She reached out, desperately, and held me about the legs, I standing before her. She pressed her cheek against my thigh. I could feel the hood, hot and damp, soaked with tears, between her cheek and my leg.
"Save me from them," she wept. "They are lunatics. They foreswear the most obvious truths of human nature. Among them the males cannot be men and the females cannot be women. It is a sick, perverted world! They struggle against passion. They are afraid to feel. They are terrorized by desire. They pervert their reason. They deny thier senses. They are all mad, all of them!"
I crouched down and took the sobbing woman in my arms.
"They will make me ashamed of my body," she wept. "They may drive me insane, I do not want their dismal peace, their pathological tranquillity, their vacuous serenity. I am not a turtle. I am not a vegetable. I am a woman. I want to be what I am, truly. I do not want to be ashamed of my needs or my sex. I want to live, and feel!"
She was Gorean woman. This had made the transitision to a Waniyanpi community additionally difficult for her. The transition, presumably, because of their conditioning and upbringing, having acclimated them to what, in effect, were Waniyanpi values, would doubtless have been much easier for a woman from Earth.
"It is not wrong to want to be alive, is it?" she asked.
"No," I said, "it is not wrong to what that."
"They pretend to be happy," she said, "but they are not happy. They are miserable, and filled with hate."
"Let us rejoice," I said, "that their madness is confined to a handful of isolated compounds in the wilderness." How frightful it would be, I thought, if such an arid lunacy should infect a wider domain.
"Save me from them," she begged.
"It is not pracitcal," I said.
She sobbed anew, and I held her more closely.
"You were found with the soldiers," I said. "That is doubtless why you were sent to a Waniyanpi community. It is your punishment."
"A most just and suitable punishment," she said, bitterly.
"Yes," I said. It was a particularly terrible punishment, of course, for a woman such as she, one who had some idea of the possiblities of life and feeling.
"Better to be the lowest slave, naked and chained, of the cruelest master on Gor," she said.
"Yes," I said.
"Look," she said, drawing back, sobbing, putting her hands to the hood. "They are afraid even to let us see true men."
"It is perhaps moer merciful that way," I said. "That way perhaps, you will experience less distress and torment when you return to the Waniyanpi compound."
"But I have known true men," she said.
"That makes it much harder for you, of couse," I admitted.
"I hunger for the touch of a true man," she said. Waniyanpi males are weak, pathetic and meaningless."
"It may not be their fault," I said. "They may be only trying to fulfill the stereotypes of their culture."
"We were made to chew sip roots on the way to camp," she said, "to protect us, if our red masters should choose to seize and rape us."
"The precaution, however," I said, "proved unnecessary, did it not?"
"Yes," she said. "We are only Waniyanpi females. No man wants us."
I did not speak.
"They do not fear our men, do they?" she asked.
"No," I laughed. "Even a boy would think nothing of usuing you in the presence of an entire work crew of Waniyanpi males, if he felt like it. They would not interfere."
"Why are we not desired?" she asked.
"You are taught, explicitly or implicintly," I said, "to behave and dress unattractively, even, so to speak, to think unattractively. Most males, thusly, assuming them to be vital and healthy, would not be likely to find a Waniyanpi woman of much intrest. They might tend to think of them as being, in some odd way, repulsively unnatural, or, perhaps, worse, as being mentally ill. Too, of course, in camps of our red masters you must realize that there are alernatives available."
"We are not really like that," she said.
"I do not suppose you are," I said.
"We have needs and hungers, too," she said.
"I suppose you do," I said. It did seem to me that the usual male assessment of the Waniyanpi female ws likely to be somewhat hasty and negative. Men are often too abrupt, t seems to me, in their judgments. They might profit from some instruction in patience. Such women, unfulfilled as females, starved for male domination, I supposed, taken sternly in hand, stripped and put to a man's feet, might prove to be grateful and rewarding slaves. In a matter of days, I suspected, it might be difficult to tell one, licking and kissing at one's feet, warmly, lovingly and gratefully, from a more normal slave.
"I suppose, if a man were suffciently desperate," she said, "he might find us of intrest."
"Probably," I said. Studies and case histories suggested that this sort of thing was true.
"The least desirable," she said, bitterly, "are the last desired."
"Perhaps," I said.
"It is so ironic!" she said.
"What?" I asked.
"When I was free, in Venna, and elsewhere," she said, "I was desired and could not be obtained. Now that I am a slave and can be obtained, I am not desired."
"I see," I said.
"It is a new experience for me, and one not to my liking, not to be desired."
"Oh?" I said.
"I had thought, when free," she said, "that if ever I fell slave, men would put me frequiently to their pleasure."
"That is common with slaves," I said. "It was a fair assumption."
"And that I must needs fear only that I might not sufficiently please them."
"To be sure," I said, "a natural fear with slaves."
"But not once," she said, "have I been put to the service of my masters."
"Surely you have frightened fleer from the maize, gardened and picked produce," I said.
"But not once," she said, angrily, "have they put me to their intimate service, forcing me to perform with the skills and talents of the female slave."
"It is perhaps just as well," I said. "You were a free woman, and you have not had much training. If you did not do well, you might be whipped severly, or perhaps slain."
"Oh," she said.
"Being a slave girl is very different from being a free woman," I said. "From a free woman a man expects little, or nothing. From a slave girl, on the other hand, he expects, as it is said, everything, and more."
"I understand," she said.
"A free woman may be valueless and, if she wishes, account this a virtue. A slave, on the other hand, must be superbly pleasing. She must see to it, with all her intelligence and beauty, that she is her master's attentive, sensitive, skillful treasure."
"I would like to be such a treasure to a man," she said.
I did not speak.
"May I call you 'Master'?" she asked.
"Yes," I said.
"Master," she said.
"Yes," I said.
"When I was free, I was regarded as being very beautiful. Indeed, it was said by some that I was as beautiful, even, as a slave."
"A high compliment," I acknowledged. I recalled the first time I had ever seen her, on her curule chair, on her high cart, in the column of the Kurii and mercenaries. She had worn the robes of concealment, but only a wisp of diaphanous silk, presumably by intent, had feigned to hide her features. I recalled, even then, wondering what she might look like in the shimmering dancing silks of an enslaved female or, say, stripped and collared, crawling at men's feet.
"Master," she said.
"Yes," I said.
How different, then, was that absurd pretense of a veil, that sweet diaphanous sheen of material, compared to the rude coarse sack which had now been tied over her head. How disgusting were the Waniyanpi.
"Surely I am no less beautiful now than I was then," she said.
"Perhaps," I granted her.
"And now I am a slave," she said.