"Bikkie, to him," said Policrates. I saw Kliomenes smile.
"Yes, my Master," said the short, dark-haired girl, and she smiling, barefoot, descended the marble stairs of the dias and taking her place on my left, lowered herself gracefully to lie on her side beside me. She began to kiss and lick at me and caress me. "I am pleaseing him," said the red-haired girl on my right. "I can please him more," said the dark-haired girl. I did not cry out to Policrates for mercy.
I knew he would grant me none. I suppressed a moan. Bikkie was excellent. I had little doubt but what she was a valuable slave and would bring a high price. Bikkie wore, like one or two of the other girls on the dias, only threads of leather, some dozen or so, depending from a leather sheathing encasing the locked steel collar on her throat. On the front of the leather sheathing, which opened only at the back, to admit the key to the collar lock, there was sewn a red leather patch, small in the shape of a heart. The heart to Goreans, as to certain of those on Earth is understood, too, as a symbol of love. The life of a slave girl, of course, is understood, too, as a life of love. She is given no alternative. The leather threads depending from the collar are stout enough to bind the hands of a girl, perhaps at her collar, that she may not interfere with what is done to her body, but they are not stout enough to bind a man. They may be used, of coures, in leasing a Master, not only in setting off the girl's ill-concealed beauty, but in touching him, brushing him, stimulating him, twining about him, and so on. The girl knows that the same strands which can bind her helplessly as a slave, are strong enought only to delight and please her Master. This helps her to understand that he is a man, and that she is a woman.
I turned my head to the side.
"Do you still insist that it ws you who entered my holding, posing as the courier of Ragnar Voskjard?" inquired Policrates. "Yes," I said. "Yes!" We know that is not true," said Policrates. "How can you know that?" I asked. Certainly I was prepared to corrobrate my claim, if need be, with descriptions of the holding, and accounts of the feast and of our conversations, descriptions and accounts much to detailed to have been likely to have been extracted from a captive. "There are many reasons," said Policrates. "One is that you are a man of Earth, and no man from that dismal, terrorized world, where men are mean and small, could have dared to enter this holding."How do you know I am from Earth?" I asked.
"We know that from Beverly, a slave in this holding," said Policrates."Nonetheless," I said, "it was I who entered this holding and deceived you, in the guise of the courier of Ragnar Voskjard."
"Impossible," said Policrates. "It is true," I averred.
It angered me that Policrates and Kliomenes, and the others, could not even accept this possibility. Surely not every man of Earth was as meaningless, as trivial, as obedient, as unquestioning, as well trained, as emasculated and effete as their various policital imprisonments demanded. I had little doubt but that somewhere on Earth, in spite of censorship, media control, manipulated education and outright policical supression, and almost nonexistent channels for expressing alternative viewpoints, some males remained men. Not every man can forget he is a man, even when he is instructed to do so. Why, he might ask, should I forget it? Indeed, why should I not be a man? It is after all, what I really am. You may not like it, but that does not make it wrong. Do you truly know better than nature? There seems no guarantee that the perversion of nature is more likely to lead to general human happiness then its recognition and celebration. Only in remaining true to nature can we remain true to ourselves. All else must be falsehood and pathology.
"I crossed swords with the courier of Ragnar Voskjard in the great hall," said Kliomenes. "He was not unskilled. Jason of Victoria on the other hand does not know the sword. "Accordingly, it could not have been I?" I asked. "Certainly not," said Kliomenes. "We have information," said Policrates, "that it was the true courier of Ragnar Voskjard who came to the holding, independently of the evidence that it was he who gave us the topaz, which stone presumably could have been only in the possession of the true courier."Information?" I asked.
"Which further," said Policrates, "has assured us that the true courier was captured, and i not being held by those in league with Tasdron and Glyco."
Suddenly I began to understand what must be the case. Whoever had betrayed us must be, or be in contact with, the courier of Ragnar Voskjard, he who had tried to obtain the topaz from me on the wharves of Victoria. Ane it must have been he, or one in league with him, who had communicated with Policrates. Of course, the true courier would not wish it known that he had lost the topaz, that a false courier had gained access to the holding.
The true courier, in this respect, was protecting himself. Doubtless he did not wish to be bound to the shering blade of one of Ragnar Voskjard's galleys. He could always maintain later that he had managed to escape from Tastron's confinement.
An idea suddenly sprang into my mind, one of a possible modality of escape for myself. "No, it was I," I said, but I falteres, or seemed to falter, as I said this.
Policrates smiled. "Do not be afraid, Master," said the red-haired girl at my side. "No, Master," said Bikkie, the dark-haired wrench, so lasciviously active on my left, "you are only chained helplessly before your enemies."
"Do you still maintain the pretense of having posed as the courier of Ragnar Voskjard?" inquired Policrates. "Yes," I said. "I mean, "It is not a pretense," It was I" I made my voice tremble as though I had been found out."Beware," said Policrates, "there are tortures in this holding to which you might be subjected other than the caresses of salve girls, the twisting of chains, of burning irons, of knives." The girls laughed.
"Make the fool writhe," said Policrates. I gritted my teeth. "Beverly!" called Policrates, sharply. I tried to control myself.Then I saw she who had once been Beverly Henderson hurry into the room, commanded by her master.She ran immediately to the tiles before the dias on which reposed the large, curule chair of Policrates. Swiftly she knelt there, head down, small and beautiful. She wore a tiny bit of yellow silk, a steel collar and her brans. "Yes, Master," said said.
"Rise and turn about, Slave, and regard a prisoner," said Policrates.
Gracefully, swiftly, the girl did so. She looked at me, startled. The girls, as she had enered, had desisted in their attentions to my body. They would resume their ministrations upon the indication of Policrates.
My fists clenched inthe chains. "Do you know him?" asked Policrates.
"Yes, my Master," said the pirate's slave. "He is Jason, from Victoria. Once he was of Earth, as I, your slave."Policrates lifted a finger and the girls about me again began to fondle and to kiss and caress at my body.
Beverly, as her masters had chosen to call her, regarded me, unmoved."How do you regard the men of Earth?" Policrates asked her. "I hold them in comtempt," she said. "To whom to you belong?" asked Policrates. "To Gorean men," she said, "who are my natural masters."
I tried to resist the caresses of the slave girls. "Could you ever yield to one such as he?" asked Policrates. "Never," she said.
I looked at Beverly, the slave, standing on the tiles, barefoot in the bit of silk, almost naked. The collar was very beautiful on her throat and her dark hair, loose and soft, as a slave's hair is commonly wornd, was soft and lovely about her shoulders. I almost gasped at the sight of her beauty, the lineaments of her face and the exquisite curves of her body. I recalled long ago how we had met in a restaruant on Earth, and she had desired to speak intimately to me of fears and dreams and matter which troubled her. I suspected that there might have been at least one matter of which she had not spoken to me, to which she had perhaps implicitly alluded, but of which she had refused to explicitly speak. I wondered what it might have been. Then I remembered how she had looked, with her hair drawn severely back and fastened in a bun, but wearing a svelte, feminine, off-the-shoulder, white, satin-sheath gown. Too, she had worn a bit of lipstick and eye shadow, and had worn a tiny bit of perfume. On her feet had been golden pumps, fastened with a lace of golden straps. She had carried a small, silver-beaded purse. The linen had been very white, and the silver soft and lustrous in the flickering candlelight. Had I been able to see her then as I was now, enabled by my Gorean experience, to see her now, I would have been able to see instantly through the trappings of her freedom to the slave beneath. I would have know for certain then, as I knew for certain now that she belonged in the collar. Then, as now, though I was not able to recognize it clearly then, Beverly Henderson was the sort of woman who belonged to me, the sort of woman who should be put naked upon the block and sold to the highest bidder.