money. Delia would collect coins from some customers, the richer ones, and others, the ones less well off, would deliver the coins to the shop of Epicrates.
And so it came about that the former Allison Ashton-Baker, once of the upper classes of her world, once so superior and haughty, once so special and important in her own eyes, once one of the beauties of an exclusive sorority, at one of her country’s most selective and expensive schools, now tunicked and barefoot, carried laundry in Ar.
I had at first rebelled at this suggestion.
This had occurred after the incident of the Sul Market, that dealing with the Metal Worker. I was still smarting from that episode. I recalled my humiliation, my helpless fury, on my knees before him, put there by his words, half stripped and bound, and he one of lesser caste, only a Metal Worker! This may have motivated, at least in part, my transient, foolish recalcitrance. Did I think I was still Allison Ashton-Baker? Did I not know I was now a slave? I would be reminded. I would be left in no doubt. I would test my limits. I would be taught them.
When I had first been brought to the house of Epicrates I suspected little more than the fact that the Lady Bina and the beast were not native to Gor. I thought this might constitute my opportunity for a manipulable, easy bondage. Certainly neither the beast nor the Lady Bina had treated me as I might have expected to be treated in a Gorean household, at least at first. For example, I had not been carried across the portal bound, thrown to the floor, and put under the whip. This is sometimes done to inform the slave that this is a household in which she is truly a slave, and must understand herself as such. Subsequently there is likely to be little doubt about the matter. And if doubts persist, they may be quickly dispelled. I took this lapse, if lapse it be, on the part of the beast, as an indication of indulgence or weakness, or perhaps merely a lack of interest, and, on the part of the Lady Bina, to be a consequence of ignorance, of her lack of familiarity with Gorean customs, and the attitudes and behaviors expected of a free woman. For all her petulance, pettiness, willfulness, vanity, and nastiness, she did not yet have the acculturated arrogance and sense of social power of the typical Gorean free woman. To be sure, she was highly intelligent and might be expected to learn such things. Delia, I am sure, would be an excellent tutor in such matters. She, like Epicrates, was of the Merchants, and the Merchants often take themselves as a high caste, though few others do. The five traditional high castes are the Initiates, the Scribes, the Builders, the Physicians, and the Warriors. Many would prefer not to count the Warriors as a high caste, but there are few who would openly deny their title to the status, as they are armed.
“I do not do such things,” I had told them, “launder, and such.”
“What?” had asked the beast.
“Grendel?” had said the Lady Bina, puzzled, turning to the beast.
I was standing, facing them.
“I was an important person on my world,” I said. “I am not the sort of person who is set to such tasks.” Then I straightened my body. “You must find another,” I said.
I would never have had the courage, or the stupidity, to speak so in a normal Gorean household.
In such a household, I would have been only too aware of what I was.
Before a man, for example, I would have knelt, head down, waiting to be commanded, hoping, at any cost, to be found pleasing.
A bit of lip pulled back about a fang on the beast’s jaws. In this instance, it had an unpleasant look about it.
I thought it best to kneel.
“What?” said the beast.
I lifted my head.
“I was an important person on my world,” I said, falteringly. “I am not the sort of person who is set to such tasks.”
From the throat of the beast their emanated a low sound, scarcely audible to me, though doubtless quite audible to the beast.
It was not a pleasant sound.
“You must find another,” I said, boldly.
Then I was frightened, for I suddenly feared that the beast, though only a beast, might be familiar with how slaves were to be treated. Why might he not know such things? He may have learned them from others, or another.
I remembered then not the gentle graciousness with which I had been borne here from the Tarsk Market, carried nestled in its arms, as though I might have been a free woman, but remembered, rather, the perfection with which I had been bound, bound as a slave. And the knots had been warrior knots!
I was scarcely aware of its movements so swift it was, and I felt myself seized up, lifted, in mighty paws, and I sensed nails within them, and heard a roar of rage, and I was flung a dozen feet across the room, striking into a wall. Then I was pulled back, by one foot, to the center of the room.
I was on my belly.
The beast, with its size and weight, knelt across my body.
I was pinned to the floor.
It leaned forward.
“Do not! Do not!” I heard the Lady Bina scream.
It was my first experience of the sudden rage of that form of life, a rage easily aroused, swift, unexpected, unpredictable, terrible and overwhelming, a rage almost impossible to subdue.
I would learn later that it was the rage of the Kur.
Whatever might be the nature of that body in it coursed the blood of the Kur.
I felt massive jaws close about my head. I felt the tongue, and saliva, of the beast, its hot breath.
“No, no!” screamed the Lady Bina.
The jaws seemed to tremble. They tightened, relaxed, then tightened again. Had they closed my head would have been bitten away.
“No! Stop!” screamed the Lady Bina. I sensed she was dragging at the fur on the beast’s back.
I sensed a titanic struggle being waged within the beast.
Then the jaws were removed from my head.
“Good, good,” said the Lady Bina, soothingly.
“It seems you do not know you are a slave, and are in need of discipline,” said the beast.
“No, no!” I said. “I am a slave. I am a slave, only a slave! I am not in need of discipline, Master! I will obey! I beg to obey!”
“Cord,” said the beast to the Lady Bina.
A Gorean male might have so spoken, calmly, one recognizing what must be done.
Then, as I lay on my belly, helplessly, pinned down, I felt my wrists drawn up, over my head, behind me, and then, held, they were bound together.
“You will beg on your belly,” said the beast, “for the privilege of serving your Mistress, and other free persons, as they might please, in whatever manner they might please.”
“I am on my belly, Master!” I cried. “I so beg! I so beg!”
My hands were still held up, bound, behind my head.
He then rose up and drew me to my feet, and to the side of the room, where there was a slave ring fastened in the ceiling, some two or three feet in from the wall. I was then bound to the ring, my hands high over my head. I could barely reach the floor, with my toes.
“Go downstairs,” said the beast to the Lady Bina. “Fetch a slave whip.”
“They have no slave,” she said.
“They will have such a device,” he said.
I did not doubt it.
Such things are common in a Gorean household. Delia, companion of Epicrates, a free woman, I was sure, would not be without one. Who knew when a slave, perhaps near the shop, at a fountain, on the street, might be displeasing? Free women, abroad, often have a switch about their person.
The Lady Bina scurried away.
I heard her descend the stairs.
I half turned about, muchly suspended from the ring. “It will not be necessary to whip me, Master,” I said. “I
