“Yes, Master!” called the girl.
“You know that at the twentieth hour you are to give pleasure to the guards in the north tower!” called the man.
“I am applying my cosmetics,” she called, “I shall hurry!”
“If you are late by so much as five, Ehn, “ be called, “you will be caressed by the five fingers of leather.” This was an allusion to the Gorean five-strap slave whip, commonly used on girls because of the softness and width of its lashes. It punishes severely but, because of its construction, does not permanently mark the girl.
“I hurry, Master! I hurry!” cried Vella.
The man left.
“You are in great danger,” said Vella. “You must flee.” I sheathed the dagger I had held her in obedience with.
“Those in the kasbah are in greater danger than I,” I smiled.
“How did you get in?” she said. “Is there a secret entrance?”
I shrugged. “I entered unobserved,” I said. “I looked at her. “Curiosity is not becoming in a Kajira,” I said.
She stiffened.
I had waited near one of the gates of the kasbah, in the shelter of the ring’s invisibility. When a reconnoitering party left the kasbah I had simply slipped unseen within. I had stopped in the kitchens of the kasbah to find a suitable garment for Vella. Then I had examined various areas, until I found her, in a room in which girls, who are to be summoned to the pleasure of men, may prepare themselves.
I looked to the lamps at the side of the mirror. One of them would do well.
Soon, Vella closely before me, her wrists bound, the tether looped about her forearm, I entered one of the long, tiled halls, carrying one of the lamps.
We passed only one or two men. I wore garments of the men of the Salt Ubar, taken from a prisoner. There were new mercenaries in the kasbah. No notice was taken of me, though much notice was taken of the luscious slave who, so briefly and shamefully clad, preceded me, I saw Vella, the vain wench, lift her body, instinctually, beautifully, brazenly, as the eyes of each man fell upon her.
She, a slave girl, found much pleasure in being well displayed before masters.
I chuckled. She tossed her bead, angrily.
When I came to one of the narrow windows, not wide enough to admit the body of a man, facing the desert on the north, I lifted and lowered the lamp, and then did this once again. I blew out the lamp. I put it down. We stood in darkness, save for the moonlight at the window.
We heard the sentry’s bar, on the wall, striking the twentieth hour.
“They will want me, Tarl, in the north tower,” said Vella. “It is the Twentieth Hour.”
“I think not,” I said. I looked out over the desert. We heard the sentry’s bar.
“When I do not appear, they will come for me. They may find you. Escape while you can.”
I saw men, riders, pouring out of the desert.
“They await me in the north tower,” she said.
“I think, in the north tower,” I said, “They have other things now on their mind than a slave girl.”
“I do not understand,” she said.
I had paid a visit to the north tower, which commanded the north gate.
“The kasbah,” I said, “will fall.”
“The kasbah will never fall,” said the girl. “There are water and supplies here for months. One man on the walls is worth ten in the desert. No force sufficient to invest the kasbah can be long maintained in its vicinity.”
At the north gate, in the gate room, at the foot of the tower, ten guards struggled, come recently again to consciousness, finding themselves bound and gagged. Above the gate, in the tower itself, lay another ten.
We heard the last stroke of the bar. It was the Twentieth Hour.
“Flee!” whispered Vella. “Flee!”
The north gate, deplorably, perhaps, from the point of view of those within the kasbah, and surely from the point of view of the guards, had been left ajar.
“Flee!” said Vella.
“Look,” I told her. I put my hand over her mouth, and held her to the window. I beard her gasp, and struggle. She squirmed. A girl within the kasbah, she was terrified at what she saw. Like any beautiful female, slave or free, she knew what it might portend for her. She tried to cry out. She could not do so. “Cry out, Slave Girl,” I whispered. “Give the alarm.” Her voice, beneath my large, heavy hand, was muffled. She moaned in misery. She was helpless. Her eyes were wild over my hand.
Riders streamed toward the kasbah. I saw the white burnoose of Hassan, swelling behind him, in their lead.
In a moment someone on the walls had seen the riders. There were shouts. The alarm bar, struck by its great hammer, began to ring madly. Men began to appear in the yard below. Men swarmed to the walls. But to their horror riders were already within the yard, fighting with defenders. Men leaped from their kaiila, climbing, scimitars flashing, up the narrow stairs, toward the walls. The enemy was within. The enemy was behind them. Riders streamed in through the gate, and, too, men afoot, running over the sand. The north gate had fallen. The north tower was theirs. More men entered, flooding within the walls of the kasbah.
Defenders rushed forth. Everywhere there was swordplay, the ringing of steel, on bucklers. I saw torches. There was much shouting. I heard the crying out of men.
I stepped back. I removed my hand from the mouth of the-slave girl. Vella looked at me, her eyes wide with horror.
“Cry out now, Slave Girl,” I said. “Give the alarm.”
“Why did you not let me cry out?” She asked. “They will kill us all!”
She had the instinctive fear of the girl of riders of the desert.
I turned her about, and thrust her before me, down the hall. “I am one of them,”
I told her. She moaned.
I could hear shouting in the kasbah. By the arm I thrust her again into the room where I had first found her, where there were the broad, scarlet tiles the vanity, the mirror, now a single tharlarion-oil lamp at the side of the mirror.
“You have returned for me,” she said, pressing her body to mine, lifting her head. “I wanted you to come back for me. I dreamed that you would!”
I thrust her back. I could hear shouting outside. “I have come back for you,” I told her.
“You love me!” she cried.
She cried out with misery when she saw my eyes.
“Then why?” she begged, piteously.
“I want you,” I told her.
“You love me,” she whispered.
“No,” I said.
“I do not understand,” she whispered.
“Foolish female of Earth,” I laughed, “do you still understand so little of your incredible desirability? Do you not yet know that it drives men mad with desire to look upon you? Have you no sense, foolish woman, of the madness of passion the very sight of you inspires in men?”
She turned away. “I know that I am attractive,” she said. Her voice was uncertain, frightened.
“You are an ignorant female,” I said. “You do not know what the very sight of you does to men.”
She spun to face me, her eyes flashing. “What does it do?” she demanded.
“To see you is to want you,” I told her, “and to want you is to want to own you.
“Own!” she cried, in horror.
“Yes,” I said. “Every man wants to own his woman, completely. He wants to have her in his absolute power. He wants to have absolute control over her, in every respect, however, minute. Dominance is genetically dispositional in his nature.
Males are divided into those who satisfy their nature and those who do not.
Males who satisfy their nature are vital and joyful, and, statistically, live long; those who deny their nature are miserable and, statistically, shorter lived, their tortured body chemistry falling prey frequently to hideous diseases.”
“Men want women to be free!” said Vella.
“Men, sometimes,” I said, “will accord small freedoms to women, thinking that these will make them more pleasing. Surely you are familiar with the master who, at certain moments, permits his girl to speak her mind. And at these moments she does so, well and boldly. But she knows that these permissions may, at his whim, be withdrawn. This torments her with joy, and she revels in his strength. He gives her what she most deeply desires, in the female genetic depth of her, the delicious feeling of her own domination, the subjection of her beauty and weakness to the will of a strong male.”
“Men on Earth,” she cried, “will be dethroned by law!”
“Earth has a complex and intricate political history,” I said. “Policies and institutions, over hundreds of years, may have consequences unforeseen by their authors, consequences which would have horrified them. On Earth, men have succeeded in building a complicated trap from which they may perhaps be unable to escape. Perhaps they can shatter its bars. Perhaps, in the cage they themselves have built, they will merely languish and die.”
Vella said nothing.
“Do you feel,” I asked, “that the women of Earth are happier than those of Gor.”
“No,” she said. “No, no.
“Kneel,” I said.
She knelt.
“On Gor,” I asked, “who have been the happiest women you have known.”
“Many of the happiest women I have known on Gor,” she whispered, “have been mere slave girls.”
“Man has a genetic disposition to dominance,” I said. “This is doubted by no one qualified to form an opinion on the matter. It may, in certain circumstances, be politically expedient to deny this truth, but that is a separate question and involves separate issues.”
