inutterably desirable."
"How kind you are to a helpless female prisoner," she said, "one soon likely, should it please the men of Ar, to be made a slave."
"I speak the truth," I said.
"You are kind,” she said.
I said nothing.
"I will try to please my masters well," she said
"I would recommend it," I said. She shuddered, against me.
"The men of Ar," she said, "took my freedom from me, when they made me a prisoner. You have taken my freedom from me, when you forced me to yield as a female slave."
"Your yielding," I said, "was not that of a female slave, for you are not yet, truly, a female slave. Yet it was, doubtless, the fullest yielding of which you were at this time capable.”
"Can there be more?" she asked.
"You cannot, at this time," I said, "even begin to suspect the depths, the dimensions, the wonders and marvels of slave submission."
"What you have done to me," she said, "is irreversible. I can never go back, now, knowing what I do, to being a proud free woman."
I shrugged. It was nothing to me.
"And yet," she said, sobbing, "I am too plain to be a slave."
"You are a woman," I told her.
"Yes," she said, "I am a woman. I did not know before, truly, what it was to be a woman."
"It is not being a kind of man," I told her.
"No," she said, "it is being a full female, in the order of nature."
"Yes," I said.
"A slave," she said.
"Yes," I said.
She sobbed.
"What is wrong?" I asked
"I want a master," she said. "I want to be everything, and do everything, for him. I want to give him all of me, holding nothing back. I want to be nothing to him, only his owned slave, totally loving and serving him."
"And so?" I said.
"But I am plain," she said. "No man will want me."
"Are you not done with her yet?" asked a rough voice.
We were startled, and looked up. There, at the edge of the straw, standing, was a large, uncouth fellow, in the garments of the Tam Keepers. "Yes," I said. I smiled. I sat up and took the Lady Gina's free shackle and jerked her ankles closely together. I prepared to close the open shackle about her right ankle. Her ankles would then be chained together, as before, with about eight inches of chain separating them. The shackles were large, and of heavy iron.
"Do not reshackle her," he said.
"Very well," I said, and got up.
"You look like a tasty pudding," he said to the lady Gins. She looked up at him, from the straw.
"Are you branded yet, Female?" he asked her.
Her hand went inadvertently to her left thigh. "No," she said, "no."
"Is she any good?" he asked me.
"Yes," I said, "she is pretty good. And there is no telling how good she will be when she is properly enslaved and finds herself in the possession of the right master."
"Of course," he said. He again looked down at her. There was a startled, soft light in the eyes of the Lady Gina as she looked up at the fellow. Suddenly, to me, she seemed very soft, and very vulnerable, in the straw. It was as though a transformation, somehow, had come over her.
"She is beautiful," he said.
"Yes," I said, for, somehow, suddenly, perhaps with the sudden understanding and acceptance of her nature Land condition, it had become true.
She gasped, and looked up at him, spoken of as beautiful. She trembled.
He then kicked her, and she cried out with pain. "Split your legs, Woman of Vonda," he said. "You are to be had."
"Yes, Master!" she cried out.
I watched for a moment, as she writhed in his arms. "You will look well on the block," he told her.
"Yes, Master," she whispered.
"Perhaps I will buy you," he said.
"Yes, Master," she whispered. "Yes, Master!"
I left the two together, and began to thread my way through the tables, between the soldiers and merchants, and others, and the stripped, shackled women of Vonda, serving as waitresses, toward the opening in the food tent. "Our forces have already moved north," one man was saying. "The troops from Lara will not be here for two days," said another. "By that time they will find here only