it was night so that she might be alone in her bin, with her blanket.

She supposed that women of low caste must do their own laundry.

Why had her master put her here, in this terrible place, she wondered. Perhaps she was being punished, but for what? Had she been put here for instructional purposes, that she might better understand her bondage? Why did he hate her so? Or did he hate her? Or could there be another reason? I must be special to him, somehow, she thought, that he has done this to me. Then she thought, fearfully, but perhaps I am not special to him, at all. Perhaps he does not even think of me. Perhaps I am here because I am not special at all. Perhaps I am to him only another meaningless slave. No, she said, I am here because it amuses him to put me here, his former teacher, one he perhaps found, to his irritation, troublesomely, even disturbingly attractive, to put me here in this terrible place, here in the laundry, miserable, sweating, no more than a naked work-slave, set to the meanest and lowest of duties. But he brought me to this world, she thought. He remembered me. I think he wants me! Yes she thought,
wants
, as a man
wants
a woman, or rather, she thought, thrilled, as a master wants
a slave
. Oh, I hope so, I hope so! I love him so! He is my master! She lay on her side, on the mat, beside the tub. She felt the heavy device locked on her body. She lightly traced with her finger the narrow curved plate between her legs, with its curved, long, slender, saw-toothed opening. The saw-toothed edges were sharp. Twice, in cleaning herself, she had cut herself. Then she had learned to go above and behind the edges, pulling the belt down and away a little. This can be managed by pulling it down an inch or so at the waist, but then, of course, it can go only so far, being stopped by the width of the hips, which she had, more than once, abraded. He put the belt on me, she thought, happily. Oh, I hate it, for its weight, its clumsiness, its bulkiness, its embarrassment, its inconvenience, but does it not show that I am special to him? Is he not keeping my virginity for himself? Or, to use the vulgar Gorean expression, at least as applied to slaves, does he not wish to be the first to open me?

At this point she pauses briefly in the narrative.

The saying is given more fully, commonly, as “open
for the uses of men
.” She adds this, it occurring to her that some who read this might feel that she was overly delicate, or insufficiently explicit or informative, at this point. She fears she might be chided for a lack of candor, and perhaps with the leather.

She was glad Gart was not in the room.

There was much laundry beside her tub, but he would have no way of knowing, upon his return, that it had not been just placed there.

Surely Kiri, the exotic, would not volunteer this information. If explicitly questioned, of course, she must, kneeling, head to the floor, tell the truth.

She wished that it was night and that she was in her cement bin. It was so much cooler there. The blanket gave her some protection from the cement. The bins had no gates or ceilings. Their walls were about four feet high, but one could not see over them once one had been chained by the neck to the ring at the back. The chain was about two feet in length. One could do little more than rise to one’s knees, perform obeisance, and such things. The girls were forbidden to speak to one another when in their bins. This rule tended to be scrupulously kept, for it was difficult to tell, chained low as one was, when a guard might be in the vicinity, behind the bins. One would dread, looking up and back, seeing the sight of his upper body and angry frown suddenly appearing, looming, over the back wall of one’s bin. Soon he would appear in front of the bins, with his whip, and the errant slaves, to their dismay, their pleas for mercy unheeded, would be appropriately admonished. In the laundry Gart was more tolerant, though he did not encourage frivolous discourse. When he was absent, of course, the frenzy of work slowed and the buds of conversation, warily, timidly, began to open.

She thought again of the garments of the free woman. She did not even know how to arrange such garments on her body. Too, she had no footwear. Too, there was no place to hide such garments, the tubs being turned and emptied at night. Too, such garments were counted, and would be soon missed.

Although Ellen had never been outside the house she understood that there was no escape for the Gorean slave girl, even outside. There was the brand, the collar, the garmenture. More importantly, there was no place to go, no place to hide, no place to run. The legal rights of the masters were everywhere acknowledged, respected and enforced. At their back was the full power of custom, tradition and law. The most that a girl might hope for would be a change of masters. If she managed to elude one master, and were not, when captured, returned to him, perhaps for mutilation and hamstringing, she would soon find herself in the power of another, and doubtless one far less likely than the first to treat her with trust and lenience, to mistakenly indulge her with abusable privileges. It is not pleasant to wear close shackles or a double-padlocked six-inch chain joining one’s ankles. The Gorean slave girl has no way to free herself or earn her freedom. She is simply and categorically slave. Her freedom, if she is to be accorded freedom, is always in the hands of another. Too, there is a Gorean saying that only a fool frees a slave girl.

Ellen thought, again, of the garment of the free woman.

She shuddered.

Even to put on such a garment, she knew, could be a capital offense for such as she.

No, Ellen did not think of freedom, for she knew that on this world that was not possible for her.

But more significantly she knew herself slave.

It was what she was, and wanted to be. It was right for her.

Too, for many years she had been free. Certainly she knew, and understood, and had enjoyed all that that condition could possibly bestow upon anyone. There was nothing in that condition which was unknown to her, or unfamiliar to her. Freedom, in itself, while undeniably precious, and doubtless a value, and doubtless appropriate for males, whom she now understood, having met true men, were the natural masters of women, tended, in itself, to be an abstraction, a possibility, an emptiness, in its way. It might be no more than a rootless boredom, in itself an invitation to nothing. Certainly those on her former world who most shamelessly exploited the rhetoric of freedom did not lack freedom, but rather wanted to use such rhetorics, and allied pressures and subterfuges, in order to have goods, unfair advantages, special privileges, and such, given to them, such as economic resources, prestige, and power. Their test for freedom was the receipt of ever-greater amounts of politically engineered unearned benefits. She had been free, and had not been fulfilled, or happy. Now, as a female slave, she suspected that her true fulfillment, her true happiness, might lie in a totally different, unexpected direction. The question, you see, was one of simple, empirical fact. Its solution was not essentially a consequence of a particular conditioning program, one of a possibly infinite number of such, or the inevitable result of some supposedly self-evident, axiomatic proposition, or some supposedly
a priori
theory, but of the world, the nature of things, of simple, empirical fact. Perhaps freedom was not the ideal for everyone. Was that so impossible to conceive of? Perhaps people, perhaps the sexes, were really different. Certainly they seemed very different. One had to struggle not to see that. What if what might be best for one was not truly the best for the other? What was best for one, it seems, might depend, really, not on politics and conditioning, not on cultural accidents and the idiosyncrasies of an ephemeral historical situation, but on other things, say, nature, truth, fact, such things. Perhaps human beings had a nature, like other species. If so, what was her nature? Presumably, whatever it was, it would be a fact about her. She did recognize, of course, that freedom was not an absolute, and that even the most free, so to speak, were subject to countless limitations. At best, freedom was relative, even for the free. But these considerations were not germane to what concerned her most. She had been free. She knew what it was like. She had tried it, and found it wanting. She had been free, and had been free and lonely, free and unwanted, free and unnoticed, free and undesired, free and terribly miserable. Something within her had begged to belong, actually, to be overwhelmed and owned, something within her had cried out to love and serve, totally and helplessly, to give herself unreservedly, totally and helplessly to another. But her world had denied that freedom to her. It had denied the cry of her deepest heart. It had told her, rather, not to listen to her heart, but to deny it, told her, rather, to be different, and mannish. One freedom had been denied to her, the freedom not to be free. That freedom had been denied to her. Freedom had been imposed upon her, socially, legally. She could not have given up her freedom even if she had wished to do so. Freedom was doubtless precious. But, so, too, she thought, was love. And she did not desire the tepidities which might exist between contractual partners. The notion of a democracy of two was absurd. One might pretend that absolute equality could be imposed upon absolute unequals, but it could never be more than a pretense. That myth would have to be hedged about with so many conventions, sanctions, rules and laws as to be a biological joke. It is a farce to claim that absolute sameness, for that is what equality means, could be imposed rationally on creatures as unlike as a man and a woman. To speak as though absolute equality, save doubtless in merit, or value, each marvelous in their own very different way, could exist between absolute unequals, things as diverse as a male and a female, was at best an idle social ritual, and, at worst, a pathological lie which, if taken seriously, if acted upon, would have, by its deleterious effects on the gene pool, wide-spread, devastating consequences for the inclusive fitness of a species. But such far-flung considerations were far from Ellen’s thoughts at the time. She did know enough sociology, and enough history, to know, though she would not have dared to mention it in her classes, that human happiness, statistically, bears no essential relationship to freedom whatsoever, but is rather a function of doing what one feels like doing, with the reinforcement and support of social expectations. Ellen wondered if she were a terrible woman, because she wanted love, because she wanted to serve, wholly and helplessly, because she was eager to be devoted and dutiful, because she wanted to make a man happy, to please a master, because she wanted to literally be his, to be owned by him, to be his complete property, to belong to him, in every way. She wondered if it were such a terrible thing, to desire to surrender herself inextricably, wholly to love. In her heart, it seemed, there had begun to burn, even then, in a small way, small at first, like a tiny glowing flame, not fully understood, the longing to know the deepest and most profound of loves, the most complete of loves, the most helpless and self-surrendering of all loves, a slave’s love.