blue-eyed slave. “
“She was insolent,” he said. “It was there that I determined I would have her
for my own slave.”
“After your touch, and abuse,” said 1, “she begged to be taught the dances of a
slave girl.”
He smiled.
“You took her boldly in the palace of Suleiman,” I said.
He shrugged.
“I have never seen a better whip-capture of a girl,” I said.
He inclined his head, accepting my compliment.
“It is thought. I understand,” he said, “that it was you, Hakim of Tor, who
struck Suleiman.”
“I did not do so,” I said.
“Why would they think you would have done so?” he said.
“It is thought,” I said, ‘‘I am a Kavar spy.”
“Oh?” he smiled.
“Yes,” I said.
“Is it known to you, Hakim of Tor.” asked he, “who it was who actually struck
Suleiman”‘
“Yes,” I said, “it is known to me. It was Hamid, lieutenant to Shakar, captain
of the Aretai.”
“I find it of interest, that it should have been Hamid,” he said. Then he said,
“I have wanted to meet you.”
“Oh?” I asked.
“I thought,” said be, “that when I stole your pretty little slave you would
pursue me into the desert. I did not know, of course, that Hamid would strike
Suleiman, and that you would be detained.”
“You wish to speak to me?” I asked.
“I am keeping the girl, of course,” he said. He looked at me. “Do you wish to do
contest for her?” he asked.
“I do not need to decide that at the moment, do I?” I asked.
“Of course not,” said Hassan. “You are my guest.” He grinned. “You may use her
at any time you wish, of course,” he said.
“Hassan is generous.” I laughed.
“From the first instant I put my hands on her,” he said, “I decided that I would
have her for my own.”
“Are you accustomed to taking what women you wish?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“If I had lost your trail,” I said, “how then would you have made contact with
me?”
“You would not have lost the trail,” he said.
“But if so?” I asked.
“Then you would have been informed where to find your-my-pretty Alyena in
chains. We would then have met.”
“But what if I attempt to slay you now?” I asked.
“You will not, for you are my guest,” said Hassan. “Besides, why should you
bring such a slave into the desert with you, a blond-haired, white-skinned,
blue-eyed wench?”
“Why?” I asked.
“Not as a simple slave,” he said. “You could buy and rent girls at any oasis.
You brought her for a purpose. You wished to sell her, or give her, to someone,
in exchange for something, for aid, for information, for something.”
“You are astute,” I said.
“I hope,” he said. “That the female slave will not complicate relations between
us.”
“How could a mere female slave, who is nothing, do that?” I asked.
“True,” said Hassan.
“She seems happy in your chains,” I said.
“She is a slave,” he said.
“It is unfortunate,” said I, “that she is white-skinned, blond-haired,
blue-eyed.”
“Why is that?” he asked.
“Such women,” said I, “are cold.”
“Not when collared,” he said.
“Is she hot?” I asked,
I knew that the metal collar of a female slave, that obdurate circlet of steel,
locked, which she could not remove, so contrasting with her softness, so
proclaiming its vulnerability and rightlessness, often transformed even an
inhibited, hostile, cold wench, hating men, into an abandoned, yielding,
man-vulnerable, passionate slave girl, loving to lie helpless at the mercy of
their touch, that of masters.
Hassan threw back his head and laughed. “She is the hottest thing I have ever
held in my arms,” he said.
I smiled. I wondered how scandalized, how embarrassed and shamed the former Miss
Priscilla Blake-Allen would be to hear her needs and her performance so boldly
and publicly spoken of. The poor thing, however, could not help herself in the
arms of a master.
“She loves you,” I told Hassan.
“I have given her no choice,” he said.
I supposed it true.
I supposed, further, that the rare event had here taken place of a girl meeting
her true master, and a man his true slave girl. The girl, one among thousands
less fortunate, had encountered a male. Surely, too, one among thousands, who
could be, and was, to her and for her, her absolute and natural master, the
ideal and perfect male for her, dominant and uncompromising, who could, and
would, demand and get her full, yielding sexuality, which a woman can give only
to a man who owns her totally, before whom, and to whom, she can be only an
adoring slave. This happens almost never on Earth, where the normal male/female
relationship is the result of a weak, pleasant male’s releasing of the female’s
maternal instinct, rather than her usually frustrated instinct to submit herself
fully to a truly dominant male as a held and owned, penetrated, submissive
female; it does occur, however, with some frequency on Gor, where girls, slaves,
are more frequently traded and exchanged. One tries different girls until one
finds she, or those, who are the most exquisite, the most pleasing; one tends
then, to keep them: this tends, too, to work out to the advantage of the women,
the female slaves, but few, except themselves, are concerned with them, or their
feelings: men, it is clear, have a need to dominate; few deny this: none deny it
who are informed; in the Gorean culture, as it is not on Earth, institutions
exist for the satisfaction of this need, rather than its systematic suppression
and frustration; the major Gorean institution satisfying this need is the
widespread enslavement of human females; the master/slave relationship is the
deepest, clearest recognition of, and concession to, this masculine need, felt
by all truly vital, sexual males: but, in the Gorean theory, this masculine need
to dominate, which, thwarted, leads to misery, sickness, and petty, vicious,
meaningless aggressions, is not an aberration, nor an uncomplemented biological
singularity in males, but has its full complementary, correspondent need in the
human female, which is the need, seldom satisfied, to be overwhelmed and
mastered; in primitive mate competitions, in which intelligence and cunning, and
physical and psychological power, were of biological importance, rather than
wealth and status, the best women, statistically, would fall to the strongest,
most intelligent men; it is possible, and likely, that women, or the best women,
were once fought for literally, as well as symbolically, as possessions if this
were the case then it is likely that something in the female, genetically, would
respond to dominance and strength: most women do not, truly, want weak men: they
wish their children to be born not to an equal but a superior: how could they
respect a man who in stature an
d power was no more than themselves, the equal of
a woman, a prize; given the choice to bear the child of an equal, or a master,
most women would choose to bear the child of a master: women long to bear the
children of men superior to themselves: it is a defeated woman whose body grows
fat with the child only of an equal: just 39 evolution, at one time, selected
for strong, intelligent men, capable of combat, because they were successful in
mate competitions, so, too, correspondingly, in the transmission of genetic
structures, it would be selecting for women who responded to, and yielded to,
such men, women who were the biologically specified and rightful property of
such men, our ancestors. The dominant male is thus selected for in mate
competition: the undominant male tends, statistically, to lose out to his
stronger, more intelligent foe: correspondingly, evolution selected for the
female who responds to the dominant male: she who fled such men either mated
with weaker men, her children then being less well adapted for survival, or,
perhaps, fled away, and her genes were lost, for better or for worse, to the
struggling human groups; the female who was excited by such men, and longed to
belong to them, to masters, and keep by them and serve them, had the best chance
of survival;
she was the best protected, her children would be the best protected; further,
her children would be more intelligent and stronger, being the offspring of more
intelligent and stronger men; her lusts, and her love of being owned by such
men, and her pride in their possession of her, would contribute substantially to
not only her survival but that of her children: too, the woman would, over
generations, become more beautiful and desirable, and sexually exciting, as
vital males exercising their masculine prerogatives selected among the daughters
of the daughters of such women; men chose for mating women who pleased them, and
women who pleased them were not the ugly, the gross, the belligerent and stupid,
but the intelligent, loving, desirable and beautiful; the twin dynamics of
evolution, natural and sexual selection, thus formed over thousands of years the
biological nature of the human female; originally there might have been only
random tendencies to respond to masculine domination, but those who had them had
the best chance of survival: such tendencies were then transmitted, becoming
pervasive genetic characteristics of women; owned women lived; the most
beautiful and best of these were selected by the strongest, most intelligent and
powerful men: it is from such intricate workings of nature that has come the
intelligent, beautiful, sensitive woman, the feminine woman, with full
complement of normal feminine hormones, who longs in her heart to lie lovingly,
obediently, excitedly in the arms of a strong man, his woman, beyond this, one
might note that dominance and submission are genetically pervasive in the animal
kingdom; among mammals in general, and primates universally, it is the male who
dominates and the female who submits; this is not an aberration; the aberration
is its conditioned frustration, possible, interestingly enough, only in an
animal complicated enough to lie subject to extensive conditioning regimes,
where words may be used to induce counterinstinctual responses, to the detriment
and misery of the individual organism, though perhaps subservient to a given
conception of economic and social relationships. We are bred hunters; we are
made farmers.
“It is near dawn,” said Hassan. “Let us leave the oasis.”
I rode beside him.
“Why should you wish to speak to me?” I asked him.
“I think,” he said, “we have a common interest.”
“In what?” I asked.
“In travel,” he said.
“Travelers often seek out curiosities,” I said,
“I intend a venture into the desert,” he said.
“It will be dangerous in these times,” I said.
“Are you familiar with a stone,” asked he, “near the route between Tor and Nine
Wells, which bears an inscription?”
“Yes,”‘ I said.
“And there was a man,” said he, “who lay near the stone, he who had scratched
the inscription.”
“Yes,” I said. “But when I saw the stone he was gone.”
“I took the body,” said Hassan. “In a great pyre of brush I saw it burned. Its
ashes I had committed to the sands.”
“You knew him?” I asked.
“He was my brother,” said Hassan.
“What do you seek in the desert?” I asked.
“A steel tower,” he said.
11 Red Rock, Where Salt is Shared; Hassan and I Encounter Tarna
“You do not wear bells on your kaiila harness!” said the man, threatening its
with his lance.
“We come in peace,” said Hassan. “Have you seen, or heard aught, of a tower of
steel?”
“You are mad!” cried the man.
Hassan turned aside his kaiila, with its single rein, and continued our journey,
his nine men, myself, and the slave girl, Alyena, following, on our kaiila.
Standing afoot, in the dust, with his lance, the nomad watched us turn away.
Behind him was a herd of eleven verr, browsing on brownish snatches of verr
grass. He would have defended the small animals with his life. Their milk and
wool was his livelihood, and that of his family.
“Perhaps there is no steel tower,” I suggested to Hassan.
“Let us continue our search,” he said.
I had now seen the Tahari in many moods. For twenty days we had been upon the
desert.
Once, when a rising edge of blackness, whipping with dust, had risen in the
south, we had dismounted, hobbled our kaiila and turned their backs to the wind.
We had made a wall with our packs and crouched behind it, drawing our burnooses
about us. Hassan, in his own burnoose, sheltered the girl, Alyena, commonly
keeping her wrists braceleted behind her, that she not forget she was slave. For
two days the sand bad hurtled about us, and we had waited, in the manner of the
Tahari, patiently in the blasting half darkness of the sand. We had scarcely
moved, save to pass about a verrskin of water and a leather pouch of Sa-Tarna
meal. Then, as swiftly as it had come, the sand fled, and the sun, bright and
immediate, raw with its ferocity and beauty, held again, untroubled, forgetful,
the scepter, the constant, merciless mace, of its light and heat over the wide
land.
Hassan was the first to stand. He shook the sand from his burnoose. He
unbraceleted Alyena. She stretched like a she-sleen. Sand was banked against the
wall of packs.
“A terrible storm,” I said.
He smiled. “You are not of the Tahari,” he said. “Be pleased that now, in the
spring, the wind did not blow from the east.” Then he said to Alyena, “Make
tea.” “Yes, Master,” she said, happily.
Two days later there had been rain.
The flies had now gone.
I had, at first, welcomed the clouds, and thrown back my burnoose to feel the
swift, fierce rain pelt my face. The temperature fell by more than fifty degrees
in a matter of Ehn. Alyena, too, was much pleased. The men o
f the Tahari,
however, sought quickly the highest ground in the vicinity. There is little rain
erosion in the Tahari, with the result that there are few natural and ready
paths to convey water. When it falls, it often falls heavily, and on flat land,
in the loose dust. Within minutes of the rain beginning to fall we had to
dismount, to drag and pull our struggling, frightened kaiila to higher ground,
They sank to their knees in the mud, snorting, eyes rolling, and we, mud to our
hips, pushing and pulling, sometimes actually seizing one of their mired limbs,
freeing it and moving it, brought them to the place Hassan had designated, the
Joe side of a rocky formation.
Hassan put Alyena, whom be had carried, beside him.
“This is only the fourth time,’’ he said, “I have seen rain.”
“It is beautiful!” cried Alyena.
“Can one drown in such mud?” I asked.
“It is unlikely,” said Hassan. “It is not as deep as a man. Small animals, in
effect, swim in it. The danger is primarily that the kaiila may, struggling, and
falling, break their limbs.” I noted that Hassan’s men had thrown blankets over
the heads of the kaiila, to prevent them from seeing the storm, and keep rain
from striking their faces, which phenomenon, frightening them, tends to make
them unmanageable.
“One must not, of course,” said Hassan, “camp in a dried watercourse. A storm,
of which one is unaware, perhaps pasangs away, can fill such a bed with a sudden
flow of water, washing away one’s camp and endangering life.”
“Are men often drowned in such accidents?” I asked.
“No,” said Hassan. “Men of the Tahari do not camp in such places. Further, those
who are foolish enough to do so, can usually, struggling and washed along, save
themselves.”
Many men of the Tahari, incidentally, and interestingly, can swim. Nomad boys
learn this in the spring, when the waterholes are filled. Those who live at the
larger, more populous oases can learn in the baths. The “bath” in the Tahari is
not a matter of crawling into a small tub but is more in the nature, as on Gor
generally, of a combination of cleaning and swimming, and reveling in the water,
usually connected with various oils and towelings. One of the pleasures at the
larger oases is the opportunity to bathe. At Nine Wells, for example, there are
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