"The common denominator," I said, "appears to be that the woman must be totally pleasing and, in all ways, is totally subject to the will of the Master."
"Yes, Master," she said.
"You may now kiss me again, Slave," I said.
"Yes, Master," she said.
I then lowered her to the robe. Her arms were still about my neck.
"Are you going to teach me to be pleasing?" she asked.
"Yes," I said.
"You will then," she smiled, "be imporving, as you suggested, my master's property."
"Yes," I said. "But I am going to do more than teach you how to be pleasing."
"Oh?" she asked.
"Yes," I said. "When I am finished with you, my naked, collared beauty, you will be quite different than you are now."
She looked at me.
"I am going to make you into a man's dream of pleasure," I said.
"Do so," she said.
"Please, please," she wept. "Do not leave me! I beg you! Touch me more, please! I beg you to stay with me! I did not know it could be anything like this! Please, I beg you, touch me again!" She clutched me. Her tears were on my arm and chest.
"Do you beg it, as a slave?" I asked.
"Yes, Master," she said. "I beg it as a slave!"
"Very well," I said.
"What a fool I was as a free woman!" she whispered.
"You were only ignorant," I said.
"I did not know what it was like to be a slave, the helplessness, the sensations."
I did not respond.
"I did not know such feelings could exist," she said. "I never felt anything like them. They are so overwhelming."
"They have to do with dominance and submission," I said.
"I was afraid, in my yielding," she said, "that I might die."
"It was only a small slave orgasm," I said.
She looked at me, wonderingly.
"Beyond what you have experienced," I said, "lie indefinite horizons of ecstasy. No woman yet, I speculate, has numbered them."
"It is so much more than mere physical feeling," she said.
"It is such feeling in a cognitive matrix," I said. "It is psychophysical. It is an indissolubly emotional, physical and intellectual whole."
"I shall now need, often, the touch of a man," she said.
"Yes," I said.
"You have done this to me," she chided.
"It should have been done long ago," I said.
"But now," she said, "what if a man does not choose to satisfy me?"
"Try to be such that he will show you kindness," I said.
She shuddered. She was now much more at the mercy of men thatn she had ever suspected she could be. The slave fires in her belly, as it is said, had now been lit. She was now susceptible to the torments of the deprived slave. Free women, whose sexuallity is usually, for most practical purposes, sluggish and inert, often have difficulty in understanding the desperation and intensity of these needs on the part of a female slave. They think that she is different from, and inferior to, themselves. If they themselves should be enslaved, of course, they are likely to soon revise these opinions. They, too, then may well find themselves moaning and scratching in their kennels, begging rude keepers for their touch, and being despised, in turn, by free women.
"You have ruined me for freedom," she said.
"Do you object?" I asked.
"No," she said. "I want to be a slave. I love being a slave."
"That is fortunate," I said, "for that is what you are."
"I have been a slave for months," she said. "I regret only that I have wasted all this time. I have waited until today to discover what it can be, truly, to be a slave."
"What do you feel about men?" I asked.
"They are interesting and beautiful," she said.
"Beautiful?" I asked.
"To my eyes," she smiled.
"And what else?" I asked.
"I know that they are my masters, that I need their touch and that I wish to serve them."
"Can you conceive of yourself kneeling before a man, head down, begging him for his caress?" I asked.
"Clearly," she said, "now that my sexuality has been awakened."
"Will he accede to your plea?" I asked.
"It would be my hope that he would," she said.
"Sometimes he may, sometimes he may not," I said. "There may come times when you will be grateful for so little as a cuffing or a kick."
"I must accept what I am given," she said. "I am a slave."
I then took her again in my arms. "Yes!" she breathed.
I lay on my side and the girl put a tiny piece of pemmican in my mouth.
I enjoyed having her feed me. She had, earlier, brought me water in her mouth, but, in its transfer, at the touch of her lips, it had only led to a new ravishment of her. I had then gone to the stream to satisfy my thirst.
"It is nearly sundown," I said.
"Then I must be returned to the herd," she moaned. "I must then be taken near the village with the others. I must then be hobbled and, a rope on my neck, be picketed with my string. How can I bear, now, to return to the herd?"
"I doubt that you will now be long kept in the herd," I said.
"I now need a man," she said. "I will do anything to be taken into a lodge, to serve."
"You are helpless now, aren't you?" I said.
"Yes, Master," she said. "May I leave the robe?"
"Yes," I said.
She went to the small hide in which the quirt had been wrapped. She picked it up and brought it to the edge of the robe. She spread it out there. "You told me," she said, smiling, "that this hide was about the size of a Tahari submission mat."
"Yes," I said.
"Behold," she said, smiling, her head down. "I kneel upon the mat."
I regarded her. A thousand memories rushed int my mind, of the vast, tawny Tahair, of its bleakness, and its dunes, of its caravans, of its oases and palaces. In the Tahari culture the submission mat has its place.
"In the Tahari," she asked, "might not girls, such as I, kneel on such mats?"
"Yes," I said. Many times I had seen such slaves, blond and beautiful, kneeling on such mats before dark masters.
"Oh!" she cried, seized and taken.
The girl knelt before me on the robe. Her head was down. "I beg your caress, Master," she said.
I smiled. Well did she remember our earlier conversation.
I looked at the sun though the trees. I thought there was time.
"Earn it," I said.
"Yes, Master," she said, happily.
Later I held her, again, in my arms. "We must start back now," I said.
"I know," she whispered.
I got up, and gathered my things together. "Roll the robe," I said. She did so. Then she knelt on the grass.
"Bind my hands and arms," she said, "so tightly that I cannot move the. Then march me back to the herd, a rope on my neck."
"No," I said. "You will walk back, quietly, before me."
"Yes, Master," she smiled.
I tied my things together with the rope. Then, the girl preceding me, we left the small grove. I looked back on it once. I had had a good time there.
Chapter 13
I LEARN OF THE PRESENCE OF WANIYANPI
"Bring her forth, the red-haired slave," said Mahpiyasapa, cheiftain of the Isbu Kaiila, standing before the lodge of Canka.
Canka stood, unafraid, his arms folded. "Winyela," he called.
The girl, frighened, emerged from the lodge and knelt down, near its threshold.
"It is she," said one of the men with Mahpiyasapa.