I looked at my master. How magnificent he was.
His collar, I had heard, was one of the most sought collars in Ar.
When he strode through the streets free women sometimes threw themselves before him, tearing away their veils and robes, begging for his collar.
He was such a man.
One's freedom is small enough price to pay, whisper some highborn women of Ar among themselves, for even ten days in the collar of Clitus Vitellius. The boredoms of freedom are small enough price to pay surely for even a brief sojourn in the arms of such a man, they conjecture.
But such women, I told myself, must be natural slaves, even though they be legally free, as I was not. If they are natural slaves, I asked myself, should they not be made slaves? Why should one who is a natural slave not be a slave? Can it be wrong to enslave a natural slave? Is it not right that natural slaves be enslaved? Is it not what they want? I looked at my master. What woman, I asked, would not be the natural slave of such a man? He was a natural master. Any woman, I suspected, to such a man, would be a natural slave. Almost any woman, I suspected, looking on such a man, would sense herself his natural slave.
That would explain why the women of Ar would twist on their couches like bitches in heat thinking of Clitus Vitellius. In the darkness, remembering him, his stride, his glance, and limbs, they would have intuited him as their master.
"Prepare to run, Slaves!" called a peasant.
I looked at my master. The heat in my thighs made me want to run to him but I dared not leave the line.
Earlier in the afternoon, casually, Thurnus had aroused me, and no one had satisfied me.
I had spent the afternoon in a slave girl's misery.
I wanted to run to my master.
I dared not leave the line.
I looked at my master. I wondered if I, though a girl of Earth, were a natural slave.
How I wanted him to have me.
Clitus Vitellius, in spite of the desires of the women of Ar, had never taken a companion.
I did not think he ever would. He was Clitus Vitellius. He would have slave girls instead.
He would always keep his girls in collars. I loved him!
"When the torch is lowered," called a peasant, lifting up a torch, lit from the fire, "you will run."
"Yes, Master," we said to him.
"The torch will then be placed in the earth," he said. "When it is fixed in the soil, you will have two hundred beats of a slave girl's heart." He pointed to a peasant's slave, who stood nearby. She was a girl of peasant stock, who had been, two years ago, stolen by slavers from a village hundreds of pasangs to the west. Thurnus had purchased her in Ar and brought her on a rope behind his wagon to Tabuk's Ford. She was thick-ankled and blond-haired, a good-looking, wide-hipped, blue-eyed, strapping girl. One of my master's men stood behind her, his left hand on her left arm. His right hand, about her body, was thrust through her brief, woolen tunic. He would count the beats of her heart. She was barefoot. About her throat, looped twice, knotted, was a length of coarse rope. I looked at the rope. It was snug on her throat. It was thus that Thurnus marked his girls. I conjectured that the heart of such a girl would be slow and strong.
"You will then be sought," said the peasant.
Counting the time it would take to fix the torch in the earth and for her heart to beat two hundred times, I conjectured that we would have a lead on our pursuers of some three minutes. I looked at the girl. Her lips were slightly parted. This angered me. She was excited by the hand of my master's man on her flesh. She backed slightly against him. Her heart would now be beating more rapidly. She was, after all, a girl in bondage, like us. Why did they not take a hundred beats of the heart of a standing bosk? Her sexual excitement at the proximity of my master's man might, I now noted, considerably diminish our lead. I decided to count now on a lead of little more than two minutes. Moreover, she was to be his for the night, once he had counted upon her body, using her beating heart as the clock of the evening's sport. It was no wonder that she was excited. This did not seem to me to be fair. But I did not complain. The men decide what is fair or unfair, and will, in any case, do precisely as they please. It is the girl's part to abide by their decision. The men decide; the girl submits. One must be master, one slave.
Eta was to my far right, on the line. Then came Maria, and Donna. I stood on the dirt line between Donna and, to my left, Slave Beads. To her left was Chanda, and on the far left, was Lehna.
"I do not want to be run for peasant boys," said Slave Beads. "I was once free."
"I, too, was once free," I told her.
"You are slave now," said Slave Beads.
"So, too, are you," I snapped.
"Does Slave Beads wish to be switched again?" called Lehna.
"No, Mistress," said Slave Beads, hastily. Slave Beads feared Lehna. For most practical purposes, she had been put in the charge of Lehna almost from the first moments of her capture. She was commonly chained before Lehna in the coffle, and it was under Lehna's supervision that she commonly performed her tasks.
After the capture of the Lady Sabina we had returned to the secret cache camp, to which my master had originally brought me, his barbarian girl. At the cache camp, the first night of our arrival, the Lady Sabina had been stripped and thrown on her back, head down, on the inclining, white-barked tree trunk, to which she had then been, as I had been before her, helplessly roped. When the iron had been pulled from her burned, marked flesh she had been rendered, as was the intention of my master, and those in Ar, politically valueless. She was then only a slave. She was unroped and thrown, a bond girl, to the feet of my master.
"We must name you," he said. «Sabina-Sabina-» said he, as though musing on the thought. "Ah," had he then said, "it seems that you, in your former name, carried already, an excellent slave name."
"Oh, no, no, Master!" she wept.
"Your former name," said he, "was clever. It appears to be the name of a free woman, and yet, within it, in disguise, which we now penetrate, it concealed secretly your true name. Very clever, Slave, but now you are discovered and you will openly wear your true name, that which will perfectly fit you and which I now, in the decree of the master, make yours."
"Please, Master!" she wept.
"You are Bina," said he.