“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 was foolish! I am sorry! I will obey, unquestioningly instantly. I am a slave. I beg for the privilege of serving masters and mistresses to the best of my ability!”
“I see you have felt the whip,” said the beast.
“Yes, Master,” I said, “in the house of Tenalion of Ar!”
I had no wish for that experience to be repeated.
Soon the Lady Bina had returned.
“Please do not whip me, Master!” I said.
“But you have not been pleasing,” he said.
I was then whipped.
When I was released from the ring I fell to the floor, on my belly, my hands still bound.
“Have you anything to say, Allison?” inquired the beast.
“Yes, Master,” I wept. “I am on my belly. I beg for the privilege of serving masters and mistresses, unquestioningly, instantly, as they might please, in whatever manner they might please.”
“Anything else?” he asked.
“Yes, Master,” I said, recalling my training. “I thank Master for my whipping. I hope that it has improved me.”
“Has it?” he asked.
“Yes, Master,” I said.
“Go downstairs,” said Grendel to the Lady Bina. “Return the whip. But buy one. We should have one here.”
She left.
“You will not need a whip, Master,” I said.
“That is for me to say,” he said.
“Yes, Master,” I said.
I later learned that the beast had indeed learned how to treat slaves, and that he had learned this on another world, a steel world, the former world of Agamemnon, Eleventh Face of the Nameless One.
He was, of course, a beast, only a beast. I wondered what it might be to have a human master. That I thought might be even more frightening, for the human would be of one’s own kind, selected for according to the radical, dimorphic relationships of master and slave over countless generations, one well aware of, and sensitive to, the psychology, the needs, the fears, the vulnerabilities, the tricks, the wiles, the vanities, the pettinesses, the weaknesses, the helplessnesses of his natural prey and possession, the female slave.