Swordsmen of Gor by John Norman

disbelieving, or numb.
    “Let me help you to your couch,” he said.
    “No,” I said, standing up, approaching them. “You, Pertinax, are master. It is you who will have the couch, and not the slave. She will sleep at the foot of the couch, on the floor, or outside.”
    “Surely not,” protested Pertinax.
    I nudged the slave with my foot, not gently, and she reacted, and whimpered. “Do you understand, slave?” I asked.
    “Yes,” she said, “Master.”
    “Then crawl to your master,” I said, “kiss his feet, and beg to be permitted to sleep at the foot of his couch.”
    Constantina, on all fours, head down, her long hair to the floor, crawled to Pertinax, bent down, and kissed his feet. “I beg to be permitted to sleep at the foot of your couch, Master,” she said.
    “Ai!” cried Pertinax, half in consternation, half in delight.
    “Well?” I asked Pertinax. “A slave awaits an answer to her petition.”
    “You may do so,” said Pertinax, his voice unsteady.
    “Thank you, Master,” she said, and went to her place.
    Cecily drew away her tunic, like the beautiful, uninhibited, shameless little animal she was, and knelt beside the mattress, at its lower left side, and lifted it a bit, and kissed it. She looked at me, expectantly, hopefully, to learn my will, and I reached down and seized her by the hair and, as she winced, in pain and delight, I drew her beside me on the mattress.
    Even in the Pleasure Cylinder the slave fires had been well lit in Cecily’s lovely, helpless, vulnerable little belly, and she had soon found herself, as is common with female slaves, their victim and prisoner.
    How the flames of their needs goad slaves to the feet of masters, even to the feet of those they may loathe.
    I did not begrudge Cecily her ecstasies, nor would I hinder them. Some masters try to shame their slaves for what they cannot help, indeed for responses for which the master himself may have been significantly responsible, particularly if they have known them as lofty, frigid free women, now, by their will, reduced to begging animals. That, however, seems to me cruel. It does help the slave, of course, to see herself as a slave, in misery and shame, as she recalls her former contempt for such things in slaves. Now she herself understands what it is to be in the throes of being mastered.
    And at a given point she throws her head back and says, “Yes, yes!” to the collar, and is whole.
    Cecily, in her yieldings, was muchly pleasured, and her master, too, if it must be known, was well pleased with his slave.
    Constantina had risen to her knees and was looking, hollow-eyed, dry-eyed, across the hut at us. There was a little light, from the embers of the fire.
    “She is a slave, a slave!” said Constantina.
    “Yes, yes, yes,” gasped Cecily, beside herself with collar rapture.
    “Disgusting! Disgusting!” said Constantina.
    “Pertinax,” I said, “take your slave, and put her to use.”
    “No, no!” said Pertinax, frightened.
    I then rolled to the side, and struggled with the vital thing in my arms, kissing, and licking me, gasping, wanting more, and more.
    Later, an Ahn or more later, Cecily was asleep, and, I gathered, so, too, was Constantina. I lay awake, looking up at the beams and thatch of the hut’s roof. Who was I to meet in two days, or so?
    “Cabot,” I heard.
    “Yes,” I said, softly.
    “You spoke of entanglement,” said Pertinax.
    “Yes,” I said.
    “I am to be paid,” he said, “and then I am done with matters.”
    “I do not think so,” I said.
    “What of her?” he asked.
    “The slave?”
    “Constantina,” he said.
    “She, too, is entangled,” I said.
    I was now confident that his employers were not representing Priest-Kings, but others, perhaps brigands, or merchants, somehow associated with Kurii. Some Kurii, I was sure, from the Steel World, would have had the coordinates for our landing. Certainly they had been transmitted through Kurii, and the security may have