She built up the fire.
I watched her.
She unfolded and adjusted a single-bar cooking rack, placing it over the fire. From this she suspended a kettle of water. The single bar, which may be loosened in its rings, and has a handle, may also function as a spit. "And what did you do today?" I asked.
"I knelt in a body hood," she said.
"It was only a sack," I said.
"It served," she said.
The sack I had drawn over her was an improvised body hood. There are several varieties of body hoods on Gor, which is not surprising in a society in which slavery, and particularly female slavery, is an essential ingredient. Most body hoods are made of leather or layers of stout canvas. I have seen at least one in which two layers of canvas were sewn about a lining of linked chain. They may be fastened by means of such devices as cords, straps and laces. They may be tied shut or locked shut.
The prisoner is entered into some body hoods from the back, her legs being placed through openings in the lower portion of the hood, the hood then being pulled up and, from the back, lacked shut. Most of these hoods do not have openings for the arms, but some do. In most hoods the arms are confined within the hood, either free within the hood itself or bound or braceleted within it. Some hoods are open at the bottom, and fastened on the prisoner by means of thongs or straps, often looped about the thighs. Others are constructed in such a way that they may be opened at the bottom, for the master's convenience. Sometimes the hood is thrust up and fastened about the prisoner's waist. The typical hood provides hand and arm security with the advantages of the blindfold. Most body hoods, unlike many common slave hoods, do not have provisions for an internal gag. The prisoner, of course, may be gagged before being hooded. The body hood, like the slave hood, tends to keep a female docile. This may be a particular advantage early in her training, when she may not yet fully understand her new nature and its meaning. Another advantage of the body hood is that it is intriguing and attractive on a woman, baring her legs but usually, unless the arms are also intriguingly bared, concealing the rest of her, this sort of thing exciting male interest, and yet in virtue of the predominant concealment afforded, making her seizure less likely than if she lying about more exposed in common hoods.
Slavers, in moving their wares through the streets, sometimes place them in body hoods. To be sure, it is more common to throw a cloak or sheet, which might be of various lengths, over their heads, this usually being fastened on them by means of a cord or strap looped once or twice about the neck and fastened under the chin. In many cities free women object to the marching of naked slaves through the streets. Still, even though the girls may be covered with cloaks or sheets, the men will usually come to watch, and call out to them, and jeer, and such. It is understood, of course, that the girls, beneath those cloaks or sheets, are slave naked. It is sometimes very trying, though also perhaps very instructive, for a new slave, perhaps a woman of a conquered city, to be marched thusly through the streets, stung with pebbles, pinched and slapped, subjected to the most intimate forms of raillery, jocosity and abuse. "Do you object?" I asked.
"No," she said, suddenly, quickly. Then she put herself on her belly, on the dirt floor of the small tent, before me. She lifted her head, looking up at me. "When," she asked, "may I use the word "Master' truly to you, in all honesty?" "But you are a free woman," I said to her.
"I beg the collar!" she said.
"Is that not an unusual request for a free woman?" I asked.
"My freedom is now a mockery," she said. "After what you have done to me these past two nights, how could I even thing of being free? Do you think that that delusion can be meaningful to me any longer?"
"You have then learned something about yourself?" I said.
"Yes," she said. "I have learned that I should be branded, that I should be in a collar!"
I smiled.
"Do not frustrate me," she begged. "Let me be what I truly am, in all honesty!" "The porridge water should be salted," I said.
"Yes, Master," she said, and crawled to the front of the tent.
"Salt it lightly," I said. She was learning to serve.
"Yes, Master," she said.
The days I had spent here had not been fruitless. I had muchly reconnoitered. I had thought that perhaps I might have been able to ascend the walls of Ar's Station on one of the scaling ladders, in a morning attack, but I had soon thought the better of it. Resistance was still such that few Cosians could reach the parapets, and those who did were usually driven back. Whereas I supposed it was possible that I might enter the city in this way this modality of ingress seemed dubious at best. It was difficult to see how my projects would be furthered if, while attempting to identify myself and explain my mission, I were to be cut open with a boat hook. Similarly I was not interested, in the midst of friendly overtures, in receiving a bucket of flaming oil in the face or, say, being struck from a ladder by a roofing tile brought from the interior of the city. I had also considered trying to enter the city through its main gate, in the confusion, when it opened for sorties by the defenders. There had been no sorties, however, for twenty days. That in itself was an index of the straits of the defenders, their will and numbers. Also, it did not seem to me practical to try and enter the city during the daylight hours from the harbor side because of the besiegers. Similarly, during the night hours, it seemed the defenders might be unusually alert.
I did not, of course, know any appropriate signs and countersigns. One might well be set upon as soon as one tried to haul oneself unto a wharf. Indeed, they probably patrolled the pilings and such in small boats. An additional problem, at least to a swimmer, I had gathered, from talking with some of the soldiers, were Vosk eels. These often lurk in shadowed areas, among the pilings beneath piers. Whereas they normally feed on garbage and small fish it is not unknown that they attack swimmers. In the last few weeks, too, given the fighting at the rafts, and in the harbor, predictably, river sharks, usually much farther to the west, had made their appearance.
My second plan, or the second portion of my plan, involved the women from the Crooked Tarn. Late this afternoon, as I had expected, they, in the keeping of the sutler, Ephialtes, had arrived. I had made contact with him away from his wagon and I had had him blindfold the women, with the exception of Liadne, the first girl, and the only slave among them, before I inspected them. Liadne, who was delighted with her name, showed them off to me, proudly. She had done a good job with them, in only three days. The free women knelt very straight, their bellies sucked in, their shoulders back, their breasts thrust forward. Too, they knelt back on their heels, their knees spread, as those of slaves. They were all there, Lady Temione, Lady Amina, the Vennan, Lady Elene, from Tyros, and Ladies Klio, Rimice and Liomache, all from Cos. All of them had, or had desired, to exploit men. now they knelt before me, not knowing who it was before whom they knelt. I regarded them. Once they had been haughty, proud free women. They now knelt within the fringes of a military camp, frightened, confused, chained, blindfolded, shave-headed prisoners. They did not know in whose power they were, or what their fate might be. I had plans for them, or some of them. They, or some of them, would learn soon enough what these might be.
I watched Phoebe pour some meal into the boiling, salted water.
Temione and Klio had had marks on their bodies. Perhaps they had dared to be initially recalcitrant, at least to some small degree. Perhaps, incredibly enough, they had even had some reservations, free women, to being handled and treated as slaves, being stripped, and chained behind a wagon, for example, or to having to obey promptly and perfectly the orders of a slave, Liadne, who had been put over them, as first girl, kneeling before her, addressing her as Mistress, and such. Perhaps, free women, they had dared, at least initially to think that they might be above such things. They had learned differently. Too, their treatment might, in some trivial ways, perhaps smooth, or make a bit less traumatic, the transition to bondage, which was a likely, as well as suitable, disposition for them. To be sure, there is probably no fully adequate way for one to anticipate, or prepare for, psychologically, the actual transition to bondage, even if one eagerly seeks it, even if one welcomes it joyously, for with it comes a new and profoundly different understanding of one's self and nature; by it, you see, a categorical and radical transformation of one's realities is effected; in it one realizes, suddenly, that one is now no longer what one was before, that one is now something absolutely different, that one is now no longer a free person, but a property, subject to buying and selling, an animal, a slave. Phoebe knelt near the fire, back on her heels. Occasionally she would kneel, up, off her heels, and stir the porridge.