Old Woman was happy.
It was noon, and the sunlight was hot on the cliff, when Tree slipped down the knotted rawhide rope to the ledge outside the cave where the lovely slave girl was kept.
He dropped to the ledge.
She moved back further, within the cave. She put out her hand, and shook her head. Her eyes showed fear. She said something in her barbarous tongue, unintelligible to the Men.
Naked, defenseless, slight, the stone wall at her back, she was quite beautiful.
Tree leapt forward and thrust her, standing, stomach to the stone, against the wall.
Then, with a length of rawhide, he fastened her wrists behind her back, and turned her about to face him.
Her back was now against the stone. She looked up at him, frightened. He touched her hair. She said something in her barbarous tongue. He lifted her from her feet and put her, bound, on the two hides.
Though the sun outside was hot, the cave was cool. Tree went to the water gourd and took a drink. He ate one of the pieces of hard fruit at the side of the cave. Twice a day he had fed and watered the slave.
He then turned and looked at her, hands tied behind her back, sitting on the hides, looking at him.
He approached her, and sat, cross-legged, beside her. She tried to edge back, but the wall prevented her retreat. The stone was at her back.
She spoke again in the barbarous tongue, questioningly, fearfully.
He made no move toward her. For a long time he looked at her, carefully, relishing the delicious, captive curves of her slave body.
She said something to him, pleading, obviously begging him to go away.
He spoke to her in the language of the Men. “I am going to make you kick,” he told her. “I will teach you what it is for a female to kick for a man. I will teach you to kick as you have never kicked before. I am going to make you kick superbly.”
Then he reached down and took her right ankle in his hand.
The lovely slave looked at him with horror.
“Go away!” cried Brenda Hamilton. “Go away!”
She tried to free her hands, but she, tied by a hunter, could not do so. She moaned. She was defenseless. Her entire body, each inch of it, curved and vulnerable, lay open to his tongue, his teeth, his fingers, his hands, his forces and pressures, his touch.
She tried to pull her ankle away but could not do so.
He seemed amused that she, with only the slightness of the female, should try to pit her strength against his.
She saw the dilation of his pupils, and knew that she was beautiful to him.
A tremor of sensation coursed from her ankle up her leg. She shuddered.
“Rape me swiftly, you beast,” she begged. “Be done with it!”
His hand still on her ankle, he reached to her hair and pulled her head forward, exposing the back of her neck. She felt his teeth, gently, biting at the back of her neck. Once she felt his jaws half close about the back of her neck. She knew he could, if he wished, with those strong jaws and white teeth, that large head, bite through the neck, breaking it. Then she was on her side, his hands moving on her body, with the full liberty of those of a master on the body of his female slave, in long, possessive, stimulating caresses. She moaned, and tried to pull away, but his hands held her. Then she was put on her back. He delighted himself with her breasts. She closed her eyes and gritted her teeth. For a long time Tree, slowly, tenderly almost, but with the underlying hardness of a master who, ultimately, will permit no compromise, and this the girl knows, kissed and touched her. He avoided only the delicacies of her delta, which she feared most, shuddering, he might touch. Should he do so, could she resist him?
Brenda Hamilton lay miserably on two hides, on the stone floor of a primeval cave, her hands tied behind her with a rawhide thong.
She looked up at her master.
Her body was helpless. In it stirred tumults of sensation. But he had not yet even touched her most intimately.
He was the most magnificent man she had ever seen, and she was helplessly his. But he was only a savage, a barbarian! She was a thousand worlds and times his superior. She was sensitive, intelligent, educated, civilized! She jerked at her wrists, trying to free them. But she looked up into his eyes. She saw that he was mighty; she sensed, too, in his eyes that his intelligence, in its raw, untutored power, was far greater than even hers, greater even, she suspected, than that of Gunther, who had been the most brilliant man, saving Herjellsen, she had ever known. She looked up at him, and knew that he was her superior in every way. She turned her head miserably to one side. And this was his world, not hers. She was not a thousand worlds and times his superior. No. He was a thousand worlds and times her superior! She, in this world, naked, bound, lying at his mercy on hides in a primeval cave, was no more than a slave, only a slave.
His hand moved toward her helplessness, but he did not touch her.
She looked at him, in terror, her body charged with blood, hurtling in the rapids of her beauty.
This was the beast who had taken her in the forest, who had brought her slave to his camp. How she hated him! She had been forced, as a beast of burden, to carry flint. He had looked on, impassively, when she had been tied as bait, to lure a predatory beast to a trap. She, and Ugly Girl, too, for that matter, might have been killed! She hated him! And she had fled, but he, like a dog, had followed her, easily. There had been no escape from him! She looked up at him. She knew she could not escape him. She shuddered, remembering the leopard. She had fallen. It had leaped toward her. The great shaft, tipped with sharpened stone, had struck it from her. Then he, seemingly as terrible, as fierce, as inhuman and bloodthirsty as the beast itself, had fallen upon it, and, striking again and again, had killed it. She remembered the grass, the night, the blood pulsating from the beast’s throat, and the killer hunching beside it, drinking its blood, and then, as a man, drawing signs upon his body, and among them, the sign of the Men.
And then standing over her, she only a naked, frightened female, from another time, at his feet, with the great, stone-tipped spear.
The leopard, gutted and bled, he had forced her to carry back to the caves, his trophy, borne on the shoulders of the recaptured female slave.
Then he had put her in this prison, in this cave, where she, nude, confined by the steepness of the cliffs, must, helpless, await his pleasure.
And then, the day after her incarceration, he had, viciously, with his man’s strength, laid the switch richly to her beauty, well disciplining the slave for her flight. She had cried out to him that she would not run away again. She had, inadvertently, to her astonishment, and horror, in English, addressed him as “Master.”
“No man will ever master Brenda Hamilton,” she said. And then, helplessly, closing her eyes, she lifted her body to him.
She, body arched, heard his great laughter in the cave, and, opening her eyes, saw him sitting beside her, his head thrown back, roaring with laughter.
She lowered her body, and turned her head to one side.
When he had finished laughing, she again regarded him.
“Yes, I’m yours,” she said, “Master.” She again lifted her body. “I am not ashamed. You are my master. Do with me what you will. I am your slave.”
Tree saw the lovely slave girl lift her body to him, as though sloe might be of the women.
He knew then that he could make her kick, and make her kick superbly.
He threw back his huge head and laughed.
When he looked again upon her, she again, pleadingly, lifted her body to him. She said something in her barbarous, unintelligible tongue. Tree did not precisely understand what she said, of course, but he understood clearly the submissiveness of her tone of voice. She was asking him to use her as a female. She was submitting herself to him.