Explorers of Gor by John Norman

yes,” she sobbed. Then she cried out, “La Kajira! La Kajira!” This was a bit of Gorean known to her. ‘I am a slave girl.’
    Ulafi, with his dagger, but not cutting her, put it first to her right ear, and then to the side of her small nose, and then to the left ear.
    “Don’t hurt me,” she begged. “I’m sorry I lied! Forgive me, forgive me! La Kajira! La Kajira!”
    Ulafi stood up, replacing the dagger in his sash. The girl had now learned that her feet might be cut off for running away, that her ears and nose might be cut from her for lying. She was still an ignorant girl, of course, but she now knew a little more of what it might be to be a slave on Gor.
    “Release her from the rack,” said Ulafi. The rack was opened and the girl collapsed, shuddering, on the wharf.
    “Tie her hands and fasten her at a dock ring,” said Ulafi, to his second officer, and two seamen, one of whom was the fellow who had passed me on the walkway of the Rim canal, on the way to the pier of the Red Urt. “Then whip her,” said Ulafi. “Then bring her to the shop of the metal worker. I shall await you there. Bring, too, a pole and cage to the shop.”
    “Yes, Captain,” said the second officer.
    “Come with me, if you would,” said Ulafi to me.
    I followed him to the shop of the metal worker. Outside the shop, stripped, weeping, chained by the neck to a ring, freshly branded, was the girl who had been the Lady Sasi, of Port Kar. A guardsman stood near her. If she was not soon sold for the cost of her branding she would be taken and put on the public shelves, large, flat steps; leading down to the water, near where the Central canal meets Thassa, the sea. She was a cheap slave, but she was pretty. I did not think she should have attempted to inconvenience honest citizens. When she saw me she tried to cover herself and crouch small. I smiled. Did she not know she was branded?
    “Heat an iron,” said Ulafi to the metal worker, a brawny fellow in a leather apron.
    “Tal,” said the man to me.
    “Tal,” said I to him.
    “We always keep an iron hot,” said the metal worker. But he did turn to his assistant, a lad of some twelve years. “Heat the coals,” said he to him. The lad took a bellows and, opening and closing it, forced air into the conical forge. The handles of some six irons, their heads and a portion of their shafts buried in the coals, could be seen.
    I looked out the door of the shop. I could see the girl, about one hundred and fifty yards away, her wrists crossed and bound before her, tied by the wrists to a heavy ring at the side of the pier. She knelt. Then the first stroke of the whip hit her. She screamed. Then she could scream no more but was twisting, gasping, on her stomach, and side and back, under the blows of the whip. I think she had not understood before what it might mean, truly, to he whipped. Men passed her, going about their business. The disciplining of a slave girl on Gor is not that unusual a sight.
    “I have five brands,” said the metal worker, “the common Kajira brand, the Dina, the Palm, the mark of Treve, the mark of Port Kar.”
    “We have a common girl to brand,” said Ulafi. “Let it be the common Kajira brand.”
    I could see that the girl had now been unbound from the ring. She could apparently not walk. One of the seamen had thrown her over his shoulder and was bringing her toward the shop. She was in shock. I think she had not realized what the whip could do to her.
    Yet the beating had been merciful and brief. I doubt that she was struck more than ten or fifteen times.
    I think the purpose of the whipping had been little more than to teach her what the whip could feel like. A girl who knows what the whip can feel like strives to be pleasing to the master.
    I could see the lateen sails on Ulafi’s ship loosened on their yards.
    Men stood by the mooring ropes.
    Two sailors, behind the second officer, carried a slave cage. It was supported on a pole, the ends of which