A Talendar for Shirley (7) by Peony D Beckside

 

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 Seven: Upskilling

 

Much of my time in training at the slave-house is standard stuff.  Master, when instructing me to write of my experiences and feelings since first meeting him, has redacted anything that he thinks is unoriginal; been written of before, by others.

Risking him reminding me about curiosity in kajirae, I had asked him...

“I will obey Master, but why do you wish me to write my story?”

I had hoped that in doing so, it might indicate the intended readership.  That could effect how I phrase things.

I chuckle at her question.

“It pleases me to add to the mythos on Earth about the Planet Gor, especially since whatever you write, if published, will only ever be seen as fiction, never as fact.  I will be adding my own version of events.  A ghostwriter on Earth will hopefully dovetail the two stories into one coherent whole. Write it from the beginning, from when you first saw me, and write it in the sense of ‘now’, i.e. that something is happening, that you are having this thought, rather than it having happened in the past or you thought it in the past.”

I have a momentary surge of hope.  If Master can get the manuscript back to Earth, can I too get back there?  I’m not truly sure whether I would want to or not.  In the time that I have been here I have seen and experienced many intriguing and wondrous things.  That’s not to mention the cleanness of the air, the handsomeness of the men, the apparent lack of systematic control and corruption prevalent on Earth.  At least here, the owning and control of us slaves is honest.

That brief flash of hope must have shown on my face, or Master has read my mind (again).

“Sorry Shirley, it doesn’t work like that.  You will never return to Earth.  Apart from the fact that I’ve no intention of letting you escape or getting rid of you, the link to get the manuscript back to Earth is very tenuous.  I pass it to someone, who passes it to someone, who passes it to someone else.  Even I don’t know how many links there are in the chain or how to follow it.  Not that I wish to anyway.”

Well that’s that then.  I write in English of course.  Firstly I’m not literate in Gorean, and second since the work is going back to Earth, it’s the logical language.

Ah, yes.  Where was I?  Oh yes, training in the slave house…

I am conducted into a dark and dismal place, something akin to an old lunatic asylum or something. It’s also clearly a prison.  I am led past a series of cages into a kind of dark hallway.  From that hallway  other corridors lead off.  From one I hear screaming.  A woman’s scream.  From another the sound of weeping.

One of the women conducting me approaches a man; the jailer I take him to be.  She kneels, knees wide, bowing her head before him.  The other slave drops to her knees too, indicating that I should too.  I follow her lead.  The first slave addresses the man.  My knowledge of the language being spoken, being virtually non-existent, the only word that I can follow is the first, ‘Dominus’.  Many of the words spoken seem to me to sound a bit Greek, Latin perhaps.  Interspersed though, I wonder if some of the words are more guttural.  Norse or German?

The man waves the two slaves away.  He grasps my arm, pulling me to standing.  He steers me down a different corridor.  Using a key attached to a lanyard, he unlocks a cell door.  I am unceremoniously thrust inside.  The clang of the door shutting and being locked terrifies me.

“No talking!”

How much English the man knows and understands, I cannot gauge from this abbreviated instruction.

There are lamps in the corridor, oil-lamps I think.  They give little illumination to the corridor, or of the body of the cage.  There’s enough light to see that there’s a hole in the floor at the back of the cage.  I have to assume that despite there being little stink, it is my latrine,

I take in the other cages along this corridor.  Each seems to have an occupant, a woman in each case, and a good looking one at that.

I sidle up to the edge by the nearest ‘girl’.  In a whisper, lest the guard hear, I try to initiate a conversation.

The woman pantomime’s zipping up her mouth.  It’s clear that she’s terrified of disobeying the ‘No talking’ edict.  No conversation here, nothing to alleviate the expected boredom.

After what I take to be a couple of hours, two other slaves enter the corridor.  Their tunics are ragged.  One carries a large and clearly heavy pail, the other a ladle, a hooked stick and a pile of crude bowls.  The one one with the ladle slops a pile of semi-liquid goo into a bowl, bends down and slides it through a small hole in the bars at the foot of the door.  She speaks.

“No use hands!”

I shuffle forwards and reach for the bowl.  Clearly it’s meant to be food.  Before I can touch the bowl, the woman again orders, this time with more force.

“No use hands!”

How am I supposed to eat if I can’t lift the bowl to my mouth?  The method comes to me.

No!  Surely not!  Surely they don’t want me to eat like an animal would?!  Yet I am hungry.  It’s been some time since I was given half a pie by Master at the take-away booth.  For that matter when will I next be fed, and will I be fed this same way?

“Eat!”

I know that food is energy, but I’m reluctant to demean myself in this manner.

The woman reaches into the hole with her stick, trying to hook the bowl.  She’s going to take the food away!  I rush forward and press my face into the bowl.  As my face descends, I see the cruel malicious smile on her face.

The mush in the bowl is rather bland and tasteless but it fills my belly and takes away the build-up of saliva from my mouth.  As soon as I rise up, having cleared the bowl, it is expertly whisked away and the two slaves move on.  The floor of the cell is covered in straw.  It’s reasonably fresh.  I take a small handful and wipe my face, depositing the wad into the hole at the back of the cage.  What kind of place has Master delivered me into?  I know that he said that my time here would not be easy, but I cry myself to sleep this night.

 

It’s some unearthly hour in the morning.  I giggle to myself at the term ‘unearthly’.  The jailer man, along with a rather flawless slave stands there.  The woman has a piece of paper and a stick  The jailer a bundle of short chains.  She rattles the stick against the bars.  The jailer unlocks the cell door.

“Come.”

I’m still trying to wake myself up.

“Harta!”

I don’t know what ‘Harta’ means, but from the context, I take it to be a command to move faster.

The slave leads, the jailer attaches a chain to my collar and tugs me gently behind him.  They’re taking no chances of me making a break for it.  But where would I run to.  I have no idea about the layout of this place.

We stop before another cage.  The slave rouses another girl.  As soon as she’s been let out of her cage she too has a chain attached to her collar.  The other end of that chain is fastened to my collar.  We are being put into a coffle!  How is it that I know that the word for a group of slaves, chained together is ‘coffle’?  Its not a common word.  Not one that I would use in any but the rarest of circumstances.  I have to assume that it must have been used in some trashy romantic bodice-ripper of a novel I’ve read in the past.

Eventually, when this coffle of us clearly nervous naked women reaches about twenty strong, we are led into a large well-lit room.  The light coming from a series of openings set high up into a sloping roof.  We cannot climb up to them, and there is some kind of shutter arrangement that we cannot squeeze through..  The coffle chains are removed, the jailer leaves.

“Form four rows of five people.  Be quick about it.”

This woman’s English is astounding!  It has an accent, not quite identifiable, but is fluent and understandable.  Not her native language, but I do wonder if she’s from Earth, for example someone of foreign descent but who grew up in a country where English was the main language.

We sort ourselves out.  The slave begins:-

“I am Shura!  I will be your trainer until you are sold.  I have full whip rights over you, should you prove recalcitrant in your training.  You will call me and acknowledge me as “Domina”.  That translates from “Mistress” in your language.”

A couple of the women giggle.

“I’m sure that some of you know the word ‘Domina’ in your own language and what it represents. You would do well to forget that semantic linkage.  Firstly, I am far crueller than any so-called Domina on your former planet, don’t ask me to prove that to you.  Secondly, if you should giggle at such a thought when addressing a free-woman as “Domina” as you must, you are unlikely to survive such an error.  Your death is likely to be very slow and agonising.”

She pauses for us to take that in.

“You will have noticed that attached to the slave collar you wear, there is a tag.  It bears a number. As slaves, you have no name.  A slave can own nothing, not even a name.  The name you were given at birth is no longer yours by right, since you cannot own it.  If at some point in the future your owner chooses to give you a name, that is what you will be called.  It can be changed at his or her will, since it is simply what he chooses to call you.  Until you are sold, and become the property of an individual owner, you are the legal property of this slave house.  In this house you will only ever be known by the number attached to your collar.  You will only use that number to identify yourself to anyone, including your fellow trainees.  Attempting to use your previous names is punishable.  Since you cannot yet read Gorean numbers, I will come among you and tell you what your number is.  Don’t forget it.  If you are called by your number and fail to respond, you are likely to be punished severely.”

Shura walks among the women telling them what their number is and how it is pronounced in this Gorean language.  Eventually she comes to me.  She raises her voice so that all can hear.

“This is ‘Shirley’.  It seems that she already has a Master, someone that owns her!  She already wears the collar of that owner.  Her Master has already vouchsafed her a name.  Tell me, ‘Shirley’, were you called Shirley before you were enslaved?”

I remember her instruction as to how I should address her.

“Yes, Domina.”

“So now you are a different legal entity, who is also called ‘Shirley’.  Don’t ever think that the person you were before is the same one that you are now, other than in a purely biological context.”

“I understand, Domina.”

“’Shirley’ here, is lucky.  She won’t need to stand on an auctioneer’s block trying to encourage a rich man to buy her, until of course her Master chooses to sell her.”

I sense that there’s a ‘but’ here.

“But it also means that I’m going to have to be harder on her in her training.  I will not let her slack in her lessons, thinking she doesn’t need to try.  I will not take a whipping because Shirley is lazy, stupid, or belligerent.  She will be a marvel when her Master comes to reclaim her.  I’ll make sure she is!  Do you get me, Shirley?”

“Yes, Domina!”

I mean it.  I’ve felt the whip.  I don’t want to get on the wrong-side of this one.  Nor do I want Master to be displeased with me when I am returned to him.  I know that he will expect me to work hard in my training. What was it he said.  “You will put your heart and soul into learning the lessons they will teach you.”  It wasn’t a question.  It was an instruction, an order.

On the second day we are not fed, none of us.  When asked why, the following morning, Shura made it clear.

“One of you did not put adequate effort into your training yesterday.”

“So we are all punished?”

“Correct.”

“Who was it?

“Sometimes you will be told, so you as a peer group can ‘encourage’ that person to greater effort.  Other times you will not.  That will motivate you all to try harder.”

She pauses

“There is a saying that’s common here on Gor.  ‘Curiosity is not becoming in a kajira.  You might be beaten for it.’  You would do well to bear that in mind.”

We have only been denied food twice since then.  The first time, it was clear from Shura’s inference that the woman who’s number equates to 273 in Earth’s numbering system had ‘let the side down’.  The following morning ‘273’ was quite badly bruised and had a seriously blackened eye.  Her cries during the night were plaintive.  I did not attack her.  Shura, having made it clear that I must work harder than the other girls, there was a greater risk that sooner or later it would be I suffering the ire of the group.

The second time, Shura did not indicate who it was that was failing.  In the communal cage where we all sleep there were many sidelong glances, many aimed at me,  Me being the ‘odd one out’ in the group, and it having been made clear that I must work harder than anyone, the suspicion being that it was I who had failed the group.  Since they could not be sure, I was not attacked, but I was treated with considerable coldness that night.

Some five or six days after ‘lessons’ begin, two brawny men remove me from the cage.  I am braceletted, leashed, and hooded.  I am naked.  I am led somewhere.  The thing any animal soon learns is that one cannot fight the leash, even more so when one can’t see a thing.  I feel warmth on my body. Sunlight?  Yes, I’m outdoors.  We walk for some fifteen minutes before we enter another building or enclosure.  I wonder where we are and why we are here, wherever here is.  The hood is removed.  I blink my eyes to get used to the light in the room.

There’s a man here, other than the guards who’ve conducted me to this place, that is.  I recognise him.  I suspect he recalls me, but cannot be sure.  The man wears a green tunic.  I wonder if that has significance.  I believe he’s a doctor of some kind.  Do all doctors wear green.  This man is the same one to whom Master had conducted me before assigning me for training at the slave-house.  This man had looked at me, prodded me, and eventually injected my gums with some kind of long thorn.  I’d not understood any of the babble between this man and Master.  I did however think that I caught a name…  It comes to me.   Paolus Vonci?  Yes, perhaps that’s who he is.  I know why I am here.  My Gorean is coming along quite well, but I still only pick up on a few words of what the guards are saying to this Master, Vonci?; not enough to fully understand what’s being said.  Master had said that I was to be given something called ‘stabilisation serums’, and that these would extend my life almost indefinitely.  Clearly then, I am to be given the second shot of this wondrous potion.  ‘Paolus Vonci’ approaches me with another syringe and thorn-like apparatus.  I open my mouth in anticipation.  I feel this ‘doctor’ push the thorn into my gums again.  I am rapidly hooded again and frogmarched back to the slave house and Shura’s ‘tender mercies’.  I do wonder just how long I will actually live now that I have been given the booster injection, and whether I will one day rue that; not that I have had any choice in the matter.

I hate this Shura with a passion!  I so want to take that switch off her and shove it where… a lady does not discuss!

Why is she being so beastly, so cruel to me.  Nothing I do is ever good enough!  I’ve had enough!  I ask her why she is discriminating against me, holding me to a standard higher than the others.  She stops everyone from working as she explains.

“You don’t get it, do you?  You think I’m being malicious to you, because I despise you.  Not so.  I am no less a slave than you are.  As a slave, I do not have the luxury to indulge in favouritism or contempt for others.  The only person that I have to answer to, to please, is my Master, and that is the head of this house.  He can have me sent into the lowest, meanest slavery in the house, or whipped into insensibility for any or no reason.  He can order my extinction with the wave of his hand.  It has been made clear to me that at the end of your training, you Shirley must be the best trained, the most thoroughly improved slave, given the time frame, that the house has ever produced. I don’t know why my Master wishes me to push you so hard, and I won’t enquire.  The stricture on curiosity for a slave applies just as much to me as it does to you.  I can’t afford to displease my Master, so I must drive you that much more severely.”

She turns to the rest of the group.

“Don’t any of the rest of you think that because I’m being beastly to Shirley here, any of you can slack off.  You too must apply yourself to your lessons.  I have my eye on one or two of you who think I’m not onto you and your lazy ways.”

I think hard on what Shura has said.  Did Master insist when he spoke to the head slaver that I be pushed hard, or is it Shura’s Master who’s driving her to pressure me so as to show Master just how good the house’s training methods are?  Either way, the only way to save myself from significant unpleasantness and pain is to put everything that I have into learning what Shura is teaching me.

Given that many of the lessons are directly related to sexual acts, I must come over before the other women as the very epitome of a total and utterly wanton slut.  I’m not the only one though.  I see some of the others becoming increasingly akin to the most abject of tramps.  The ones with the greatest contempt for me and the rest of us who are becoming more sexually awakened as to what we can do, seem to be the ones that are now receiving the ire of Shura.

Indeed, as part of, or as a consequence of, our training, I and perhaps some of the others are becoming much more needful of sexual attention.  The guards are often involved in our training and may use us as they wish, and I for one have become so much a tramp that the slightest touch of a man anywhere on my body and I become aroused and ready for him slake his lusts.  Not only that, I am disappointed when for training reasons, Shura asks, humbly as she must, a given man to perhaps try another of her charges rather than I.

Though skilful lovers, that are capable of driving me to passions I was never capable of on Earth, my memories of that first taking by Master with its shock of my total abject surrender to him, are not eclipsing that first time.

Whilst our training is not all about sexual skills, we being taught how to move gracefully, basic Gorean cookery, laundry skills, the erotic is constantly kept to the fore.  In time we all become hot desperate tramps.  On Earth I’d inadvertently wandered past a movie theatre specialising in lascivious porn.  One of the lurid posters advertised ‘Women's’ Prison Lust’.  I’d giggled at the time, at the ridiculousness of such a movie.  Now I understand perfectly.  Some nights getting to sleep is difficult for the moans of unfulfilled need.  Last week one of our number was caught intimately caressing herself.  We were all made to watch as 269 was whipped into insensibility.

“Your passion and need is not yours to indulge.  It is part of you, and as such belongs to your Master.  It is up to him to decide whether you will cry out and moan in ecstasy or squirm helplessly in abject unfulfilled frustration.  Most Masters punish very severely for self-pleasuring.  If you would satisfy your need, you must supplicate your master to want himself to satisfy your cravings.  268 will be taught the unacceptability of granting herself that which is not hers to bestow.  You will all, I trust, learn from her example?”

Even though I’m still angry with that rat of a Master of mine…  Hark at me.  I’m finding it very difficult to think of my Master not being mine, that I am his.  Losing the context of ‘having’ things even when ‘the boot is on the other foot’ and it is others that actually physically own me, is taking time.  Intellectually I know that I’m owned, it’s just the semantics of learning different ways of being linked to my Master rather than me linking myself to him.  I was saying…  Yes, I feel the ire of Master’s kidnapping of me, whipping me and even assigning me to this cruel hot-house learning environment, slipping away.  The annoyance is not fully gone yet.  I wonder if I’ll ever be able to fully forgive him for his effrontery at what he has done to me.  Yet every day I find it harder and harder to hate him.

There is here the carnality of the Neanderthal, Master simply picking me up and carrying me back to his cave, to be his mate, his toy, his ‘woman’.  I can’t help it, but it speaks to something deep down and ancient in me.  That he thinks I am sufficiently beautiful to be worth his while in simply ‘taking’ me, is a kind of compliment, a very meaningful one.  When I dream, I often dream of Master caressing me.  Following such nights, I am often sticky and gooey between my legs.  It could easily have been me that was tied to the whipping post if I’d gone that one step more, extending my dreams into physical pleasure.

If the truth is known though, was I happy back on Earth?  I existed.  Shop work is generally poorly paid.  I struggled most months to remain solvent, to be able to pay my rent, to buy food, to pay the subway fare to get to and from work.  Whilst I had (short term) boyfriends, none of them ‘lit my fire’ like the first time Master had taken me.  Sure, I was skilled at what I did.  I knew my stuff.  I had job-satisfaction, but I didn’t have any realistic hopes of ever rising to anything better.  Can such a life be classed as being ‘happy’, as being LIFE as such.

At least in this new life, I feel myself awakening, blooming like a flower opening up.  I have fewer worries, or at least will when I’m returned to my Master.  I won’t have to find money for rent.  Master will provide accommodation, even if it is being chained to the foot of his couch.  My Master…  I keep calling him MY Master.  I suppose that using ‘The man who owns me.’ is just too clumsy …  Ah, yes.  Master will feed me.  Often that food may be bland gruel, but it’s food.  I giggle to myself at not needing to pay subway fare.  There’s no subway to need to ride.  I don’t need to ‘go to work’.  My ‘work’ is, or will be wherever Master is, I being his property will be with him, or where I can be available for him to use me.  No,  I will have effectively only one worry, not dozens.  How can I best please Master?  The minutiae of that, being simply part of how I am allowed and expect to live.  Master will set the agenda, the scene, provide the ‘props’, tell the cast (me) what to do, and he will be happy.  Anything he doesn’t like, it is in his power to change it.  Being a part of this production, everything that I need in order to please Master, will be provided so that I can play my part.  See, all worries gone, as long as I am pleasing to Master.  Simple!  How then can I, should I be angry at Master for bringing me here.  He wanted me, wanted me enough to simply pluck me as he would a flower, didn’t he? 

 

I have lost all track of time.  The days being full to bursting, I have no idea how many have past, nor was it made clear to me or the others how long our training was to be.  It’s the end of another exhausting day, when Shura calls us to attention.

“Slaves, we have come to the end of your training.  Tomorrow morning, you will be put into an exhibition cage.  Men, and perhaps a few women, will come and examine you.  You will do well to entice them to want to bid on you to buy you at auction tomorrow night.  Some of you may be hesitant in the cage or on the ‘block’ to thrust yourself forward into interesting a potential buyer. Failure to do so, to be left unsold will have serious consequences for you.  Don’t let me find that any of my students suffer such a fate!”

Shura turns to me.

“Shirley, tomorrow I will be reviewing everything you have learned.  You will polish those skills until they are second-nature.  It will be a long and tiring day.  Make sure you get plenty of sleep tonight and tomorrow night, for the day after tomorrow, your Master will return to collect his property. Everyone in the house, all the way down to me will be most displeased if you are not perfect for your owner.  None of us likes to be disappointed.  You get me?”

“Yes, Domina!”