"As you are a stupid girl and new to your condition, your punishment, this time, will be light. Three lashes."
"Three!" she sobbed.
"Do not expect masters to be so lenient with your stupidity in the future," I said.
"No, Master," she wept. Then, doubtless for the first time in her life, she who had been the proud free woman, the Lady Rowena of Lydius, naked, and on her belly on the tiles, felt, like the common girl she now was, the slave whip of Gor. "Stand," I told her. "Back straight, belly in, breasts out. Lift your hands to your shoulders, flex your knees."
"I have been whipped," she said, disbelievingly.
"See the difference," said a man to another at his table. "How she stands?"
"Yes," said the other.
I touched her here and there, with the whip, deftly, correcting a line, or the tension of a curve. She shrank back from the touch of the whip. She now knew what it could do to her. She had felt it. After a girl has once felt the whip, the mere sight of it is usually enough to bring her immediately into line. "What hangs upon the wall?" a master might ask. "The slave whip, Master," she responds.
"How may I be more pleasing?"
I handed the whip back to the fellow who had had it, and returned to my place at the table of Samos. He signaled the musicians, and they began, again, to play.
I saw that it was a slave who danced before the men. She gyrated just inches from a burly oarsman, the leaped back, eluding his drunken grasp. She moved between the tables, a slave, an owned woman. Then she was kneeling beside a man, kissing and caressing him, and then, as though it were involuntary, as though her hands were tied behind her and she was being pulled back, away from him, by a rope, she retreated from him. In a moment she was showering another man with her hair and kisses. Then she offered a man wine, holding the goblet, pressing it against her belly, swaying sensuously before him. She was again in the center of the tiles, among the tables. She made as if to speak, and then, suddenly, stopped, as though startled. Then she took a wad of her long, golden hair and, swiftly balling it, thrust it, as though insolently, in her mouth. She then looked at the men reproachfully. It was as though a man, perhaps not desiring to hear her speak, had gagged her with her own hair. Thee was laughter. She drew the hair from her mouth, drawing some of it, in loosening it, deeply back between her teeth, with her head back, as though she might have been in the constraint of a gag strap, all this to the music, and then her hair was free, and, with a movement of her head and movements of her hands, beautifully, the draped and spread it about her. It seemed then she withdrew modestly, frightened, behind the hair, drawing it like a cloak or sheet about her, as though by means of this piteous device she might hope desperately to conceal at least some minimal particle of her beauty from the rude scrutiny of masters. But it was not to be permitted.
To a swirl of music, taking her hair to the sides, holding it, parting it, with clenched fists thrust behind her, twisting, her body thrust forward, her beauty was suddenly, it seemed as though by command, or by the action of another, brazenly bared. "Good!" said more than one man. There was a striking of shoulders in Gorean applause. Even some of the slave girls cried out in pleasure. The girl had done it well. Then she was again dancing among the tables. Her movements gave much pleasure. She entertained well. If Samos had known she would prove this good he might have put her in bells or a chain. I doubted that some of the things she had done, in all their abundance and richness, had been merely thought up on the spur of the moment. I suspected that many times in her dreams and fantasies she had danced thus before men, as a slave. Then, lo, one night in Port Kar she found herself truly a slave, and so dancing, and for her life.
