A Talendar for Shirley (3)

 

A Talendar for Shirley
Peony D Beckside

With acknowledgement and thanks to John Norman for creating the world of Gor, in which this story is set.

Chapter Three: Beyond A ‘Bad-Hair’ Day.

 

I think that I’m awake.  I wonder if I dare chance opening my eyes?  Not yet, please.  There are just a few sensations that don’t seem to want to let me drift back into glorious slumber.  They niggle me, needling me to investigate them, to open my eyes and become fully conscious.  Leave me alone!  Just let me go back to oblivion…  My thoughts won’t let me.

I’m lying down; on a floor, I think.  Certainly not in my bed, under my comforter.^[1]  I’m not cold, though I should be, being naked.  Naked!  Why am I naked, lying on a floor.  I guess I must have had a good night last night!  Must have been a great party.  But hold on, I didn’t go to a party.  I had dinner at a restaurant with that sweet, but clearly crazy, man with his talk about another planet.  I recall getting into his big plush car, but not arriving at home or at his apartment.  I remember a great weight of tiredness then nothing more

Why then am I lying naked on a floor?  Did we, did he ‘take’ me when I was out-cold?  Why was I out-cold?  Did he somehow drug me?  Rohypnol?!  That’s the name of the stuff.  The ‘date-rape’ drug.  If he did, I’ll ‘have his balls’, as the saying goes.

I have enough outrage to chance opening my eyes.  Yes, I’m lying on my side, my head lolling onto the tiled floor. Yes, I am naked.  The air feels warm enough that my nakedness isn’t a problem.  I attempt the sitting-up manoeuvre.  Something’s wrong!  I over-compensate, almost falling over to the other side.  I have to assume that whatever I had last night, pills, booze, whatever must still be in my blood.  I must be ‘high’ or drunk.  Yes, I know that I had several glasses of wine and a single (large) gin and tonic.  There’s nothing there to make me hung-over.  I wonder again about the possibility of a date-rape drug, and whether it’s still effecting me.

I don’t feel as if I’ve been ‘fucked’, to use a crudity.  I let my hand wander down between thighs. No, there’s no stickiness, gooeyness, no soreness.  I really don’t know what, if anything did happen to me

I hear the chinking of two pieces of metal as I move.  I become aware of a cool tightness at my neck, round my neck.  I reach up with both hands.  It’s metal, not cloth or leather.  It seems to be a solid band, rather like a velvet choker, but more obdurate.  I follow the band round my neck.  It’s solid all the way round!  There doesn’t seem to be an opening.  Correction, I find a joining; however when I try to pull the band open, I am unable.  It needs more force than I am capable of exerting.  Perhaps there’s some kind of hidden catch.  My fingertips explore further.  There’s a keyhole, or something like it!  This thing is locked on me, locked round my throat!  I’m appalled!  Horrified!  Enraged!  How dare someone lock a metal band round my throat!  Was it that Mike, who I had dinner with last night?  For that matter where am I?  Where have I been brought to?

I’m sitting up now.  I hear a chinking noise from behind my back.  I reach behind me.  My fingers identify a vertical chain.  I follow it up as far as I can.  I have a horrible feeling.  I reach to the back of the metal band.  Yes, on the outside edge there’s a lug.  The top of the chain seems to be fastened to this lug with something akin to a padlock.  Chain!  Chained?  Fastened to something?  I turn and look behind me.  The chain coils away to a ring set into the floor.  It’s fastened securely to the ring.  There seems to be a surprisingly long length of chain securing me.

I shuffle towards the floor ring.  Tugging and twisting is totally ineffective, as is doing the same at the metal band.  I’m definitely held, securely it would seem.  I’m blazing!  Furious!   Somebody’s chained me up like I’m a dog!  If it’s that Mike, I’ll kill him!  I’ll kill him anyway, for letting me fall into the hands of some kind of ‘sicko’ pervert.  Must be!  Chaining a woman up, it’s unheard of except for those psycho’s that play BDSM games.  I shudder with apprehension, fearful of what he or they are going to do to me.  Is it though?  Is it a ‘quiver’, a ‘shiver’, a ‘tremble’, perhaps even a ‘flutter’.  I sense my heart beat increasing, my breath shortening.  I tell myself that it’s from fear or anger, but in my heart of hearts I know that it’s from excitement.  In truth, I’m dampening between my thighs; not enough to be sexually aroused but I sense that I could become so.  There’s something so atavistic, so barbaric, so intriguing about being chained so.  The imposition of it has a kind of fascinating ‘Ooh er’ quality.

No!  No-no!  That can’t be.  I’m not, I can’t be that kind of slut, a wanton squirming tart that gets turned on by being put into Bondage.  No, I’m not!  I’ve never had any interest in playing domination and submissive games.  Such are so retrograde!  A woman is more than just a plaything, a toy, for a man, any man.  A woman is a person in her own right!  Deep down though, I’m not sure that I can be so sure.

I’m not an overt feminist, not one of the most vociferous fighters for ‘The cause’, but I do believe in a woman’s right to decide her own future her own destiny; to do what she wants without having to get someone’s permission, just as men can and do.

This chain though, symbolically, and I suppose literally, takes that away from me!  It should be my right, my decision to just get up and leave this place.  Secured as I am, I cannot exercise that right.  Who dares to deny me my rights!  I fume silently.

I decide to rise; to investigate what I can within the ambit of the chain.  As I stand, I again overcorrect.  I feel like I just leapt to my feet, but I only used the same kind of muscle-power I’d use to stand gently.

Another thing.  Somehow the air itself is different.  Cleaner perhaps, more enriching, it feels invigorating like wine.  I wonder if I’m somewhere different, overseas perhaps, or perhaps in the country rather than the city.

I can’t reach the door of course.  That would be too simple.  Self defeating for the person who’s chained me up.  Most of the rest of the room I can reach.  There’s not much furniture.  No chairs, but a low table surrounded by big cushions.  Japanese décor?  Am I in Japan?  Whilst I can physically sit cross-legged at the table, that would show my ‘everything’ to anybody watching.  No, at such a table, I’d have to kneel.

On the table, there’s a container and a kind of bowl.  There’s a note too.  In English too thank goodness.

“Coffee.  You’ll be parched and tired.  No, it’s not drugged.  Drink!”

The word ‘drink’ seems almost almost like an order.  I’m tempted to simply ignore it, but now the matter has been mentioned, I realise just how dry my throat is, and yes, there is some residual sleepiness.  Dare I trust the implied assurance that the beverage is harmless.  I pour the sweet brown liquid into the bowl and take a sip.  It is welcome.

The reference to the drink not being drugged, reminds me that yes, I think last night I must somehow have been ‘slipped a mickey-finn’, to use an archaic colloquialism.  I’ll have something to say to that Mike!

Taking the bowl with me, I wander further.  There’s a kind of shuttered window.  Surprisingly I can reach it.  The catch is simple.  I operate it and push the shutters outward.

 

I stand there in absolute shock.  What I’m seeing can’t be real!  It’s got to be a hallucination!  Perhaps everything since I thought I’d woken up, the metal band, the chain, is a part of a bigger hallucination!

It’s a city!  A city the likes of which I’ve never seen before.  I’ve seen pictures of most of the world’s major cities, and this just doesn’t look like any of them!  Not even the new or expanded cities of China could look like this!  For a start, there are many cylindrical buildings.  Indeed that seems to be the standard form of them all, not like the rectangular block buildings of most American, and I believe, world cities.  At the side, I see a substantial city wall.  Many cities have city walls, but those are mostly relics from before the days of gunpowder.  These instead seem well maintained and functional.  I see men patrolling the ramparts but can’t make out details.  The only cities that I can think of with walls this high are Marrakesh, Timbuktu Jerusalem and Dubrovnik.  The buildings inside the walls of those cities are nothing like these I can see,

A wedge of birds flies across my line of sight.  HUGE birds, hawklike, like nothing that exists on Earth.  Upon each of these birds, seems to be sat a man!  A rider!  Each man is like something out of the past; carrying spears, swords, etc.  This is a dream!  A nightmare?

I look down onto a street.  At the sides are what look like market stalls.  Down the centre a wagon is being pulled by a large shambling creature I find difficult to describe.  It’s like a cross between a large lizard and a dinosaur.  The wagon is filled with women, naked women!  What is this place?  I reel with what I suspect is a form of culture-shock.  I can take in no more.  The farrago of sensory input is too great.  I pull back from the window.  Finding a kind of ottoman like chest, I lean against it, my knees up in front of me protecting me, protecting my naked vulnerability.

The door opens.  A man enters!  The man, yes, that Mike!  He’s not wearing the usual shirt and trousers.  Instead he sports some kind of robe, of blue with yellow edging.  My gestalt tells me somehow that he’s more comfortable in this garment than he was in what I saw him in last.

“You!  What have you done to me?!  Where have you brought me?  Why am I chained up like a dog?  Where are my clothes?  I want to go home.”

He smiles unsettlingly.

“All in good time, kajira.  I’m sure you have many questions.  Whether you like the answers is irrelevant.”

Kajira?  That’s not my name.  He knows what my name is.  Why doesn’t he call me by my name.

“Who are you really, Mister!?  Is your name really Mike?”

“I am Michalis Dundras.  Mike Donaldson was more suitable for our previously mutual home.”

I’m not sure that I like the sound of ‘previous home’.  This isn’t my home.  I doubt it ever will be.

“You however will refer to me at all times as ‘Master’.  In case you haven’t figured it out yet, you are a slave, that’s what the word ‘Kajira’ means.”

I watch in fascination as her hackles rise.  After all she’s spent all of her life in an environment where women were deferred to, pandered to, allowed to think that they are special.  Yes, they are special, but not in the way that she thinks they are.

“Slave?!”

She looks horrified.  As well she might.

“Hey, I’m no-one’s slave, Mister!  Unfasten me!  Let me go.  You can’t do this to me!  Slavery is illegal!”

“Not here, it’s not.  Here you have no status.  You do not have a home-stone, that’s analogous to a country by the way, hence there is no one to protect you, to protect your freedom.  No one to fight for you.  As such even if you had not been enslaved before being brought here, you are thus ‘fair game’ and can be enslaved at will, which is effectively what I have done.  As a slave, you are legally classed as an animal.  You may be biologically human, but legally you have no more status than a tarsk, a verr, or a sleen…”

What the fuck is a tarsk, a verr, or a sleen?  Clearly from his comments, lowly animals.

“Even then, being human, as a slave you have no, what you would call ‘human rights’.  Indeed here, the very concept of Human Rights does not exist.  There are, for men, only those privileges that he and by extension his city has won by the sword, lance, and arrow.  For a woman, a free-woman that is, the privileges and freedoms that her city, with its warriors is able and prepared to defend.”

Apart from incomprehension at the concept of warriors using such to her, barbaric weapons, I see also in her eyes, dismay, anxiety and dread.

“Where on earth are we?  What city is that outside?  It’s like no city I’ve ever seen before?  Is it one of those mushrooming Chinese cities?”

“That’s the whole point, kajira.  We are not on Earth.  This is the planet Gor.  Sometimes referred to as the counter-earth, counter as in opposite.  You will recall me talking about it at dinner, back on Earth.”

“You’re Mad!  Insane, a lunatic.  There is no ‘Gor’  Where am I really?”

I remain calm and collected.  By rights I should have her whipped for saying that.  Instead I’m enjoying her discomfiture, her attempts to make sense of a situation that cannot possibly make sense to her.  The only sense that it can make is from a Gorean perspective, and she’s not yet ready to grasp that.  I could of course bring her new reality to her with the whip, and time enough for that; but verbally sparring with her in this way is quite sparkling.  It’s fun!

“Am I?  Have you not noticed how clear the air is here.  I’d forgotten myself, having spent so long on your former planet…”

‘Former’ planet?  I don’t yet know how, but eventually I’ll find my way back, by waking up from this nightmare.  I mean, it can’t be anything else, can it?  It would be me that’s insane if I were to believe that I’m actually on a different planet.  The very idea is absurd!

“Did you not note in the lightness of your step and that you nearly stumbled when you went to the window, that gravity is slightly less here?  Yes, I did notice.  There’s a spy-hole between the next room and this.

            When you looked out at the city, did you not notice the architecture that’s completely unlike anything on modern Earth?  Did you not notice the slaver’s wagon pulled by a tharlarion, full of his merchandise?  Did you not see the flight of tarns, each one being ridden by a warrior?  Can you not believe your own eyes?  Explain those if you can!”

“This is a dream!  A nightmare.  I’ll wake up soon, doubtless with a hangover, and this mirage will vanish.”

“I admire your tenacity in clinging to your old belief system.  You will find however, that this supposed nightmare of yours will last a very long time, for the rest of your normal lifetime and beyond.  You will never wake up from this ‘nightmare’, because it is reality and you are already awake.”

“What do you mean ‘rest of your normal lifetime and beyond?  What’s that supposed to mean?”

“You are to be given a treasure that was beyond price on your Earth.  You will be given the stabilisation serums.  They will extend your life and beauty many-fold.  Instead of living for eighty years, forty of them being decrepit, you will have a full and active life for several centuries at least.”

I see her look of wonder, until it mutates into disbelief.

“Even if I believe this, believe that it isn’t part of this fantastic dream,  I’d still be a slave.  How would I free myself from slavery.  Hundreds of years as a slave?  I think that I’d rather be dead, thanks.”

The toad laughs.

“I get your point, kajira.  It’s rather like that Earth joke ‘The dictator says to his people ‘Citizens the bad news is that because of the famine, the only thing we have to eat is shit.  The good news is that we have plenty of shit!’’.  However you don’t get to choose.  Your Master decides.”

“Hey, Mister.  I’ll not call you Mike again.  Stop calling me kajira.  I told you I’m not a slave.  My name is Shirley.  Shirley Thompson.  And for that matter, since for you this fantasy is real, how do I get back to Earth?”

“No, you won’t call me Mike again, not if you want to avoid a whipping!  You have been told that you are to address me as ‘Master’.  I have been patient with you since you are having to re-examine all your previous assumptions about your life.  That patience is running out.”

A new hardness comes into his features, his eyes.  A firmness I’ve never seen in him before.

“Shirley is not your name, unless I as your owner choose to call you that.  A slave loses everything, even her name upon enslavement.  The only name that you now have is that which I choose to give you.  As yet you are nameless, hence ‘kajira’ is the appropriate usage.  I have not yet decided what to call you.  If I were to call you Shirley, it would no longer be your name by right, merely how I chose to refer to you, and how others would identify you in conversation.  I can understand why you haven’t yet referred to me as ‘Master’.  That would be an acknowledgement by you, of your slavery. Fail to acknowledge properly again, will earn you that whipping I mentioned.”

“You would really whip me?!...  It’s barbaric”

I laugh.  She is a barbarian slave, yet what we class as a civilised way of keeping order among the slaves she sees as barbaric?  Clearly a matter of definition.

“Believe it!  Yes, I would and will…  As for getting back to Earth, sorry can’t help you.  I no longer have the contacts to be able to, even if I wanted to.  Those of us who work the inter-planetary slave trade know that when we have finished our stint, those parts of our mind that can identify, and hence betray the trust, are wiped from our minds.  I no longer know to get you back.  Even if I did, why would I?  You are one gorgeous piece of slave flesh!”

I see the look of lust, of appreciation in his eyes.  It’s like when he walked into the florist’s shop back on Earth.  The back-handed compliment warms me, sending a shiver down to my pussy.  I don’t want to admit to myself that despite the outrageous liberty he’s taken in kidnapping me, he excites me immensely.  I have to bolster my defences.

“I hate you!  I despise you, you bastard!  What right did you have to bring me here, to kidnap me?! You arrogant prick!  I’ll fight you every step of the way!”

My laughter is long and loud.  I’ve been a slaver long enough to know that she’s using this formulaic frenzy to cover up an uncertainty, that she can fend me off.

“No, you don’t.  In your heart you are flattered that you’ve been deemed beautiful enough to be worth capturing.  What right did I have?  The right of the victor, ‘because I can’.  Arrogant?  Yes, by the weak accommodating surrenders of Earth men, yes, doubtless arrogance is how it is perceived. Fight me?  Excellent!  Go for it!  It’ll make taming you that much more delicious!”

Damn!  He understands me better than I understand myself.  His arrogance?  This is beyond that, it’s hubris!  I’ve never really believed in God, or for that matter any deity, but right now I just wish one or other of them will blast him to death for that hubris!  At least that’s what I tell myself.  In truth though, that power in him, even if assumed power, excites me.

“I do understand why you think you hate me.  Your enslavement flies in the face of decades if not centuries of feminist propaganda.  You can’t help but think in terms of equality.  Try being a feminine woman instead of a masculine clone…”

Where is he going with this.  I’m a woman, by definition that makes me feminine, doesn’t it?

“...Even on your previous planet, did you not notice that historically women’s attire was always much more decorative, much more feminine, much more differentiated when women had the least economic power; when the need to attract a man to financially look after them was at its greatest? Now, women have perhaps greater spending power than men since men are still expected to carry the burden of supporting a family.  Women’s attire has effectively become identical to that of men.  You have thrown away that one quality that makes you special, your femininity.  You have broken away from nature’s differentiation between man and woman.  You need to be a woman again.”

I can’t accept this.  Women are just as capable as men, yet are still women, still feminine.

“Isn’t it a question of how you define ‘woman’ and ‘feminine’ in society?  We are no less valid as women than we ever were, no less feminine.  We’ve just chosen to manifest it differently from the past; in a more equal way.”

“Precisely.  But there is and can be no equality between men and woman.  To use your own Earth phrase, ‘You can’t compare apples to oranges’.  Could you stand in battle, sword to sword with a man and survive?  Do you have the physical strength to build a city wall?  Can you carry a message on foot, ninety pasangs in a day, that’s about sixty miles?  No, here it’s acknowledged even by free-women that they are not equal to men.  Free-woman are valued as being the future of the city, of every city, and hence are protected, they are special.  Female slaves on the other hand are not valued as much, but they are special in a different way.  They can, nay must, surrender to their primordial truth that they are absolutely dependent upon men.  To survive they must be superb as women.  They are thus valued in a different way.  You cannot hold onto your Earth social conditioning.  You must become the ultimate truly feminine woman.  Gorean men will not accept otherwise.  They will take you back to that basic femininity.  You will be Helen, Salome, Jezebel, Messalina, Madam Du Barry, Lola Montez, superlative, but without their wealth, power, or venality.”

“But they were all lascivious sluts!  I’m not like that.”

“Your use of the words lascivious and sluts with their negative connotations, and your general demeanour show just how conditioned, ‘brainwashed’ to use the Earth word, you have been, by a controlling religious and political hierarchy.  You do not even dare to be as marvellous as you can be. If you substitute the word ‘sexy’ for ‘lascivious’, and ‘playgirls’ for ‘sluts’, are they then bad? What’s wrong with a woman having a healthy libido?  You say, ‘I’m not like that’.  If I didn’t think you had the potential for such grand passion, you wouldn’t have been chosen.  You were scouted to be brought here before I decided I wanted you for myself.  You would have been brought to this planet, to your slavery, irrespective of my interest in you.”

There’s a compliment in there somewhere.  It warms me.  I think that we women are genetically programmed to appreciate and value compliments.  They reaffirm our femininity, our desirability.  I don’t want to admit that some of what he’s said is true despite it not being ‘politically correct’.

“As a slave you have only one overarching command.  All others are derived from and are subservient to this:  A slave must be absolutely pleasing to her Master at all times and in every way. Learn this as a catechism, and live by it.  Should you fail to do so, you can expect to be punished.”

I’m not sure that there’s anything I can say to this.  To even acknowledge it, carries an implication of accepting it.

“Enough of this, I get bored quickly.  You have already failed to be pleasing twice, and I’ve been generous in how I interpret that.  You have already broken the one overarching command of the slave-girl.  Such is punishable.  It is common practice to whip a kajira when she is brought to a new home, to teach her that in her new household she is subject to discipline.  Your punishment will serve double duty, covering both situations.  Consider that a boon granted by your Master.”

“Hey!  You aren’t going to whip me.  I won’t let you!”

I take in her pugnacious stance, with her hands closed into fists.

“Correction, three times.  You like to live dangerously!  How are you going to stop me?  I note your threatening posture.  A word of advice.  Never, ever, attack a free person.  A Master has plenty of ways to make you regret an attack on himself, but an attack on a third person, a free person, will likely earn you death by slow torture.  You will scream your way to oblivion.”

I see the look of shock on her face.

“I’m not joking!”

What the fuck!  I’m seriously frightened now.  How can I protect myself, if that’s the case.  I’ll ask, but I wonder if I already know or sense the answer; I can’t.  Though it galls me to use the word, at this juncture some backing-off of principle is wise.

“Master…  What happens if someone assaults me, insults me?  How can I protect myself?”

“You can’t.  A slave must accept whatever abuse that a free person cares to inflict on her.  As regards insult, you think too much of yourself!  How can an animal be be insulted.  Should another slave assault or insult you, then most Masters and Mistresses don’t really care to bother about the squabbles of slaves unless there’s a danger of one or other of them being killed or seriously damaged.”

I get his drift.  He goes over to the ottoman, lifts the lid and pulls out an object and places it on the table. It’s a whip of some kind.  Shit!  He really means it!  A further item retrieved from the chest, is decorative but its underlying purpose is brutal.  The jewelled handcuff-like item dangles from his fingers.  He utters a word in a strange tongue, presumably the language of this place.

“That means ‘Bracelets’; i.e. position yourself to be handcuffed.  Hold your wrists together behind your back, and offered outwards to make it easier for your Master to secure you.  Don’t make it displeasure number four!  A Master expects absolute, immediate, uncomplaining obedience in everything, at all times.  He will not accept slow, sullen or sarcastic obedience.  Lack of suitably subservient obedience is a major displeasure, and you will expect to be seriously punished for it.”

Given that he seems genuinely serious, it doesn’t look as if I’m going to be able to escape being whipped.  I shall take what he wants to inflict on me stoically, not giving him the satisfaction of hearing me cry out.  I really don’t want, however to make the situation worse.  I decide that a certain mollification of my attitude would be politic.

“Yes, Master.”

I go behind her and bringing her wrists closer together than she’s holding them, lock her wrists into the slave bracelets.  I turn back to the ottoman.

Though he’s got his back to me, still digging things from the ottoman, I see enough of his face to discern what I think is a smile.

The metallic cold of the handcuffs insinuates itself into my mind.  I tug gently at the bracelets subtly testing the limits set by them.  A feeling of helplessness, of vulnerability, of control lost, assails me.  It is a trepidation, a fear, but strangely there is an odd kind of of comfort there, a surety, a certainty, even a kind of excitement.  No, it can’t be.  Surely, my mind is reading fear as excitement.  Why that should be, I can’t imagine.  One thing’s for certain, my nipples are hardening and that damp stickiness I’ve had when with a man I liked, is beginning.  These feelings shame me. 

“Nadu!  That means ‘kneel’, but it specifically means kneel with your thighs wide open.”

When I turn back, I see that she has obeyed.

“Master, this position is indelicate, demeaning, obscene even.”

“That’s only your Earth moralistic hang-ups talking.  You have no rights to dignity, decency, decorum, modesty, propriety, reticence, or inhibition.  You must jettison the earthly ‘brainwashing’ that’s been fed to you since childhood.  Indeed, only by abandoning all inhibition can you reach the full joy and ecstasy that a slave-girl can achieve.”

“Joy, Master?”

“Yes. An awakened kajira paradoxically even in the most restrictive of chains, is emotionally and sensually the freest of beings in all of Gor.  The deeper, the more abject her slavery, the more wonderful she is.”

“Am I expected to believe that, Master?”

“Be careful with sarcasm, girl.  It will be considered displeasing by most Masters.  But, yes.  You can’t see it yet, you don’t think it possible, but you will one day; and you will look back on your present naivety with amusement.”

Like hell, but I’d best go along with this madman for the present.

I reach for the object that I’ve carefully hoarded.  I stand before this beautiful but yet untamed kajira. I hold the object in front of her eyes.

“This is your slave collar.  As well as marking you slave, it also identifies you and who it is that owns you.  I had it made specially for you before we left Earth.  I’m not an Ubar, an Emperor, so can’t afford to put my slave into a silver or gold collar.  This is stainless steel, it shouldn’t react against your skin as ordinary steel might.  If anyone asks, it is a special steel only made in ‘Barbarian lands’.  Got that…”

“Yes, Master.  But I don’t want to wear it.  I’ll get it off eventually.”

“No, you won’t.  Remove it, even if you can, and I will kill you.  No-one will help you remove it, such would be seen as being effectively illegal and immoral.”

I go cold again with fear.  I can’t see a way, handcuffed as I am, that I can stop him locking this metal ring round my throat.

“Do you see these squiggles?  Since you are illiterate in Gorean, I will tell you what they say.  Don’t ever forget.  It says ‘Shirley’, yes I choose to call you that.  You will remember what I said about that not being your name by right, only what I choose to call you.  You are ‘Shirley’ and only that, because I wish it.  The rest of the engraving says ‘Property of Michalis Dundras - If found straying, please return me for punishment-Reward.’

I’m feeling rather terrified right now.  With this thing locked on me, I can’t see how I’ll escape.

“Please Master… Don’t fasten this on me.  I don’t need it, I swear.”

Is he reading my mind?  His response ’pours cold water’ on my hopes.

“Yes, you do.  You think that without the collar, you might be able to escape.  I’ve got news for you, Shirley.  For a slave, there is no escape, anywhere.  There’s nowhere to run to, nowhere to hide.  Get used to that fact.  Here, there is a saying:-’Only a fool frees a slave’; and I’m not a fool.  You will be a slave to the end of your days.  Learn to make the best of it, or your life will be a misery.”

I open the collar far enough to pass it round the neck of my kajira and swing it shut.  There is just enough space above the one securing Shirley to the floor.  The lock clicks.  She is mine now.  Collared according to merchant law.

The clicking of the lock is a toll of doom.  I doubt I will ever forget the sound of it, the timbre of it. The weight of the collar is not problematical, but there’s a coldness to the metal.  Such will probably warm up from my body heat, but I doubt that I will ever reach a point where I’m not aware of this collar encircling my neck.

“Hey, Master.  What if I were to say to you that I don’t want to be owned by you.  That you’d be better off getting rid of me, sell me even, if that’s what it takes?  Kill me, if you must?  You’ll always be my enemy.”

She’s not the first free woman enslaved, who’s sworn that she’d prefer death to slavery, nor will she be the last.  Experience has shown me that when it comes to the moment of death, they all fall to the feet, begging for the collar.

“Many slaves would kill to be the sole slave in a Master’s life, in his household.  There are worse slaveries out there.  Perhaps you’d prefer to be sold to a leather tanner?  You’d spend all day, every day, softening skins in pits of urine.  Perhaps instead you’d prefer to be chained permanently to a cloth-maker’s loom, working for 14 Ahn a day, that’s about 16 hours a day, sleeping on the floor next to the machine?  Sold to a Peasant, you’d pull a plough under the lash.  Would you want that.  Do you fancy being a paga-slut in a tavern, available to be fucked by each and every customer for no, or little more than the price of his drink?”

I don’t tell her that paga-sluts are the most joyous of slaves, being the most and best fucked of all slaves. Sexual frustration being something that they can barely comprehend, except as a cruel punishment.

“Think yourself grateful. It’s academic, anyway.  You don’t get to choose.  I your Master wills it, it will be so.”

“But why?  You still haven’t explained why you’ve kidnapped me?  You’ve implied that you want me as a slave, but I assume you want more than a household servant, that you want me as some kind of sex-slave.  Why me?  I’m not a beauty.  I’m really quite ordinary.”

His laughter is really quite sardonic.

“Have you no vanity, girl?  Do you really see yourself as that ordinary?  The manipulators of Earth have done an amazing job in destroying your sense of your own self-worth.  Gorean men have a more varied eye as to what constitutes beauty.  They appreciate different things.  You to me are sufficiently beautiful and intelligent that I wanted you, wanted to own you.  Whether you believe it or not, I believe you have what it takes to be the most superb, magnificent and abject slave a man could ever have.  I do hope that I’m not mistaken in that.”

Oh!  I can’t help but be warmed by such a powerful compliment, and by the appreciation in his eyes and voice.  I believe that he really means it.  How can I not be affected by such praise.  The implied warning at the end of his peroration does not frighten.  This man wants me!  A good looking hunk of a man desires me enough to simply grab me.  It’s Neanderthal!  It’s like back to cave-man days.  He wants me, he simply ties me and carries me back to his cave as his less than equal ‘mate’.  I don’t want or dare to admit even to myself that such desire is extremely carnal,  I feel myself beginning to excite; my nipples harden, my pussy moistening.  Damn this body!

“Now enough of this badinage.  Entertaining as it has been, it begins to bore.  Time for you to learn the realities and practicalities of your new life.”

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[1]              North American bedding item, akin to a duvet, but without a separate cover.