Fiction

Another Valerus of Ar Mystery, the fifth in the series

for laisha's Master, with heartfelt and humble devotion as endless as time

"Minda."

My heart leaped at the unexpected sound of my Master's voice, at the diminutive of my name that he only used when he was pleased with me. I dropped the tunic I was mending and ran to kneel at his feet, but before I could do more than press one passionate kiss to the soft leather of his boot, he said, "I am going away. Heel."

He turned and walked out of the room. With no planning, no packing, no preparation at all, wearing only a thin camisk of green silk and golden earrings like cascades of graceful leaves, I followed him.

I knew better than to ask him where he was going. He was taking me, and that was all that mattered.

He strode through the streets of Ar, nodding and smiling to passers-by, stopping now and then to exchange a word or two. My Master was a known man in the city, a Physician, much- traveled, with wealth and family connections solid as a wall behind him, and friendships that reached high into the ranks of the guardsmen and magistrates. I was nothing, less than nothing, a barbarian slave girl who was only beginning to learn the true meaning of slavery at his hands.

Whenever he stopped and spoke to a free person, I knelt in the dust behind him and put my head down. No one paid the slightest attention to me.

My vision, though, was filled with him and only him. He had a striking face, my Master, Valerus of the Physicians of the city of Ar. His jaw was angular, his eyes wide-set, not brown, not gold, but something of both. There was a hint of austerity in the hollows under his cheekbones, but at the same time there was sensuality in the full mocking curve of his mouth. His mass of heavy, loosely curling hair was the intricate color of a tarn's ruffled feathers, light brown and dark brown and tawny, with a few surprising glimmers of silver.

He turned into the Street of Brands, and at a handsome complex of buildings with an arched door of carved yellow ka-la-na wood he stopped and pulled the call rope. There was a small insignia inlaid into the wood of the door jamb in polished blue stone, an elongated eye that reminded me of ancient Egyptian carvings I had seen on Earth. Goreans often adopted such marks as business emblems, or even as personal devices.

I thought of the Lady Ianthe's desert veminium flower, and shivered.

An attendant admitted my Master and ushered him obsequiously through a sunny courtyard into the main building. I followed. I continued to follow, silent, wondering, as my Master was led through several hallways and ultimately into a spacious, luxuriously appointed office.

A man behind a large desk, a man in a blue-and-yellow tunic, stood up with a smile. Instantly, just inside the doorway, I knelt and lowered my eyes. I caught only a glimpse of a dark blue circle, perhaps seven or eight feet in diameter, inlaid into the polished wood floor just as the eye device had been inlaid into the jamb of the door.

A circle on the floor. A man in blue and yellow...

"Valerus!" the man said. "It is always a pleasure to see you, my friend."

"We do not meet often enough," my Master agreed pleasantly. "I am going away for a time, Ixion, on private business, and I have brought a girl for you."

He snapped his fingers. I rose immediately and went to the heel position, just behind him and to his left. He reached back, caught my arm, and thrust me to my knees in the center of the circle.

My heart stopped.

I have brought a girl for you...

"Ah," the man named Ixion said, rather doubtfully. He stood up and walked around the desk. "She has pretty hair, at least. One silver tarsk. Perhaps two, if she is properly responsive."

I could not breathe. I thought I was going to faint.

My Master laughed. "Properly responsive?" he said. I felt his hands on me, casual and pitiless, dragging me half-upright, touching me. My head fell back, my lips parted, my blood flowed molten in my veins. I would have done anything, regardless of the slaver's cool appraising eyes. Anything...

I keened like an animal, helpless in my need.

My Master laughed again and dropped me carelessly back into the center of the circle. I lay gasping, my hot cheek pressed against the polished wood of the floor.

"Three silver tarsks," Ixion said. His voice seemed to be coming from very far away. "Still a side-block girl, of course, but I do believe something could be made of her."

"Perhaps when I return," my Master said. "For the moment I only wish to have her boarded, and to have a few details of training attended to."

I felt his hand in my hair, dragging me back to my knees. I struggled to get my legs under me, to kneel properly. I was trembling all over.

"Dancing?" Ixion said skeptically. "She does not look as if she would--"

"Writing," my Master said.

"Writing?"

My Master grinned. "A simple thing," he said. "A quill? A bit of paper? She speaks a rather rudimentary form of Gorean, of course, as all barbarian slaves do, which she has picked up from listening to those around her. But I wish to have her taught the language more formally, not only to speak it fluently, but to read it as well, and ultimately to write it."

"That will not particularly improve her value," Ixion said.

"Perhaps not. However, I have a use for such skills in... an avocation of mine."

Ixion shrugged and returned to his desk. He made some notes in a large leather-bound ledger. "Boarding, then, and training in Gorean," he said. "For how long?"

"I am not sure," my Master said. "I have matters to attend to, in the south. Keep her here and write me a bill when I return."

"So be it," Ixion said. "I have a space in... cage seven. A four-girl cage." He opened a small pocket affixed to the ledger page and took out an iron key. "Here, here is your key."

"My key?"

"Of course. I have full facilities here. If a man chooses to use his girl in the course of her training, he can enter the cage freely. Or take her out of the cage, into one of the alcoves."

"I see," my Master said. He took the key. "Well, as I will not be in the city, I myself will not require it. But I will give it to my friend Titus, of the city guardsmen. If you should encounter any difficulty with Mindar here, it is Titus you should call upon."

Ixion wrote a note on the ledger page. "Excellent," he said. "Although I do not anticipate any difficulty."

My Master nodded. Then he grasped my hair again and shook me, half playfully, half warningly. "I expect to return to a substantially more literate slut," he said to me. "Take care to please me in this, or you will find yourself on the side block very quickly."

"Yes, Master," I whispered.

He gave me one last admonitory shake, and left me there.

Of the other girls in my cage, I liked one, disliked one, and feared the third.

The girl I liked was called Dalika, a tiny, fragile, impossibly graceful dancer who belonged to the House of Ixion itself. She was being groomed and conditioned for a major sale to be held in Se'var, the month of the Gorean winter solstice, which was only a few hands away; from what she said Ixion was expecting her to turn him a handsome profit. Despite the fact that she was a center-block girl and I, to my humiliation, was only a side-block girl, I liked her at once. She was beautiful, with rich auburn hair and slanting golden-hazel eyes. She was gentle, intelligent, humble, utterly dedicated to the art of pleasing men.

She had been born a slave, brought up a slave, on the harsh beautiful world of Gor. She had never been free. She was happy.

She sang as she cleaned and tidied the cage, willingly doing more than her share of the work. She looked forward with delight to the moment when she would step onto the center block of the great Curulean auction venue, naked, chained, with all eyes upon her. She was one in a thousand, one in ten thousand.

The girl I disliked was called Bina. "Bina," which meant literally the cheap glass and wooden beads used to make adornments for slaves, was a relatively common slave name on Gor. Bina herself hated it, as to her own mind she was anything but cheap and common.

As she told us over and over, she had been a free woman, the daughter of a Scribe, until the day she had been snatched from one of the high bridges of Ar by a reckless young tarnsman half-drunk on paga. "Chain luck," it was called, for of course with the all-enveloping Robes of Concealment that Gorean free women wore, a man was trusting to luck indeed when he took the trouble to capture one. Bina's Master, who was named Acron, had enjoyed fairly good luck, in that Bina was pretty, tawny-haired, blue-eyed, with very white skin and a soft full- breasted, lush-hipped body. On the other hand, she was spoiled, lazy, deceitful, and unbearably superior in her attitude.

Acron seemed to enjoy her arrogance, and he visited the House of Ixion almost every day. He was a cavalier young warrior in a scarlet tunic, with a tassel of multi-colored silks wound round the hilt of his sword like the flag of a conquered city. Bina told us furiously that it was made up of the last veils of the girls he had enslaved off the bridges of Ar, and that a torn remnant of her own last veil, a rich Scribes' blue, was now wrapped over the rest.

In between our sessions of training, Bina and I bickered endlessly. Dalika sang and did the work about the cage that we both neglected. The fourth girl, Aila, was a girl apart.

She terrified me. She fascinated me.

She was a panther girl, captured by outlaws in the northern forests, bound and offered for sale at one of the exchange points along the shoreline of Thassa. She was a wild, magnificently beautiful female creature with midnight-dark hair and eyes as green as the sea itself, and she raged against her slavery, raged against her training, raged against her Owner, a quiet, abacus-eyed Merchant named Evander. It was said that Evander also intended to realize a prodigious profit on his merchandise. Indeed, the whispers among the slaves were that he was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, and needed the profit badly.

Aila scorned the three of us with a panther girl's fierce scorn: a born slave, a soft free woman of the cities, a barbarian from Earth. We all avoided her when we could, although I, with my Earth upbringing, could not help admiring her a little. Sometimes Dalika looked at her with fear in her eyes, the fear of a girl who has always stood secure on the center block and now sees the possibility of herself being supplanted. Once or twice, Bina almost came to blows with her.

One day, about two hands after my Master left me there, the tension in the cage escalated into violence.

It began, innocuously enough, over a handful of slave candies that Dalika brought back from one of her training sessions. In typical Dalika-fashion, she offered to share them with the rest of us. By sheer chance, it seemed, she went first to Aila.

Aila sneered at her and pushed her roughly back against the bars. Dalika cried out and dropped the candies.

Bina leaped to gather them up, to take more than her share.

My own anger and frustration, suppressed and simmering ever since I had been consigned like a beast to the House of Ixion, exploded.

On Earth I had been trained in what was called self-defense. I had traveled all over the world, after all, to war zones and teeming cities, gathering my news stories in strange places, dark places. Often I had worked alone for the sake of a source's confidentiality. I was rusty, soft, after almost a year on Gor, but such moves are moves that the body never really forgets. I gathered myself and kicked out with all my strength, catching Aila in the belly with my heel.

She fell back, gasping, surprised. But then she screamed her own defiance and swung a violent backhanded blow at my face. I evaded most of the force of it, although she clipped me hard across the temple and I went down, my head ringing.

She was on top of me, scratching, biting, tearing at my hair. I snarled and kicked, thrusting up my hips, bucking her off and rolling over to pin her with a knee across her breasts. She squirmed, pushing at me with a panther girl's strength. I scrabbled to get my hands around her throat, to compress her carotid artery as I had been taught.

There was a crack like lightning, and at the same time scorching pain exploded across my back. I fell forward, a scream tearing out of my throat, trying to roll away from the slashing blows. Aila began to shriek as well. For a moment we writhed, entangled, sobbing, under the whip. Then I managed to extricate myself and curl up into a ball in one corner of the cage.

"Stupid sluts," a man's voice said. One of the guards. He sounded tired. If he had been at the beginning of his shift instead of at the end, he might have beaten us more thoroughly. "You know better than that. No food tonight for this cage."

He left the cage and locked the door behind him.

I lay huddled in the corner of the cage for a long time, crying, the stripes of the whip like fire on my skin. Dalika eventually came to crouch beside me, smoothing my hair, murmuring gently. Aila stayed in her own corner, alone and contemptuously silent.

Bina ate all the candy.

The next morning, when a guard came to bring our gruel, Aila was dead.

Things happened very quickly. I was yanked from the cage, my wrists braceleted tightly behind me, my ankles chained with a short hobble. I was gagged and hooded with the peculiar efficiency of the Goreans. Helpless, blinded, voiceless, I was dragged for what seemed like miles. I heard a door open and close, and felt myself flung forward. I could not break my fall with my hands chained behind me, and sprawled painfully to a hard and polished floor.

"Slut's gone and killed one of the other girls in the cage." The guard's voice. "Cage seven. Zeno caught them fighting last night, this one and that panther girl, and this morning the panther girl was dead. Beaten. Strangled, it looked like."

I lay trembling on the floor, half-fainting with terror.

Footsteps. Stopping close beside me.

"This is the one who was being taught to read and write." It was Ixion's voice, thoughtful. "Valerus's barbarian."

"She'll have to be destroyed," the guard said. "Plain to see she's vicious."

"The other two girls?"

Terrified as I was, I remembered that Dalika belonged to the House of Ixion, and was valuable. Ixion would be concerned, of course, with the safety of his own stock.

"The other two are all right. You want this one sacked up and thrown in the river? Or impaled out in the back exercise yard? I can do it now, before breakfast."

I felt the cold sweat of horror break out on my skin. The needle-sharp point of the impaling stake between my shoulder blades, felt my helpless body stretched over it, forced down slowly. It would mean nothing to them, nothing, nothing but the casual and conscientious destruction of a dangerous animal.

And wrongly. Wrongly. There was no possibility, none, that Aila could have died from the few bruises and scratches I had inflicted on her.

I struggled. I managed to get to my knees, choking on the gag, begging to be allowed to speak. My pleas came out as meaningless mewling animal sounds.

A brutal blow drove me back to the floor, half-stunned.

"Vicious," the guard said again.

"But not without value," Ixion said. "Evander is going to be furious about the panther girl, but Valerus will also be angry if he comes back to find we have destroyed his property without his permission. The cage was locked?"

"Locked up tight. Zeno tested it last night, and I unlocked it myself this morning when I brought in the feed."

"The other girls could not have done it?"

"The panther girl would have fought, and neither one of them is marked. Look at the bruises on this one."

Ixion's footsteps retreated, and I heard the dry rustle of a book being opened, pages turned over. "Put her in a slave box for now," he said. "And send one of the household slaves in. I have a message for her to carry for me."

I was in the slave box for hours, days, years, expecting every moment to be dragged out and impaled, or tied in a leather sack and thrown into the river for the urts. I tried to pray, but the half-remembered words of my Earth-girl childhood had lost their power in the primitive reality of Gor. I wept and scratched desperately at the inner walls of the box, tearing my fingernails.

When I had given up hope the door of the box was suddenly opened, and I was dragged out. The hood and gag were torn off roughly and I was cast at the feet of a man.

A man...

I cried out and embraced the ankles and pressed my lips to the leather of the boots. "I did not do it, Master, I swear to you, I did not, I did not, I did not," I sobbed.

"Get up, Mindar," the man said.

It was not my Master's voice.

I pushed myself back and straightened, gasping, brushing my filthy and tangled hair weakly out of my eyes with one forearm. I looked up.

It was Titus, my Master's friend, one of the chief guardsmen of the city and a specialist in irregular matters.

Titus, to whom my Master had instructed Ixion to turn in the case of any difficulty.

Difficulty was hardly the word.

"Master Titus," I whispered. "Oh, Master Titus, help me, please, please."

"By the balls of the Priest-Kings," Titus said, although there was a smile in his voice. "You do manage to get yourself into some of the strangest situations, Mindar. Although Valerus is almost as bad, haring off to the south to track a pack of Assassins to their den, and all because a kaissa player he didn't even know got himself killed by a free bitch who's beyond anybody's reach anyway."

It did not make sense to me at the time, I was so terrified and miserable. I could only continue to kneel at Titus's feet, whispering, "Please, please, please."

"Pull yourself together, girl," Titus said. "Don't snivel. Tell me what happened."

I took a deep breath and struggled to compose my thoughts, knowing that I was lucky, lucky beyond imagining to have this chance to speak, to tell my side of the story, on Gor where a slave's words were meaningless.

"Aila, the girl who was killed," I began, forcing myself to be dispassionate and strictly accurate, "pushed Dalika, one of the other girls in the cage. It made me very angry. I did indeed attack Aila, Master Titus, I did strike her. I am sorry."

"You'll get a whipping for that, my girl," Titus said cheerfully. "I'll make sure of it. Then what happened?"

"A guard parted us with his whip. He went out and locked the door to the cage behind him. I went to one corner of the cage, and Aila went to another corner. I cried myself to sleep. Dalika slept in my corner, next to me. Bina... the other girl... I'm not sure where she was. When we awoke in the morning, when the guard brought our gruel, Aila was dead."

"And you heard nothing in the night?"

"No, Master Titus. Although I was so exhausted... once I slept, I fear I slept very soundly."

"Well, the other two claim they didn't hear anything, either," Titus said. "Although the guilty one would hardly admit to being up and about the cage in the middle of the night."

"Master Titus," I burst out. "Oh, Master Titus, I beg you--"

"I know," he said, cutting me off. "I've already sent a tarnsman to look for Valerus, and bring him back if he can."

"I did not kill her, Master Titus. I swear to you I did not kill her."

"From what Ixion and Evander tell me, the panther girl was a valuable bit of goods," Titus said. "Someone will have to be responsible. But you're worth a bit yourself, Mindar. Ixion has thought better of all that talk about destroying you. I've given him a receipt, and I'm going to take you home with me tonight. Tomorrow we can all hope that Valerus will be back in Ar to straighten things out."

I fell at his feet again, kissing them over and over, thanking him incoherently. He stood still. I could feel his eyes upon me.

"You and my Reena make an interesting pair," he said slowly. His voice was no longer light and cheerful. "The black-haired Tuchuk bitch and the golden barbarian from Earth. The animal and the enigma. I have been looking forward to the opportunity of enjoying the two of you together."

My Master returned the following afternoon. In the sunny courtyard of Titus's house I ran to him and flung myself at his feet.

"Master," I sobbed. "Master, Master."

"I trust," he said calmly, "that you have made it worth Titus's while that he went to the trouble of extricating you from your difficulties."

I shuddered, remembering. "Yes, Master," I said faintly.

"I will decide on your punishment for attacking the other girl, and precipitating this whole situation, after it has been resolved," he said. "Now tell me everything. Everything you remember, everything, important or not, about the other three girls in that cage, and their owners."

I took a breath and began, my voice a little unsteady. He questioned me ruthlessly. I felt as if he were turning my mind and my memories inside out and shaking them thoroughly. By the time I was finished I felt empty, exhausted. He knew everything I had said, everything I had heard, everything I had observed, in the hands I had been boarded at the House of Ixion.

My Master thought for a moment, then stood up.

"Heel," he said.

I stood up and followed him.

The eye device set into the door jamb at the House of Ixion seemed to be leering at me unpleasantly as I passed through again at my Master's heel. Again a fawning attendant ran to meet him, and led him through the maze of corridors. But this time it was not Ixion's luxurious office that was the destination. This time it was a stone-flagged, stone-walled room deep under the house, dark and clammy. Attendants brought more torches.

On a slab in the middle of the room, Aila's carcass lay. It had not been decently composed or shrouded, as a free person's body would have been, but simply slung down, a little asprawl, one arm thrown back over the head. The eyes had not been closed. Rigor had passed off, leaving the limbs limp, beginning to show mottling on their lower surfaces where the blood and body fluids were settling.

Ixion himself was there, with Zeno, the guard who had separated me from Aila, and Achillo, the guard who had discovered Aila's body. Evander, the merchant whose property had been destroyed, was there as well, his fingers twitching. The young tarnsman Acron was there, his sword at his side, the bit of blue gauze that had been Bina's last veil still wound around the hilt over the other colored streamers of chain-luck silk. Bina knelt at his feet, silent for once. Dalika knelt slightly behind Ixion.

I knelt at my Master's left and put my head down.

"Ah, excellent," my Master said. "Everyone is here. Now, let us get to the bottom of this."

"The bottom of it is," Evander said sullenly, "that a very valuable slave has been destroyed. She would have brought ten silver tarsks, at least. I demand immediate compensation."

"Let us first discover who it was who actually destroyed your property," my Master said. "Ixion. Your guards testify that the cage was locked?"

Zeno nodded. "It was locked the night before last," he said. "I locked it with my own hands."

"And it was locked yesterday morning," Achillo said. "I unlocked it with my own hands."

"Indeed," my Master said. "Very good. And you can also testify... what is your name? Zeno? You can also testify that this girl kneeling here beside me, a slave known as Mindar, was involved in a fight with the dead girl, the night before last?"

"She sure was." Even though my head was down, my eyes lowered, I could feel the guard's eyes upon me. "Giving pretty much as good as she got, too. Both of 'em scratching and squealing and pulling hair until you could hear it in the Cities of Dust. Kind of a shame to stop it, in a way, although I couldn't allow fighting in the cages. Bad for business, that, fighting in the cages."

My Master turned his attention to the carcass on the slab. With one fastidious finger he tilted the dead slave's head to one side. With the rigor of death passed off, the head lolled with terrible looseness.

Her neck was broken. Her larynx was crushed. She was covered with scratches and bruises, even to the one upturned palm of her hand, but that one blow, that larynx-crushing blow, was clearly the cause of her death.

"The larynx is made of cartilage plates," my Master said, in his cool relentless physician's voice. "In layman's terms, gristle. Very tough gristle. It is not really bound down to the underlying structures very tightly, and would slip aside from an ordinary blow. Would you, Zeno, having watched Mindar and this girl fighting, testify that you think Mindar is strong enough to deliver such a blow as the one that has crushed this girl's larynx and broken her neck?"

"No, sir, not at all," Zeno said promptly. "I've seen a lot of sluts fight in my day, and I can gauge 'em pretty close. That Mindar girl of yours is a pretty good fighter, but nothing like strong enough to bash in the other girl's voice-box like that."

Evander frowned. Acron shifted impatiently and rested one hand on the hilt of his sword.

"One of the other two girls, then," my Master said. "The dancer? What is your name, girl?"

"Dalika, Master," Dalika whispered.

"Stand up, Dalika."

She stood up immediately. She was small, perhaps five feet one or two inches in Earth-style measurements. She was slender and sinuous, deliciously curved. She probably weighed less than a hundred Earth pounds.

"This one?" my Master said.

Zeno laughed. "Not a bit of it, sir," he said. "No chance."

"The fourth girl, then," my Master suggested. "Acron's girl."

Acron jerked Bina irritably to her feet by one arm. She was heavier than Dalika, taller, but her city woman's softness was plain to see. The guard Zeno just laughed.

"So," my Master said. "We have a locked cage with four girls in it. One girl is killed. None of the other three could have killed her. She could hardly have killed herself in such a way. What, then, is the answer?"

"The keys," Ixion said softly. "Each of us had a key to the cage, of course. Evander, Acron, your friend Titus, I myself."

My Master's brown-gold eyes rested thoughtfully on Ixion, the slaver. "The keys indeed, my friend," he said. "In order to eliminate Titus from suspicion, I have gone to the trouble of checking his whereabouts night before last. He was roistering in full view of fifty free men at the tavern of the Fifth Passage Hand, until about the second ahn. At that point he became insensible, still in the full view of fifty free men, and was taken home by four friends."

I spared a thought to marvel at Titus's powers of recuperation, in that the night after such a revel he had made such forceful and thorough use of two sluts, one dark, one fair.

"That leaves," my Master went on, "you yourself, Ixion, Evander, and Acron. One of the three of you used your key to enter the cage. One of the three of you removed, and killed, this slave."

He lifted Aila's hand, the one that had been thrown back over her head. Her arm was scratched and bruised. Even the palm of her hand was bruised, darkly blue in the flickering light of the torches.

"Why would I despoil my own property?" Evander demanded.

"Why, indeed," my Master murmured. "You are very anxious, as you said, for immediate compensation. There are whispers that your business is not exactly flourishing. Perhaps you did not want to wait until the sale next month. Perhaps you wanted -- needed -- the money now."

Evander flushed darkly. It was clear my Master had struck a nerve.

"And you, Ixion," my Master went on. "You were counting on a glittering profit from your sale of the little dancer. But the panther girl was shaping up to surpass her on the center block. How convenient for you that she is dead, particularly if someone else can be made liable for her value."

Ixion turned white. "No," he said.

My Master turned to Acron, the happy-go-lucky young tarnsman. Acron straightened, with the touchy pride of the warrior, and I saw his knuckles go white as he clutched the silk- wrapped hilt of his sword.

"You, Acron," my Master said, "seem to be the one man without a motive. The one man who clearly did not kill the slave."

Acron's hand relaxed. My Master reached out, with that curious knife-thrower's quickness of his, and caught the tarnsman's wrist. He lifted it, turned it.

Acron's palm was blue.

"The one man who clearly did not," my Master repeated coolly. "And yet you are the man who did."

Acron clenched his fist and wrenched his hand out of my Master's grip. My Master turned to Aila's carcass again and pressed open the fingers of her right hand.

The odd blue color on her palm was not bruising, as it had appeared to a casual glance. It was some sort of artificial color. Some sort of stain. As if, with a sweating and terrified hand, she had grasped something wrapped around with richly dyed blue silk.

Just as Acron, with a sweating and anxious hand, had been grasping the hilt of his sword, bound with Bina's last veil.

"She was only a slave!" Acron burst out. "She taunted me! What difference could it possibly have made? I took her out of the cage that night, took her to one of the alcoves. She dared to fight me, the wild bitch. She dared to put her hand on my sword."

"A capital offense," my Master agreed gravely.

"I didn't start out to kill her. I only wanted to use her. But once she was dead I knew I couldn't pay for her. So I just put her back inside the cage. Who would care if one slave got accused of killing another?"

I felt my fingernails cutting into my palms as I clenched my fists. I would care, I thought bitterly. I would care, hooded and gagged, chained and helpless, lying on the floor while men spoke quite casually of impaling me before breakfast. I would care, locked in a slave box, facing death. I would care...

"As the girl committed a capital offense, you had every right to kill her," my Master said. "However, the laws of compensation apply. You must reimburse Evander for her value."

Acron looked around wildly. Young warriors were notably impecunious, of course. Finally he grasped Bina's arm and threw her sprawling across the room toward Evander.

"There," he said. "Take her for your compensation. A girl for a girl."

Evander looked at Bina, his abacus eyes clicking coldly. She pulled herself to her knees and tossed her head.

"She is worth perhaps half what the panther girl was worth," Evander said. "What else will you offer?"

Bina's mouth fell open. Her brows rushed together furiously. I could not help feeling a flash of vengeful satisfaction.

Acron tore the wisp of blue silk from the hilt of his sword, then unwound the others until the leather and metal were stark and bare. He threw them to the floor. "Chain luck!" he said. "There are better girls to be had on the bridges of Ar. I will bring you all the girls you want for compensation."

He strode out of the room, whistling, and no one made the slightest effort to stop him. He was guilty of nothing, of course, but breaking a bit of property that belonged to another man. He would pay for it, in bits of similar property, and everyone would be satisfied and go out and drink paga together.

Aila, wild, beautiful. Aila, the panther girl from the northern forests, sullen, sensual, magnificent. Aila, sneering. Aila, fighting. Aila, alive.

Aila, dead.

I put my head down so my Master would not see my tears.

My Master did not, in the end, punish me severely for my fight with Aila. He confined me to my kennel on half rations for three days. I thought of Dalika and Bina and Aila. I thought of death. I found myself thinking in Gorean for the first time. When my Master let me out, it was just dawn on a heartbreakingly beautiful morning.

I crawled to his feet and pressed my lips to his boot.

"What are you?" he said to me.

"I am a slave, Master," I said. My voice broke.

"What is your purpose?"

"To please you."

There was silence for a moment.

"But you are afraid," he said. "Now that you know what a slave's value is."

"Yes, Master."

He reached down and stroked my hair. "Death can come at any time, for anyone," he said, "slave or free. Even on Gor, where age is held at bay and disease barely touches us. Does it matter so much what happens afterward?"

I swallowed. I said, "No, Master."

I did not know if I truly believed it or not.

Again he was silent. Time passed.

"I have been in the south, as you know," he said at last. "I have also been thinking much of death. The Wagon People have a saying: 'The death of a warrior is steel. The death of a kaiila is gold. The death of a kajira...'"

He lifted his hand. I raised my head. He had such beautiful hands, my Master. Surgeon's hands.

He let his fingers fall open.

"'The death of a kajira,'" he said softly, "'is a flower petal in the wind.'"