I had no difficulty in recovering m ten copper tarsks, put down to hold the girl for Boots's later inspection.
"Are you pleased with your buy?" I asked Boots later, when we were leaving the market, the girl following behind us, heeling us, her wrists tied behind her back with a string.
"She was pretty expensive," said Boots.
"But you are pleased, are you not?" I asked.
"Yes," he said.
"Are you grateful?" I asked.
"Eternally, undyingly," he assured me.
"Perhaps you would consider granting me a favor," I said.
"Just ask," he said.
"I would like to join your troupe," I said.
"No," he said.
"I thought you just said to 'just ask'," I said.
"You are correct," said Boots. "That is exactly what I had in mine, that you should just ask, only that, and nothing more. Now, where are my wagons?"
"You are a hard man," I said.
"Yes," he said, "I am a grim fellow. But one does not attain my heights by being soft."
"Your wagons are in that direction," I informed him.
"Thank you," he said.
"You will not reconsider?" I asked.
"No," said Boots, "and what am I to do without a Brigella?"
"I do not know," I said.
"I am ruined," said Boots.
"Perhaps not," I opined, hopefully.
"Are you a business man?" he asked.
"No," I said.
"I will thank you, then," said Boots, "to have the decency to refrain from forming an opinion on the matter."
"Sorry," I said.
"Do you know where I can find a Brigella?" he asked.
"Perhaps you could buy one," I said.
"Not just any girl can be a Brigella," he said.
"I suppose not," I said.
"I am ruined," he said.
"At least you now have a golden courtesan," I said, "and I expect that she will prove profitable in the tent as well."
"Perhaps," said Boots.
"I would like to join your troupe," I said.
"It is out of the question," said Boots. "Now, where are those wagons?"
"That way," I said.
"Thank you," he said.
"More to the left," I said.
"Thank you," he said.
"You would not have to pay me!" I called out, after him.
"No, no," he said, waving his hand, "it is out of the question." He then continued on his way, muttering about Brigellas, expenses, free women, fate, elusive wagons and the woes that sometimes afflict honest men.
Security in Brundisium, I had learned earlier from Boots, was tight. I wondered why this might be. I was curious to know, too, why at least some in that city seemed to have an interest in Tarl Cabot, or Bosk, of Port Kar. Much seemed to me mysterious in Brundisium. It might be an interesting place to go visiting, I thought. Too, it had been a long time since I had gone hunting. I was sorry that I had not been able to join Boots's troupe. None, I thought, would be likely to suspect a lowly member of a group of strolling players. It would have been a superb cover. Tomorrow, before nightfall, I suspected, Boots's wagons would leave the fair, probably heading west, probably on the road of Clearchus. It is a dangerous road. There was no law against two traveling it. Boots had disappeared now among the booths and stalls of the fair.
"Please, let me yield!" she whispered. "I beg to be permitted to yield! Please, Master, let me yield! Please, Master! Please, Master!"
I looked down into her eyes. She looked up at me, through her hair, wildly, piteously.
"No," I said.
She moaned. She tried to control her breathing. Her beauty was held tense, rigid, almost motionless. I heard the tiniest sound of the chain on her ankle. the collar, the flat, snug, unslippable band on her throat, locked behind the back of her neck, was lovely.
We were some two hundred pasangs west of the fairgrounds, at the edge of the woods of Clearchus, just off the road of Clearchus. I had traveled for the last few days in the vicinity of the troupe of Boots, but not really with it. We had traversed the woods of Clearchus, Boots losing little time in the business, without incident. He had, this afternoon, at the edge of the woods, for local villagers, given his first performances since the fair, from which, as we had anticipated, he had been duly expelled, that following from various complaints lodged with the fair's board of governance by a certain free woman, the Lady Telitsia of Asperiche. He had also, given the supposed gravity of his offenses, been fined three silver tarsks and publicly flogged.
He had not been in a good mood that evening. Such things, of course, are not that unusual in the lives of players. Worse, perhaps, two of his company had joined another troupe, taking advantage of an opportunity at the fair, the fellows who commonly played the comic father and the comic pedant. Boots was now trying to make do with his Chino and Lecchio, two other fellows, his Bina and his new "golden courtesan." Things were so bad that he had, this afternoon, actually interspersed his dramatic offering with what were more in the nature of variety or carnival acts. One must make do as one can.
Fortunately his Chino was an accomplished juggler and his Lecchio was excellent as a comic tight-rope walker. Boots himself was very skillful in the matter of slight-of-hand and magic. Indeed, his dilapidated, oval-roofed wagons seemed a veritable repository for all sorts of wondrous paraphernalia, much of it having to do with matters of illusion and legerdemain. This multiplicity of skills, incidentally, is not all that uncommon with players. Most of them, too, it seems, can do things like play the flute or kalika, sing, dance, tell jokes, and so on. They are generally versatile and talented people.
Boots's player, incidentally, the kaissa player, the surly, masked fellow, called usually "the monster" in the camp, remained, too, with the troupe. He remained, as far as I could tell, from what I had heard this afternoon, consistently and insolently adamant to Boots's please that he manage to lose a game once in a while, if only for the sake of business, or, at the least, make an effort to play a bit less well. Nonetheless, even as it was, he did make some contribution to the welfare of the troupe. His kaissa games, for what it is worth, usually brought in a few coins. There was something I wanted to talk with him about, sometime.
"Please, Master," whimpered the girl.
"Are you ready?" I asked.
"Yes, yes, yes!" she said, tensely.
"'Yes' what?" I asked.
"Yes, Master!" she said, helplessly, tensely.
"Very well," I said. "You may yield."
"Aiii!" she screamed, wildly, inarticulately, in release, in relief, in animal gratitude. Then she cried, "Oh! Oh!" and thrashed beneath me. "Oh!" she cried. "Oh!" She clutched me, desperately. Her legs, with a rattle of the chain, locked about me. "Oh!" she cried. Her fingernails dug deeply into my back.
Then again she could speak. "I yield me!" she cried. "I yield me to you, Master! I am yours! I am yours, yours, yours! Oh, yes, I am yours, yours." She clung then to me, sobbing and gasping. I heard the chain on her ankle.
"Your yielding," I said, "was satisfactory-for a new slave."
She looked at me wildly, and then moaned softly, continuing to cling helplessly to me.
"There are, of course," I said, "infinite horizons and varieties of such responses, ranging from ravishings in which the slave, by one means or another, is driven almost to the point of madness by the pleasures inflicted upon her, ravishings in which the master, in his cruelty, and despite her will, forces her relentlessly and helplessly to, and beyond, ecstasy, giving her no choice but to accept total sexual fulfillment, to putting her helplessly to lengthy and gentle services, warm and intimate, in which her slavery and condition are well brought home to her."