I looked into the eyes of my captor. "Please, no!" I wept. "Please, no!"
Then, head down, helpless, held, I was branded a Gorean slave girl.
The marking, I suppose, took only a few seconds. That is doubtless true. Objectively I grant you the truth of that. Yet a girl who has been marked finds this obvious truth difficult to accept psychologically.
Perhaps I may be granted that those seconds, those few seconds, seem very long seconds.
For an hour it seemed I felt the iron. It touched me firmly, kissing me, then claiming me.
I screamed, and screamed. I was alone with the pain, the agony, the degradation, the relentless, hissing object, so hurting me, the men. Mercifully they let me scream. It is common to let a girl scream, a Gorean kindness, while she is being marked with a white-hot iron. Afterwards, however, once the iron is pulled out of her body, and she is fully marked, Gorean males are less likely to. accord her such consideration for her feelings. They are less likely, then, to be so indulgent with her. This makes sense. Afterwards, she is only a branded girl.
It begins swiftly, almost before you can feel it. I felt the iron touch me and almost instantaneously, crackling, flash through my outer skin and then, firmly, to my horror, enter and lodge itself fixedly in my thigh. It was literally in my body, inflexibly, burning. The pain then began to register on my consciousness. I began screaming. I could not believe what was being done to me, or how much it hurt. Not only could I feel the iron, but I could hear it, hissing and searing in the precise, beautiful wound it was relentlessly burning in my thigh. There was an odor of burning flesh, mine. I smelled burning, as of a kind of meat. It was my own body being marked. I could not move my thigh. I threw back my head and screamed. I felt the iron tight in my body, then, to my horror, pressing in even, more deeply. The marking surface of the iron, then, lay hissing, literally submerged, in my flesh. I could not move my thigh in the least. I threw my head from side to side, screaming. The marking surface of the iron is some quarter of an inch in depth. It was within my flesh. It was lodged there, submerged, hissing and burning. Taking its time, not hurrying, it marked me, cleanly and deeply. Then, swiftly, cleanly, it withdrew.
I smelled burned meat, my own. The men released my thigh. I began to choke and sob. Men regarded the mark. My captor was commended on his work. I gathered I had been well marked.
The men then left me and I continued to lie, head down, roped and helpless, on the broken, inclined trunk of the white-barked tree.
I was overwhelmed, psychologically, with what had happened to me. The pain was now less. My thigh still stung, and cruelly, but the pain seemed relatively unimportant now compared to the enormity of the comprehension that shook me to the core. I had been branded. I shuddered in the bonds. I moaned. I wept. My thigh would be sore for days, but that was unimportant, even trivial. What would remain was the mark they had placed in my flesh. That, unlike the pain, would not vanish. I would continue to wear that mark. It would, from now on, identify me as something which I had not been, or had not explicitly been, before, but now was clearly, for the eyes of all. I lay there. I knew I now was, because of the brand, deeply and profoundly different than I had been before. What could a brand mean? I shuddered. I scarcely dared conjecture the nature of a girl who wore such a mark on her body. She could be only one thing. I forced the thought from my mind. I tried to move my wrists, my head and body, my legs and ankles. I could move them very little. They were helpless in their constraints. Only animals wore brands. I lay there, helpless, miserable. I was Judy Thornton. I was an excellent student at an elite girls' college on Earth. I was the most beautiful girl in the junior class, perhaps in the whole school, unless for my rival, the lovely senior in anthropology, Elicia Nevins. I was an English major, and a poetess! How was it then that I lay bound on a strange world, and bore in my flesh a fresh brand? How Elicia Nevins would have laughed with delight could she have seen me, her lovely, saucy rival, brought so low, even to a brand. I considered Elicia. We had been catty, haughty and smug to one another, competing in our beauty, our honors and popularity. How she would laugh to see me now! I could not even, now, have looked her in the face. The brand had made me different. She did not have a brand. I did. Had she faced me then, and I been unbound, I would have lowered my eyes and head, and, in shame, knelt before her. Had a simple mark on my thigh made me so different? I suspected that it had. I shuddered. I thought of the boys with whom I had gone out on Earth, those immature young men, many of them rich and well-placed socially, whom I had accepted as escorts and dates, often for no better reason than to display my unusual popularity before the other girls in the school. What if they should see me now? Some, I supposed, would have fled in terror, had I, a branded girl, been thrown to their feet. Others, perhaps, stricken and confused, would have blubbered and stammered, looking away, covering me with their coats, speaking tumbled, incoherent, soothing words, solicitous and hypocritical. How many of them, I wondered, would do what they truly wanted, as I had little doubt Gorean men would do? How many of them, I wondered, would simply look down and see me at their feet as what I was, a branded girl? I wondered how many would look down upon me, laugh with pleasure and say, "I have always wanted you, Judy Thornton. Now I am going to have you," and then take me by the arm and throw me to their sheets? Few I suspected. Yet, now, branded, for the first time I was acutely aware of the fantastic strength and size of even such boys, not even men, not even Gorean men, compared to my own diminutive strength and stature. Such matters had not seemed important before; now they seemed extremely important. Before I had been able to put off boys with a glance, a gesture, a sharp word, but what if, now, they should see me as I now was, wearing a brand. Would they simply laugh now at my silly glance, my gesture, my protest. Would they simply laugh, and do what they wanted with me? Or, perhaps, like Gorean men, would they first discipline me, and then perform upon me what actions they chose? With the brand, I knew I was somehow deeply and profoundly different. I lay on the white-barked tree trunk, head down, weeping. The brand was on Gor legal, institutional status; that which it marks it makes an object; its victim has no rights, or appeal, within the law. Yet the most profound consequences of the brand seem to be less social than intensely individual, personal and psychological; the brand, almost instantaneously, transforms the deepest consciousness of a girl; I resolved to fight these feelings, to keep my personhood, even wearing a brand. I lay confined in bonds. I could scarcely move. But I suspected, and truly, that the mightiest bond I wore was not the strict, confining loops on my wrists or belly but the newly incised brand on my body; later, I suspected, even if coils of rope and heavy chains might be heaped upon me, or I should be confined in cells or kennels, the most complete and inescapable shackle placed upon me would nonetheless be always that delicate, feminine design, that small, lovely flower, resembling a rose, burned into the flesh of my upper left thigh.
I heard the sounds of the camp about me. The men were near the fire. The roasted meat was being cut. There was conversation. Eta, long-legged and beautiful, was serving the men. I look up at the rich Gorean night, beautiful with bright stars. Turning my head I could see the three moons. I felt the smooth, brittle bark of the white-barked tree beneath my back, on the interior of my thighs, tied as I was. I could smell the roast meat, the vegetation about. I heard insects. I tried to move my ankles and wrists. I could move them very little. I had cried a great deal. My cheeks, tear-stained, felt tight under the salty rivulets which had dried upon them. I wondered what could be my status on this world, now that I had been marked. What could be the nature, on a world such as this, of a girl who wore such a mark on her body?
Men from about the fire, including my captor, and Eta, too, approached me.
My captor took my head in his hands, and held it so that I must look up at him. I looked to him for pity. In his eyes there was no pity. I, branded, shuddered in his grasp. "Kajira," said he to me, clearly and simply. "Kajira." Then he released my head. I continued to regard him. "Kajira," he said. I understood that I was to repeat this phrase. "Kajira," I said. I had heard this word several times before on this world. The men who had first come to the rock and chain in the wilderness had used it to me. And, too, there had been the cry of "Kajira canjellne," which had seemed to play some ritualistic role in the fierce contests which had brought me, helpless, into his uncompromising power. "La Kajira," said Eta, indicating herself. She drew up the brief garment she wore, turning to me, exposing her left thigh. It, too, bore a brand. She, too, was truly branded. I now realized that I had seen the mark before, in torchlight and half darkness, yesterday evening, when she had been stripped, hooded and belled, and set as lovely quarry to run for the amusement of the men. I had not even understood it at that time, not well seeing it, as a brand. It had never even entered my mind that it might have been a brand. It had been only a puzzling mark of some sort. I would not have believed, yesterday night, that a woman could have been branded. But now, after my recent experience with the iron, I was prepared to believe the evidence of my senses. Women, on this world, could be branded. Eta and I were, in a profound sense, I realized, now the same; we were both branded women; no longer was I her superior; a mark had been put upon me by a hot iron at the pleasure of men; I was now exactly the same as Eta; whatever she was I, too, I knew, was now that, exactly that, and only that. Her brand, however, was not precisely the same as mine. It was more slender, more vertical, more like a stem with floral, cursive loops, about an inch and a half in height, and a half inch in width; it was, I would later learn, the initial letter in cursive script of the Gorean expression 'Kajira'; my own brand was the «dina»; the dina is a small, lovely, multiply petaled flower, short-stemmed, and blooming in a turf of green leaves, usually on the slopes of hills, in the northern temperate zones of Gor; in its budding, though in few other ways, it resembles a rose; it is an exotic, alien flower; it is also spoken of, in the north, where it grows most frequently, as the slave flower; it was burned into my flesh; in the south, below the Gorean equator, where the flower is much more rare, it is prized more highly; some years ago, it was not even uncommon for lower-caste families in the south to give the name 'Dina' to their daughters; that practice has now largely vanished, with the opening and expansion of greater trade, and cultural exchange, between such cities as Ko-ro-ba and Ar, and the giant of the southern hemisphere, Turia. In the fall of the city of Turia, some years ago, thousands of its citizens had fled, many of them merchants or of merchant families; with the preservation of the city, and the restoration of the Ubarate of Phanias Turmus, many of these families returned; new contacts had been made, new products discovered; even of those Turians who did not return to their native city, many of them, remaining in their new homes, became agents for the distribution of Turian goods, and for the leathers and goods of the Wagon Peoples, channeled through Tuna. That in the north the lovely dina was spoken of as the "slave flower" did not escape the notice of the expatriated Turians; in time, in spite of the fact that «Dina» is a lovely name, and the dina a delicate, beautiful flower, it would no longer be used in the southern hemisphere, no more than in the northern, as a name for free women; those free women who bore the name commonly had it changed by law, removed from the lists of their cities and replaced by something less degrading and more suitable. Dina, in the north, for many years, had been used almost entirely as a slave name. The reason, in the north, that the dina is called the slave flower has been lost in antiquity. One story is that an ancient Ubar of Ar, capturing the daughter of a fleeing, defeated enemy in a field of dinas there enslaved her, stripping her by the sword, ravishing her and putting chains upon her. As he chained her collar to his stirrup, he is said to have looked about the field, and then named her "Dina." But perhaps the dina is spoken of as the slave flower merely because, in the north, it is, though delicate and beautiful, a reasonably common, unimportant flower; it is also easily plucked, being defenseless, and can be easily crushed, overwhelmed and, if one wishes, discarded.