“The Lady Bina may wish to entertain again,” I said.
“I suspect so,” he said. “But eventually we must to Harfax.”
“When?” I asked.
“In a few days,” he said.
“I am naked and shackled,” I said. “I am at Master’s mercy.”
“So?” he said.
“Is it not time for shackle check?” I asked.
“She-sleen,” he smiled.
“Master?” I said.
He knelt beside me, and put his hand about my left ankle, and examined the enclosing shackle. My ankle was well grasped. I moved a little. I trembled, a little, from the closeness of my master. He then jerked the chain against the shackle ring, and then against the slave ring, set in the couch.
He then stood up, and I put out my hand to him.
“The slave is secured,” he said.
“Master!” I said.
“What?” he asked.
I put my head down. “Nothing,” I said.
He turned away.
“Master,” I said, frightened.
“What is wrong?” he asked.
I looked up.
“What is it?” he asked.
“I begin to sense,” I said, “what it might be, to be denied.”
“Just now?” he asked.
“Earlier, too, sometimes,” I said, “amongst the wagons, in camps, in the Voltai, in the Cave.”
“More so, now?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“You had subsided,” he said. “Now things are beginning, again.”
“Did you do this to me?” I asked.
“Not I alone,” he said. “You have felt such things before.”
“Yes,” I said, uncertainly.
“It is common,” he said. “Sometimes it begins as early as the block, your bare feet in the sawdust, the men bidding on you, you knowing that you are being sold, sometimes from as early as your first enclosure in a slave cage, you kneeling there, looking out, grasping the bars, sometimes with your stripping and the locking of the collar on your neck. Even on your old world you must have felt such things.”
“Restlessness, desire, curiosity, a helplessness one attempted to dismiss,” I said.
“But here it is different,” he said.
“Here I am a slave,” I whispered.
“You are aware of your vulnerability, of what is expected of you, of how you may now be, and must now be, what you have always wanted to be,” he said.
“I am afraid,” I said.
“Surely you have felt the restlessness, the agitation, the discomfort, the uneasiness of a female slave before,” he said.
“It makes me helpless,” I said.
“I expect your slave fires began to burn as long ago as the house of Tenalion,” he said.
“One cannot help such things,” I said.
“Nor should you,” he said.
“One must try to suppress them, to deny and crush them,” I said.
“You are no longer on Earth,” he said.
“One must try!” I wept.
“You are on Gor,” he said. “It is not permitted.”
“One must try!” I said.
“Why?” he asked.
“I must crush them!”
“You will not be able to do so.”
“Surely you will be understanding with me, and kind to me,” I said.
“No,” he said, “and neither will any other master.”
How pleased I was to hear this, that I would have no choice but to be, and choicelessly so, as I wanted to be, a vulnerable slave, at my master’s mercy.
“I think what you may not fully understand,” he said, “is, as I suggested earlier, that more is involved here than permissions, commands, and such. Once things have begun, as I think they have with you, they will take their course, as much as hunger or thirst.”
“One cannot die of such deprivation,” I said.
“Happily not,” he said, “or, as I gather, the population of females on your former world would be considerably diminished.”
I did not respond to this. I did know that many, if not most, women of my former world lived in a sexual desert. How astonished then were some for the discovery, on Gor, of true men, at whose feet, stripped and collared, they might gratefully kneel.
“They can, of course,” he said, “be miserable, know agony, suffer recurrent, excruciating discomfort.”
“Yes, Master,” I said. Often enough I had heard of deprived slaves, being readied for sale, moaning, and scratching at the walls of their kennels. I had heard, often enough, too, of beautiful slaves crawling to the feet of hated masters, begging piteously for the relief of a caress.
“Sooner or later,” he said, “slave fires begin to burn in the bellies of slaves. Then, over time, they become more frequent, and more intense. They will rage within you, and enwrap you, belly and body, in their enveloping, insistent flames.”
“Men are cruel,” I said.
“They are men,” he said.
“Masters!” I said.
“And women?” he asked.
“Slaves!” I said, angrily.
“I doubt that you are, at present, aware of this,” he said, “but the strongest bond on a female slave is not fiber, leather, cord, or iron. It is her slave needs.”
“Men have made her so!” I said.
“Yes,” he said.
“But I would not,” I whispered, “have it otherwise.”
“It will not be otherwise,” he said.
“No wonder free women hate us so!” I said.
“They know women belong to men,” he said, “and in the slave it is manifest, for there before them is a woman who belongs to men.”
“Yes, Master,” I said.
“Too,” he said, “they are furious that the slave’s beauty is public, as they secretly wish was theirs, and that men, when they want pleasure, rather than station, opportunity, advancement, position, prestige, and such, seek out not them, but the slave. They resent it, too, that the slave’s sexual needs are deep, profound, and blatant, and that she satisfies them. Too, they suspect the slave’s erotic ecstasies, afflicting her entire mind and body, the glow imbuing her entire yielded, subdued existence, the profundity of the submitted female’s succession of uncontrollable orgasms, the raptures of a begging, thrashing chattel’s responses, the daily joy, in large things and small, she knows in a master’s collar.”
“Master,” I whispered.
“Yes?” he said.
