He would think for himself; he was such a man.
And so, for whatever reason-whether he had understood and been forgiving of a slave’s desperate concern to discover in what city she served, whether he had been tolerant of an Earth-girl slave’s naive foolishness, whether he was fond in his rough way of her, and thought he would this time excuse her indiscretion, whether he had simply seen no point in punishing me, whether he thought the whole business beneath his attention, or perhaps simply, as I suspected, because he had other things to attend to, which more concerned him-he had not beaten me. I was grateful to him. I did not think him weak. If in his view I had truly merited a lashing, then, even if he were fond of men, as I suspected, I would have received it, and so, too, would have Fina, or any of the others.
The pit master, as we have noted, had not been zealous in enforcing the edicts of the officer, he to whose compartments I had earlier been conducted, he whom I had served, he before whom I had danced, he who had several times made slave use of me, he at the side of whose couch, on the floor, on the tiles, with only a sheet to cover me, my head to its foot, I had been slept in a chain.
Certainly he had been lax in enforcing the officer’s instructions in the matter of the mysterious peasant, that huge, vacant creature in the lower cells. He had not regarded such treatment as honorable. In not complying, however, I did not doubt but what he had betrayed oaths, or even codes. “What is one to do?” he had once said in the corridor. “Master?” I had asked. “It is nothing,” he had said. He had then continued on.
“Have you spoken of this to the Lady Constanzia?” he asked.
“No, Master,” I said.
“Do not do so,” he said.
“Yes, Master,” I said, gratefully.
“How is she?” he asked.
“Well,” I had said, “Master.”
“Good,” he had said.
“Master,” I said.
“Yes?” he said.
“Is anything wrong?”
“No,” he said.
“I am sure Fina would be happy to please you,” I said.
“And you?” he asked?
“I, too,” I said.
“You need not look upon my face,” he said.
“No, Master,” I said. “Thank you, Master.”
“Go to your kennel, and close the gate,” he said, kindly.
I kissed the massive, swollen cheek of the pit master. I did this very gently. Then I stripped and went to the kennel, for we are to be nude within them.
I wrapped the blanket about me, and, from the inside, drew shut the gate.
It locked automatically.
I watched him sit there on the bench by the table, his head in his hands.
Then, after a time, I fell asleep.
23
“It is precisely here that you will stay!” laughed the Lady Constanzia.
“Yes, Mistress,” I said, irritably.
I knelt by the same slave ring to which I had often fastened her.
My head, by the neck, was pulled back close to the ring. The leash was wound about the ring in such a way as to hold me tightly back against it.
“That will do for the moment!” said the Lady Constanzia.
I could not pull away from the ring.
“She is pretty, isn’t she?” said the Lady Constanzia, turning to the fellow with her, the stranger in the city, he who had come again and again to visit her, at this very ring.
“Quite,” said he, approvingly.
I was dressed precisely as she had been in our first outings, in the rags I had selected for her, those which I had specially selected, in my slave girl’s vengeance on a free woman, to display her as a low slave. I had wished her to burn with shame and humiliation in them but she had loved them. Now it was I who wore them! I, though I was an actual slave, doubtless because I recollected my won intent, felt the very shame and humiliation which I had intended for her, but which she, infuriatingly, had simply refused to feel. I do not think I would have thought much about the garmenture if it had not been for the significance involved, from my point of view, at least. But, you see, there was a principle of sorts involved here. That was what was maddening about the whole thing. It was not so much the fact that I was muchly exposed, for I have worn slave strips, and less, and slaves grow used to such things, and may even revel in them brazenly, as the fact that I was now revealingly clad in the very way I had once intended for her to be revealingly clad. “Is that too tight?” she had asked, as I had knelt, back-braceleted, in the depths. “Yes!” I had said. She had then made it tighter. Then she said, “Suck in your belly.” She knotted the rag about my waist. “How is that?” she asked. “Too tight,” I said. “Oh!” I said. She had jerked the knot yet more tight.
She had then leaped up and clapped her hands, admiring her handiwork. “You are pretty, Janice!” she said. She bent down, kissed me. Then she leashed me. “Come along,” she said, eagerly. “We must go above.”
I now looked up at her, irritably, I kneeling at the ring, my head back against the metal.
It is not comfortable, having one’s head back in that fashion.
A great change had come over the Lady Constanzia, as you may have gathered, in the last few days. The current reversal of our typical situation had come about in two ways. First, the pit master had been well aware, it seems, and far more so than I had realized, of my little games with the Lady Constanzia, the frequent imposition of my slave girl’s vengeances upon her, a free woman. Indeed, he seemed far more aware of such things than the Lady Constanzia herself, or, at least, rather more inclined to object to them, for in her case it seemed that the more she was treated as a slave, the better she liked it. But was she not a free woman?Was she not, thus, entitled to more respect than I had accorded her? And had I not been, in my way, an insolent slave girl? In any event, this morning, he had decided that it was I who would be leashed, and garbed precisely as I had, earlier, chosen to garb her. Second, it had to do with the change which had been taking place in the Lady Constanzia over the past few days. I had, on the whole, refused to recognize that change, but it had been clear enough to the pit master. We had become, it seemed, less a free woman and a slave, as I viewed us, than two slaves. And, if that was so, why should it be I who would be always permitted to act as her arrogant superior, when there was, in effect, little, if anything, to choose between us. Did my insolence not need a corrective? Might I not profit from a lesson? Very well. Today, it would be I who would wear the leash. As you can see, the matter was quite paradoxical. On the one hand, as the Lady Constanzia was at least technically a free woman, might I not be reprimanded for having subjected her to certain indignities, my little slave girl’s vengeances on a free woman? And, on the other hand, paradoxically, as she was now little other than a slave, might not I, a mere slave, be reprimanded for having treated her in such a way as to suggest that she might be less than I? In any event, today, it would be I who would be leashed.