"When I was in the south, I heard an interesting thing," my Master said. He moved a yellow kaissa piece on the cloth spread over the little tem-wood table in his library. "Ubar to Ubar's Tarnsman one."

I wrote down all his words, as best I could, in my laborious and badly-spelled Gorean. My Master wished me to learn to write quickly, so as to eventually be able to take down what people said as they spoke, and he had set me to practice for ahn each day. In a world without electronic recording devices, such shorthand would be valuable to a Physician in his work.

It would be valuable as well to a man who probed into cases of murder.

Titus, the highly-placed city guardsman who was my Master's friend, moved one of his pieces in return. He looked disgruntled, from which I deduced that my Master was winning. "I have learned to be wary," he said, "when Valerus of Ar speaks of 'interesting things.'"

I wrote down what he said. At Titus's feet, a black-haired, black-eyed Tuchuk slut named Reena rubbed her breasts sensuously against her Master's shins and smiled at me smugly. See, her smile said. I am pleasing my Master properly. You are sitting there scratching away like the ugly little mindar bird you are named for.

I smiled back at her. My Master had gone to some trouble to have me taught to write, and by the time I was finished I was going to be the quickest, most fluent, most accurate scrivener on Gor.

I loved my Master. There was no longer any point in denying it. I loved him passionately, totally, overwhelmingly, not in spite of the fact that he owned me, but because of it.

I had been almost a year on Gor. I had learned a great deal.

"Ianthe has fallen out with her brother," my Master said. "There are whispers of a secret coup here in Ar, a failed attempt to put Ianthe in her brother's place as Administrator."

"I have heard the same whispers," Titus said. "There is always gossip about the great. It's your move, Valerus."

My Master moved a piece. He seemed to do it casually, carelessly, but my Master was never careless. Titus's face grew longer.

"She has not been seen about the city for several hands," my Master said.

"You are obsessed with the woman," Titus said. "You have her followed. You go chasing off to the south and risk your life at the hands of a pack of Assassins, just to find someone who could tell you more about the ruffian she goaded into killing that Player. It is not healthy, Valerus."

I scratched and scribbled frantically, trying to keep up.

"It is your move," my Master said.

Titus shrugged and moved a piece. "Builder to Ubar's Scribe six," he said. "If that is all you learned in the south, it was hardly worth the traveling."

"There is more."

Titus looked up, a gleam of unwilling interest in his dark eyes. Reena made a little hissing sound, as if of disapproval, and Titus cuffed her into silence without even looking at her.

"More?" he said.

"She has a new plot afoot, I am told," my Master said. "Se'Var has begun. The whisperers say that she will make a pilgrimage to the Sardar, ostensibly in penance for her many sins, but in reality to meet with new conspirators at the Fair. Perhaps even to launch some fresh intrigue."

Titus swore. He was extraordinarily inventive. I felt myself flushing a little as I wrote down his words.

"That female should be sent on a pilgrimage to the Cities of Dust," he said at last. "Or be put in a collar and forced to do as she is told, once and for all."

My Master smiled coldly. I felt a shudder of fear. Even Reena, for all her half-tamed willfulness, looked down.

"Indeed," he said.

Se'Var was the month of the Gorean winter solstice. At each of the equinoxes and solstices, a huge Fair was held at the foot of the Sardar Range, the mountains named for the gods of Gor. At least, "gods" was as close as my Earth-born mind could come to the concept of the Sardar themselves, the mysterious Priest-Kings of Gor.

My Master traveled to the Sardar for the Fair of Se'Var that year. I went with him, leashed to his stirrup. Katar, my Master's sleek light saddle tharlarion, was fretful after long idleness, and I took care to keep out of the range of his claws.

Perhaps it was the fact that peace, rare on Gor with its many fractious city-states, was enjoined at the Sardar Fairs. Perhaps it was the season of the winter solstice, and the fact that to many on Gor the journey to the Sardar was a religious obligation. Perhaps it was the color and festivity of the many pavilions, crammed with tempting merchandise. For any of these reasons, or for all of them, when Katar had been stabled and I heeled my Master amongst the crowds at the foot of the Sardar, I found myself thinking of Christmas.

Christmas, and Earth, and my family.

I had not gone home for Christmas, the year before, when I was still on Earth. I had been too busy, busy with my work, my ambitions, my arrogant belief that I, only I, could do justice to a news story I was following. I spent Christmas Day in a hotel suite in Washington, making phone calls, writing up notes, gloating over the exclusive and sensational details that I, only I, would report. A few days later--three? four? five? the memory was blurred now, but it had been before the New Year--the Gorean slavers had snatched me away.

Had my story ever been published? Had my colleagues found my notes? Or had some other reporter pried the same facts from my supposedly secret sources?

I did not know. I did not care. But I was sorry I had not gone home for Christmas.

Christmas.

The gray shingled house on the quiet, maple-lined street in a little midwestern town. Snow. Mittens and scarves and boots, laughing aunts and cousins, brightly wrapped and ribboned gifts. The sweet crisp vanilla-y taste of Christmas cookies, the savory scents of baked ham, scalloped corn, candied sweet potatoes. My sister, my brother, who had lived in that little town all their lives while I roamed the world and flickered before them on the television screen. My mother, sad and frail since my father's death.

Oh, Christmas.

Suddenly tears pricked my eyes. I had been too busy for them, too successful, too important. I had thought, carelessly, heedlessly, that there would be other Christmases. For a moment I missed them all so much I thought that I would die of it.

My Master stopped suddenly. In my reverie I almost stepped past him. Luckily a year's harsh training in the ways of Gor came to my rescue, and halted me in time.

Before him the crowd had cleared away. In the open space there stood a sedan chair slung between two handsome tharlarion. The chair was made of dark wood, richly chased with gold and silver, curtained with lustrous violet-colored silk. Half a dozen slaves, male and female, their brief rep cloth tunics belted tightly with knotted violet cords, attended it.

Violet. Violet everywhere.

A tiny enameled desert veminium flower set in a ring, violet-blue...

My stomach lurched. I fell to my knees.

I heard a silken whisper as the enclosing curtains were withdrawn.

"Tal, Lady," my Master said.

"Tal, Valerus of the Physicians," the Lady Ianthe said. "I am flattered."

"Flattered?"

"That you now see fit to follow me yourself, instead of sending hired tattlers to watch my every move and word."

My Master smiled. His expression was perfectly courteous, and his voice was cool and only very faintly ironic. "I wanted to see your... penance, with my own eyes, Lady. I was convinced that no second-hand tale would be able to do it justice."

I did not dare look up, so I did not see the expression on Lady Ianthe's face. After a moment she said, with the same tinge of delicate irony, "Perhaps there are... other things that you might want to see with your own eyes, my friend."

"Perhaps."

No, Master, I screamed inwardly. No, no, no.

But of course I said nothing. I was a slave, and my Master and the Lady Ianthe were free persons, with the right to do as they chose.

The Lady Ianthe laughed her low, velvety, flower-petal laugh. "Perhaps you will see something of interest to you tonight, at my pavilion," she murmured. "It is near the center of the Fair, next to the street of coins of the bankers of Ar. It is distinguished by my device, which you may remember."

My Master placed one hand over his heart and bowed. His fine bony profile was inscrutable. With his curling tarn's-feather hair and heavy-lidded, sensual eyes, he could have stepped straight from the treacherous courts of the Medici, the Borgia, on long-ago Earth.

"I remember it very well," he said. "Until tonight."

That peculiar sense of Earth-style Christmas no longer seemed to pervade the Fair, for all its bustle and color. Numbly I followed my Master to Lady Ianthe's pavilion that night. I had expected to be left behind, shackled to a slave ring, and I knew better than to ask my Master what his reasons were for taking me. Perhaps he had no reason, other than to annoy the Lady Ianthe. I heeled him silently, carrying his medical kit and pharmacopoeia as I always did.

He seemed utterly at his ease. He did not even look at the guard at the entryway to the pavilion, but passed through calmly, accepting as his due the fact that the heavy violet-colored silk was lifted for him. Inside it was dim, cool, scented with sweet musky perfumes that aroused the body, turned the mind to every kind of erotic pleasure. As much as I hated the Lady Ianthe of Ar, as much as I feared her, I was not immune to her arts. A year as a Gorean slave girl had left me helpless. I breathed in the scents, and shuddered, and stepped closer to my Master.

He ignored me.

The Lady Ianthe herself was reclining on a silken couch under a single pierced silver lamp, her robes of concealment so diaphanous as to be a mockery. Two slaves, naked but for silver siriks and the brands upon their thighs, knelt at her feet. I remembered them, from the day my Master had visited the Lady Ianthe's house in Ar. Or did I? One of them was different, smaller, slighter, with a strange sad sweetness to her expression like nothing I had ever seen before.

Perhaps she was also from Earth. Perhaps she was also thinking of Christmases lost forever.

"So," the Lady Ianthe said. She also ignored me. "Valerus. Some wine?"

My Master did not respond for a moment. He also seemed to be looking at the slave girls, assessing them. The taller one stared back at him boldly. The other one, the new one, flushed and looked down.

The Lady Ianthe snapped her fingers. "Crezia," she said. "Attend to the Master."

The new girl started, and then rose quickly, came forward and knelt at my Master's feet. She was very pretty, more for her unusual coloring than for her features. She had golden apricot-rose skin, pure and perfect, and a spill of apricot-gold hair like crimped silk. The similarity in color between her hair and her skin was striking. Her nipples and her soft full lips were simply a darker, richer tint of the same ripe-apricot color.

I could not see what color her eyes were.

"I beg to serve you, Master," she murmured. She had a very soft, husky voice.

My Master leaned forward and tilted her face up to his with one finger. Her eyes were hazel-gold, with the same exotic flush of apricot as her skin and hair. Jealously I wondered if she used some artificial means to enhance or alter her coloring, in defiance of the laws against such artifices for slave girls.

Closer my Master leaned. For a moment I thought he was going to kiss her. Unexpectedly, she seemed to cringe back a little.

My Master frowned and withdrew his hand. "Wine," he said brusquely.

He made a curt gesture to me to kneel behind him, in a shadowed corner of the pavilion. My senses were spinning and my body was trembling and I wanted to touch him so desperately that I felt a little sick. But I obeyed.

The apricot girl, Crezia, served my Master the wine with gentle grace. He watched her hands closely as she prepared it. In the presence of the Lady Ianthe of Ar, of course, only a foolish man did not watch the hands of a slave who poured wine, did not watch for a tiny pinch of powder or a drop of two from a vial.

"Is this not better now," the Lady Ianthe said, when my Master was comfortably settled with the goblet of wine in his hand, "than being at odds, hating each other, mistrusting each other? After all, I have done nothing to harm you, Valerus."

"I am a kaissa player," he said. "An amateur, it is true, but a zealous one."

The Lady Ianthe lifted her eyebrows, an elegant question. What is that to do with anything?

"I have not forgotten Diarmuid of Lara," my Master said. He had not yet drunk any of his wine.

"Oh," the Lady Ianthe said. She seemed genuinely surprised. "Diarmuid. He was not really important, you know."

My Master shrugged. "To players of the game, he was."

"Would you not rather think of other things? More... pleasurable things?"

"Such as?"

"Choose for yourself."

My Master looked thoughtfully at the glowing apricot girl kneeling at his feet. Then he looked at the Lady Ianthe. What I saw in his eyes made my own body turn liquid with desire.

Lazily he gestured Crezia back to her post at the foot of the couch. Then he straightened, put aside his goblet of wine, and with a flick of his long fingers extinguished the lamp.

Darkness. I heard the rustle of silk, and a cry of pleasure, quickly stifled.

My Master's voice murmured, cool and hard, "I choose... this."

"I have her," my Master said. "I have her at last."

We were back in my Master's own tent. He had been elated in a strange, harsh way, ever since he had dragged me from the Lady Ianthe's pavilion, chained me outside one of the bathing tents for an ahn while he disappeared inside, and then brought me back here. He seemed to need to talk. Normally, of course, he would have talked to Titus, or one of his other friends. But tonight there was no one in his tent to talk to but a barbarian slave girl.

I wanted to please him. I was still shaky with the effect of the perfumes, with the frantic frustration of kneeling in the darkness of the Lady Ianthe's pavilion while my Master made ruthless and quite thorough use of her. But it seemed that what would please him now was not the further use of a slave girl's body, however aroused. What would please him was to talk.

I listened.

"You already know things about the Codes of the Physicians that would be instant death to you if you ever revealed them," he said. "You learned them in Ma'rau."

I flushed. Yes, I had learned the secret of the blackspur fungus, the cause of the Little Flame Death, by eavesdropping in the sa-tarna fields of Ma'rau. I had learned also that the blackspur had life-saving properties when a birth went wrong. But I had no right to know these things, and I had paid dearly for my stupidity and deceit. One or two of the marks of my Master's whip would never fade from my back.

"Another bit of information, then, will make no difference," my Master said. "The girl. Crezia. She will send Ianthe to the stake at last."

"Crezia, Master?" I said. It made no sense to me. Crezia had seemed like an ordinary slave girl, in every way but her exotic coloring.

My Master grinned. "Ianthe must be mad to have the girl about her, in personal attendance," he said. "But risks always have seemed to... amuse her. Crezia is a poison girl, my Minda."

I stared at him in horror. I had heard about poison girls. A former high general of Ar, Maximus Hegesius Quintilius, had been assassinated in his own pleasure gardens by the bite of such a girl. Slaves whispered among themselves that the flesh itself of such girls was poisonous, that all their bodily fluids were venomous, that their breath alone could kill.

"Master," I whispered. "You touched her. You bent close to her face."

My Master laughed. "Indeed I did," he said. "And as you can see, the stories are not true about poison girls killing with a breath. The contact must be a little more direct than that."

She had such a gentle face, Crezia. Such a sweet, sad expression. She had the kind of face that had thoughts behind it, real thoughts. How could a girl with a face like that be such a monster?

"The golden-orange tinge to her skin and hair and eyes is a characteristic feature," my Master said. "Naturally it is not generally known, or poison girls would be instantly recognizable, and lose their efficacy as weapons. But the poison used is a chemically altered derivative of ost venom, and in some way that we do not quite understand, it creates the orange coloring. Osts themselves, as you know, are bright orange."

I nodded dumbly. I had never seen an ost, of course, but my Master, with his interest in poisons, was in a position to know.

"There are other attributes, more subtle," my Master said. "A scent of spice on the breath. A very fine pitting of the fingernails, giving them a velvety look instead of a smooth shine. Oh, yes, Crezia is a poison girl. There is no doubt about it."

I remembered my Master tilting Crezia's face up to his, bending toward her. Ever the Physician, he had been testing her breath. And I remembered her drawing back, ever so slightly. She knew, then.

She knew.

He had watched her hands closely as she poured the wine. Oh, yes, it was always wise to watch the hands of a slave girl pouring wine in the Lady Ianthe of Ar's presence. But it was also a way to examine the fingernails for an unusual texture, a very fine pitting, like velvet.

"So Ianthe's new plot is again an assassination," my Master was saying. "Who? Her brother? But he is not here. Hardly me, as she did not know that I would be here... although I suspect that she thought to take advantage of an unlooked-for opportunity when she asked the girl to attend to me. No, there is someone else here at the Fair who Ianthe intends to kill. Kill with the gift of a kajira."

The gift of a kajira. The gift of a poison girl. And I had been thinking of Christmas.

"You will stop her, Master?" I said hopefully.

"Of course not," he said. His voice had changed. He was no longer talking to me, but to himself, considering, planning. "That is the last thing I wish to do, because then I would never know her intended victim. I will wait, and when she finally sends her gift I will intercept it. I do not wish Ianthe to take fright and escape, and so I will replace Crezia with another girl. Whoever the intended recipient is, he will be sure to send thanks enough to disarm the bitch for a few days, at least. And in the meantime I will have the poison girl in my hands, with her gift collar... real proof at last of Ianthe's treachery, and plenty of time to make good use of it."

My heart had stopped. My breathing had stopped.

I will replace Crezia with another girl...

Someone else's voice seemed to say, "What other girl will you give away, Master, in the poison girl's place?"

My Master had already started toward the opening of the tent. He turned and looked at me with the hard eyes of a Gorean man.

"You, of course," he said.

Valerus speaks...

To this point I have not meddled in my slut's scribblings, other than to correct her Gorean, which is still execrable. I am, after all, a Physician, not a Scribe. But there are parts of this business of the Sardar Fair of Se'Var that Mindar could not record, as she is not, to my knowledge, a mind-reader. So I will be adding a note or two to this manuscript.

The Codes of the Physicians say, "Truth is a medicine." All medicines, however innocuous they may seen, should be used with care. I write with care here, but I write the truth.

Ianthe of Ar disgusted me, for all her vaunted beauty and her practiced charm. But I could hardly leave her pavilion the moment I had seen the poison girl. Whatever else Ianthe was, she was no fool. She would have realized instantly that I knew what the poison girl was.

I made use of her. It distracted her. That was all it was intended to do.

For a free woman, she was adequate.

After that I watched for two days and two nights. I did not sleep, and I ate only a bite or two, here and there. Just as the second night was beginning to lighten into dawn, I saw the messenger leave Ianthe's pavilion, with the poison girl leashed behind him.

She wore a gift collar, as I had suspected she would. Such collars are an affectation of the high castes, particularly the women. The lower ring of this one would be engraved with Ianthe's name, as the giver of the gift. The upper ring would be engraved with the name of the intended recipient. The two sections are detachable, and formal acceptance of the gift is denoted by the removal of the lower ring and its ceremonial return, which leaves the slave collared with only the name of her new owner.

A gift collar, its two halves unseparated, locked about a poison girl's throat, would be hard proof, proof in steel, of an assassination attempt.

The messenger was unsuspecting, as violence is not permitted in the precincts of a Sardar Fair. Is the virtually painless prick of a needle in the back of the neck something that could be considered "violence"? Surely it could be argued that it is not. Not even a drop of blood was spilled.

The needle was coated with a highly concentrated oil extracted from tassa powder, a pharmaceutical used by Physicians when long unconsciousness is desired. The messenger dropped without a sound.

The poison girl gasped and shrank away. I took her leash, wrapped it twice around my fist, and jerked her to her knees.

"Silence," I said.

She knelt trembling before me, silent, her head down. Her rippling fall of reddish- golden hair fell forward into the dust, luminous even in the very faint light of the moons. I parted it further and twisted the collar on her neck so that I could read it.

Ianthe Symaethia of Ar was engraved on the lower ring.

I brushed aside another strand of the poison girl's hair.

Tereus of Don was engraved on the upper ring.

I stared at it. Tereus of Don? What possible reason could Ianthe have to assassinate the generally even-handed and respected Ubar of Don, a thriving but not particularly important port on the shores of Thassa, a little north of Brundisium? How would that further her ambition?

It had been said that Ianthe had conspirators. Who else, then, might be interested in Don?

I visualized the map in my library. Don was at the extreme easternmost point of a vast arrow-shaped bay, south of the Vosk delta. The city had a fine, deep harbor, fit anchorage for the largest of warships and troopships. And from Don it was the shortest possible distance overland to Ar.

Who else might be interested in Don?

The greatest enemy of Ar.

Cos.

If Ianthe had thrown in with the Cosians, her treachery was black beyond imagining.

I picked up the unconscious body of the messenger and jerked on the poison girl's leash again.

"Get up," I said. "Come with me."

She obeyed me silently. Her skin, with its delicate sunset pink-and-gold-and-orange tinge, was a little flushed. She knew what she was, of course. She would have been chemically treated, over a number of years, with the synthesized ost venom. The treatments are painful. And their effect is permanent. There is no way to render a poison girl harmless, except to kill her and burn her body.

I took her back to my tent. Mindar was waiting there, kneeling, shackled as I had left her, deathly pale.

"Strip him," I said to her. "I will wear his clothes."

She said, "Yes, Master," in a very small, strangled voice, and went to work to strip the unconscious messenger.

I led the poison girl to the one lamp in the tent and forced her to kneel under it. I took her bright mane of hair in my hand and twisted it up over her head, out of the way.

"Hold that," I said.

She reached up and caught the knot of hair. She had lovely hands, narrow, elegant, with long slender fingers. Her beautifully shaped nails had the characteristic fine pitting, giving them a soft matte texture. The back of her neck, bent, collared, utterly vulnerable, touched me suddenly in a way that I had not been touched in a long time.

I took hold of her collar and selected another needle from my medical bag.

"Master," she said very softly.

I stopped. "What is it, girl?" I said.

"Do you mean to kill me, as you killed Nisus?"

It took me a moment to realize that Nisus was the messenger. "He is not dead, girl," I said. "I am a Physician, and unless my own life is threatened, my Codes swear me to heal, not to kill."

She sighed. I felt her quiver under my hand.

"Master," she said again, her voice hardly more than a breath. "If you are a healer, can you heal me?"

"No," I said. "Nothing can heal you."

She bent her head a little further. Holding her collar, I felt her swallow.

"I do not wish to do what they have prepared me to do," she said, in a voice so faint and sad that I had to lean forward to hear it. "What I have been ordered to do. Death would be sweet, Master. I would embrace it."

I let go of her collar and ran my hand lightly over her hair. It was incredibly fine and soft. I had not heard that the effect of the poison created such unusual softness of the hair. Suddenly I remembered that her name was Crezia.

"I have other plans for you," I said. "Crezia."

I thrust the needle into the nape of her neck, above the collar. She did not even gasp, but collapsed silently, in a spill of silky sunset-gold, to the tent's carpeted floor.

Mindar's tale continues...

After that night in the Lady Ianthe's pavilion, my Master had left me alone in his tent for two days and two nights, shackled, with quill and rence paper to practice my writing. A hired slave girl from one of the public tents came in to feed and water me twice a day. I struggled to write, as my Master had commanded, but my letters straggled off the page meaninglessly.

I was afraid.

I will replace Crezia with another girl...

You, of course...

How could I have forgotten, when I fell so deeply and helplessly in love with my Master, that I was only a slave, a piece of property to be sold, given away, discarded at his will? How could I have forgotten that I was no longer on Earth, where families celebrated Christmas, but on Gor, where enemies came together at the foot of the Sardar?

Tears splashed on the paper, spoiling the letters.

Early in the morning on the third day, he returned. He was carrying what I at first took to be a dead body, and leading the poison girl, Crezia, by a leash.

He threw the body carelessly to the carpet next to me. "Strip him," he said. "I will wear his clothes."

My mouth was dry. "Yes, Master," I said.

He took the poison girl to the other side of the tent and spoke softly with her for a time. I stripped the man of his clothes, a white linen tunic with a narrow edging of violet, a white hooded mantle. The tunic was belted with knotted violet cords, and a small blue-violet flower device was embroidered over the left breast.

The man was not dead, but deeply unconscious. My Master had many vials and powders in his pharmacopoeia, and I had seen him induce such unconsciousness before. The man would sleep for two days, possibly three, and awaken with no memory at all of what had happened to him.

I heard a soft sound. I looked up. The poison girl also lay unconscious on the carpets piled over the floor of the tent. My Master fastened her leash to the same slave ring my own shackle was attached to, then looked at me.

I quailed before his eyes.

"Help me into those clothes," he said. "I am going to deliver a gift."

My Master took me first to a tent selling slave wares. There were leashes and cuffs and guide thongs, wrist belts and ankle belts, chains and cords, slave silks, and, of course, collars. My Master selected what was called a gift collar, a trumpery device much loved by the idle free women of Ar, and handed it over to be engraved.

I waited, kneeling. I had no more tears to cry. My Master selected a thin, pale-violet silk camisk. Without a word he gestured me to take off the green silk that he had always given me to wear. I obeyed. I stood there, naked and shivering, in the open tent. A few men looked at me, not disapprovingly. A free woman in robes of concealment sniffed scornfully.

I put on the violet camisk. I thought I would retch when I saw the color against my own skin.

When the gift collar was finished my Master reached down casually, unlocked the plain steel collar I had worn since he had purchased me, took it from my neck and put it away in his belt pouch.

The collar was incised, I am the property of Valerus of Ar.

I no longer wore it. I was no longer my Master's property.

The very air against the naked skin of my throat was agonizing.

He put the gift collar around my neck and locked it. I did not know what he had ordered to be engraved in the shiny, plated metal.

He snapped the leash to the collar and jerked me to my feet. He said nothing. I said nothing. I followed him out of the tent.

There was a silver and blue device, an ocean wave, on the flap of the tent he approached. The tent itself was a darker blue, corded with silver. It was very rich and large. I looked at it numbly.

My Master, in his messenger's tunic and mantle, was admitted without question. I followed him, leashed, collared with a strange collar, wearing strange violet silks that burned my skin. We were taken to a separate section of the tent, divided from the main tent by blue silken curtains. A dais stood at one end, with a curule chair, draped in more blue and silver silk.

There was a man slouched in the chair.

I knelt. My Master bowed. He had the hood of the messenger's mantle muffled up about his face.

"I bring a gift," he said coolly, "from the Lady Ianthe of Ar to Tereus, Ubar of Don. She wishes to show her high regard."

There was silence. It stretched.

At last a harsh, taut voice said, "Why does she send me a gift? What gift?"

There was pain in the voice, tiredness, worry. I looked up through my lashes.

The Ubar of Don was as tall as my Master but broader, with heavier muscles. His features were less refined. He was dark, with gray eyes.

"The Lady Ianthe did not take me into her confidence, Ubar," my Master said. "The gift is this girl."

"I do not want a girl just now," Tereus said. "Take her back."

My Master shrugged, spread his hands in a deprecatory gesture. "I am only a messenger," he said. "She was consigned to me to deliver. I have not been given any instructions to return her."

He played the part so well that even I thought for a moment he was really what he claimed to be.

"Oh, very well," Tereus said. "Does she know anything about healing, about leechcraft, or is she just an ignorant pleasure slave?"

"I do not know, Ubar," my Master said. "I am only a messenger. You will have noted, of course, that she wears a gift collar?"

The Ubar of Don stood up and stepped down from the dais. He twisted his hand in my hair and pulled my head up.

I looked at him. I saw dreadful pain in his eyes.

"What is your name, girl?" he said.

"Mindar," I said. "Master."

"Are you any good with the sick?"

I straightened a little. I felt a single flash of defiance in the midst of my misery.

"I have belonged to the finest Physician of the city of Ar," I said. "I have been responsible for his pharmacopoeia and his instruments, and I have observed him closely."

I thought I heard my Master suck in his breath, but I was not certain. Without expression he proffered the key to the gift collar to Tereus. The Ubar of Don took it, unlocked the bottom ring of the collar I wore, and took it off.

"Foolish device," he said. "Very well, take the giver's ring back to the Lady Ianthe with my thanks. Here..."

He held out his hand. A slave came forward and put a ribbon into it, blue and silver, embroidered with the wave device of Don. He tied it carelessly to the giver's ring of the collar and handed it back to my Master.

"My thanks, Ubar," my Master said. He bowed again.

And then he turned and walked out of the tent.

He was gone.

I felt cold, and shivered.

"None of that," the Ubar of Don said sharply. "And I am not in the mood for formal submissions at the moment. Come along with me and see if you can make yourself useful."

I dipped a fresh square of rep cloth in the water and sponged the laboring girl's face. She stirred and moaned.

I thought of Earth movies I had seen about childbirth, Earth books I had read. They were more helpful than anything I had ever seen on Gor. The stabilization serums, and the efficacy of slave wine, made childbirth on Gor a rare thing.

I sponged her face again. She was very white, and her eyes were sunken. She had been laboring for thirty ahn now, that I had seen. God only knew how long she had been suffering before that. She had little strength left.

Her name was Julia. She was the Ubara of Don. The Ubar had brought her to the Sardar on a pilgrimage, to beg for the mercy of the Priest-Kings on what had apparently been a difficult pregnancy from the beginning.

The mercy of the Priest-Kings had not been forthcoming.

There had been three members of the Caste of Physicians hovering about her couch when Tereus first brought me into the curtained-off alcove. They were gone now. They knew she was dying, and they did not wish to be blamed.

Tereus remained at his free companion's side, his face haggard. The Lady Julia's old childhood nurse remained, and a half a dozen handmaids, and me. The nurse and I were the only ones willing to actually tend her. The nurse loved her. I... I did not care if I was blamed for her death. I did not care about anything anymore.

I wondered what my Master had been doing in the ahn since he had given me over to the Ubar of Don. I wondered if he had questioned the poison girl, turned her over to whoever acted in authority at the Fair. I wondered if the Lady Ianthe was even now in custody. An assassination attempt within the precincts of a Sardar Fair would be a very serious charge.

I wondered if the poison girl, the apricot girl, Crezia with the sweet thoughtful face, would have killed only the Ubar himself, or Julia too, and the unborn baby. Goreans seemed given to the practice of wiping out the entire ruling family of a city.

I wondered, and wondered, and wept a little, and comforted the Lady Julia as best I could.

Toward dawn, the baby was finally born. To everyone's astonishment, it was alive. It wailed. The old nurse cut the cord. Her gnarled hands were tender and full of awe as she washed the baby and swaddled it and laid it in a fine cradle.

It was a boy.

The Lady Julia looked upon her son, and smiled very faintly, then closed her eyes and slowly began to bleed to death.

Tereus raged. It did not help.

The old nurse prayed to the Priest-Kings. They did not help.

Nothing could help.

Nothing...

Suddenly I heard my Master's... my former Master's voice, a little blurred with grief and paga, beside the public whipping post in the little village of Ma'Rau.

Since you already know the power of the blackspur fungus, you might as well know the rest. Like most poisons, it is beneficial to humans if used with care. In minute, carefully measured doses, it can be life-saving in cases of hemorrhage following childbirth. A very rich sea trader, a member of Port Kar's Council of Captains, once paid me his first-born son's weight in sereem diamonds for using blackspur to save the life of the boy's mother...

I crawled to my... my throat closed, my heart ached, but it was necessary to accept the word... to my new Master's feet.

"Master," I whispered. "Master, please, please, I beg to be allowed to speak."

He looked at me. He was white with exhaustion and grief and fury. "Speak," he said. "But speak with care, girl. If your words are empty or foolish I swear I will kill you with my own hands."

And what would my own Master... my former Master do, if he were called back to the Ubar of Don's tent in his true identity? Would he be angry? Would he come? Or would a message to him now upset the whole delicate intrigue of vengeance he was pursuing against the Lady Ianthe?

I faltered. Would his vengeance be more important to him than the fading life of the girl on the blood-soaked couch?

I took a deep breath.

"My words are not empty," I said steadily. "Master, I beg you. Send for Valerus of the Physicians, of the city of Ar. He is within the precincts of the Fair. And he has a powder... a powder called blackspur, that would at least give him a chance to save the Lady Julia's life."

Valerus speaks...

I should whip the slut for doubting me. I would, if it were not for the unfortunate truth that I did hesitate when the message from the Ubar of Don arrived.

I had given Crezia a much smaller dose of the tassa-oil soporific than I gave the messenger. She had awakened after only a few ahn, and I had questioned her thoroughly.

She answered me with utter, transparent honesty. She looked up at me, her beautiful hazel-gold eyes glimmering with sparks of orange. Brave eyes. Sad eyes. Poison-girl eyes.

I wondered what she had looked like before they had treated her with the poison.

She told me everything. Ianthe had spoken freely to her, never dreaming that she would have an opportunity to repeat the words. It seemed that the young Ubara of Don was pregnant, and that the Ubar had brought her to the Fair on a pilgrimage, hoping to avoid complications in what promised to be a difficult birth. Ianthe's plan was to wipe out the family, Ubar, Ubara, and heir, and with the support of the Cosians take the Ubarate of Don for herself. It was the Cosians who had provided her with Crezia.

She had used the poison girl as a personal slave for exactly the reason I had suspected... the sheer reckless bravado of it. It had satisfied some dark urge in her to have death kneeling at her feet.

Unwilling death. Gentle death. But death, all the same.

I found myself thinking of ways Crezia could be kept safely, ways she could live out her life. But of course that was madness. My whole purpose in taking her, in exchanging my own girl Mindar for her, was to turn her over to the authorities as evidence against Ianthe. The authorities would question her again, examine her collar, write everything down, and destroy her.

I delayed. I questioned Crezia further.

And then the messenger from the Ubar of Don arrived, disheveled and desperate.

I had left it too late. If I went openly to the Ubar of Don's tent now, Ianthe would know. She had people watching me, just as I had people watching her. Any contact between me and the Ubar of Don would make her instantly suspicious. She would be gone before any magistrate could lay a hand on her.

I now had two choices. Take the blackspur powder and try to save the life of a dying girl. Or take Crezia to the authorities and achieve the vengeance that had obsessed me since that terrible moment in the Plaza of the Central Cylinder in Ar, when the crossbow quarrel sank itself into the heart of Diarmuid the Player.

Damn that slut Mindar. She should have known.

But that was why the messenger had come, of course. She did know.

Mindar's tale concludes...

The man who had been my Master came to the Ubar of Don's tent just at midday. He was almost too late. But he brought the blackspur powder with him, and I, who had seen people die horribly of the Little Flame Death at Ma'Rau, had a chance to see the blackspur give life instead.

The bleeding stopped. Valerus of Ar called for raw bosk juices and rich red wine, and the Lady Julia drank a little. A hint of color came back into her face. She opened her eyes, and although she was too weak to lift her arms, she smiled a bit when the baby was lain against her breast.

I was crying openly. It did not matter, as the old nurse and the foolish handmaids and Tereus himself were crying, too.

With all of us kneeling around the baby's cradle, and with the wisest of Physicians offering the blackspur powder, the sustaining meat juices, and the wine... well, perhaps there was a tiny bit of Christmas on Gor, after all.

Tereus did not seem to connect the skilled and commanding Physician with the obsequious messenger who had delivered the gift of a kajira to his tent three days before. But of course the Physician had kept the hooded mantle with the violet stripe wrapped closely about his face. Tereus had been distracted with worry then. He was distracted with joy now.

At dusk, when the Lady Julia had drunk some more strengthening meat juice and wine and was sleeping quietly, Valerus of Ar began to pack his vials and boxes and instruments back into his medical kit. He did not look at me. I watched him hungrily, shamelessly, knowing that I would never see him again.

Suddenly I realized that Tereus, my Master, was watching me. I flushed and put my head down.

"Valerus," Tereus said suddenly. "I would give you a gift."

A very rich sea trader, a member of Port Kar's Council of Captains, once paid me his first-born son's weight in sereem diamonds for using blackspur to save the life of the boy's mother...

"It is not necessary," Valerus of Ar said. "You will receive an account from me, Ubar, I assure you."

"An account," my Master Tereus said scornfully. "My scribes will see to that. I wish to give you a personal gift. A rich gift, that will show how much I value the life of my son's mother."

Valerus of Ar smiled and shrugged. He looked tired. "As you wish," he said.

"Choose for yourself," my Master Tereus said. "Don is a port city, and all the merchandise of Gor passes through our harbor. Would you have gold, or silver, or gems? Fine woods, scarce spices, richly woven and embroidered silks?"

He paused. Then abruptly he stepped to where I was kneeling, caught my arm, and dragged me to my feet.

"Or would you have this girl?" he said. "She is pretty enough, and she seems willing to work at any task she is set. She even claims she once belonged to a Physician. And she looks at you with strangely hungry eyes."

He gave me a push. I sprawled to the floor of the tent at Valerus of Ar's feet.

"Gold," Valerus of Ar said thoughtfully. "Or silver, or gems. Spices. Silks."

I pressed my face to the piled carpets and prayed as I have never prayed before.

I could hear that he was smiling when he said, "I will take the girl."

I knelt beside my Master, his own collar once again locked securely about my throat, at the end of the avenue leading to an immense timber gate. On the other side of the gate and its palisade were the Sardar, both the mountains and, it was said, the Priest-Kings themselves.

Sometimes, in the course of the Fairs, humans passed through the gate and entered the Sardar. No one knows what they found there, because none of them have ever returned. Oh, there were stories told. Even I, a slave, had heard a tale about how the palisade and the gate were once destroyed, and a man and a woman came back from the Sardar. But those were only tales.

There was a ceremony when someone entered the Sardar. A member of the caste of Initiates asked the petitioner ritual questions, performed a ritual washing of his hands. And then the gate was opened, and the petitioner passed through, and the gate was closed again. To mark the moment, there was a tolling on an enormous hollow metal bar which was installed some distance from the gate.

At the sound of the bar, people throughout the Fair, man and woman, slave and free, trembled.

Someone was about to enter the Sardar.

She was very small, facing the huge gate, surrounded by the white-robed Initiates. But she stood erect, stood bravely. The sun glinted off her loose spill of apricot hair.

My Master had taken Crezia to the authorities as soon as he returned to his tent from the tent of the Ubar of Don. But it was too late, of course. The Lady Ianthe, just as he had feared, had been informed of his actions. When the authorities of the Fair had gone to her pavilion, they had found only her abandoned slaves, and emptiness.

Crezia had been examined by a panel of Physicians and certified to be a poison girl. She had been questioned, under torture as is customary with slaves on Gor, by a panel of magistrates versed in the law. Her collar had been examined minutely, and rubbings had been taking of the engravings on it.

She had submitted to it all without resistance. She had told them everything. At the end of it, the Lady Ianthe was proscribed, a traitor and a fugitive. She was cast out from her caste and disowned by her brother. She had escaped with her life, but little else.

Naturally, when the panels and judges were finished with Crezia, there was nothing left to do but destroy her.

At that point my Master had intervened. He was allowed to speak privately with Crezia for several ahn. He never told me what she said, or what he said, or did.

But in the end, Crezia was not impaled and burned. She had, after all, done nothing but obey. She was allowed instead to enter the Sardar, and perhaps the Priest-Kings, whoever or whatever they were, if they even existed, would be able to give her the gift of peace.

We watched.

Crezia finished speaking to the Initiate in charge of the ceremony, and he performed the ceremonial washing of his hands. Then he made a gesture, and the gate slowly began to open, powered by windlasses turned by two bands of chained and blinded slaves.

The Initiates backed away. Crezia waited, alone.

Then she turned, and lifted one hand to shade her eyes against the sun, and looked down the avenue for a long moment.

My Master stood, unmoving.

Perhaps she had loved him.

Perhaps he had loved her. It was not for me to know or question.

Crezia lowered her hand, turned around again, and walked into the Sardar. The gate slowly ground shut behind her.

The bar tolled. It was terrible. I put my hands up to cover my ears against the sound.

For a long time my Master did not move. Then he reached down and took hold of my collar. I could feel the hard, unyielding strength of his hand, the tightness of the steel at my throat.

"Come, Minda," he said. "We are going home to Ar."