Tal Goreans,
Greetings visitors,

Welcome once again to the Booknotes column. Just as Judy Thornton was getting settled in her new station in life as the slave of Clitus Vitellius, and apparently a favourite slave at that, she has suffered a reverse. Her Master has made her confess her unreserved and undying love and devotion to him, and no sooner are the words out of her mouth than he, renaming her Dina after her flower-shaped brand, announces his intention to give her away to Thurnus the Peasant. Let us go and assess her reaction to this.

Chapter Nine

Clitus Vitellius callously disposes of Dina and she bids a tearful farewell to her fellow-slaves. Then she is put to hard agricultural labour without further ado. She makes the acquaintance of Thurnus’s other slaves, including the brawny Sandal Thong who, despite being large and strong for a woman, is still quite the frail next to Thurnus and has a serious case of the hots for him besides. But though Sandal Thong may be the ideal slave girl for a Peasant who intends to get a full day ’s hard labour out of his property, Dina is a quite different proposition and does not make out very well at any work she is put to. Still, Thurnus is of the Gorean school of thought that a square peg can be fitted into a round hole with the appropriate application of percussive maintenance, and would doubtless have said “Where there’s a whip there’s a will” if one of Tolkien’s orcs hadn’t got there first. At that, he is a far from cruel master, as we shall see.

To begin with Thurnus hitches up Dina and the other girls to his plough. If this is mere adherence to principle - that if you own slaves you will put them to whatever use you see fit, regardless of other considerations - it is a slightly quixotic one. On Earth it’s been an established fact for several centuries that a horse, equipped with a collar, has a power-to-fuel ratio about double that of a man - in other words, one horse will do the work of a number of men, on half the food that must be fed to the men, no matter what you do to the men. We would assume that Thurnus, who is a thoroughly able Peasant, would be well able to assess whether he could plough his land with bosk more economically than with kajirae; but it pleases him to use the women.

Ending this digression, your annotator must report that Dina makes a very poor draught beast. Despite the whip’s encouragement - which at least persuades her not to shirk her share of the load - she soon drops from exhaustion, and is vaguely aware of Sandal Thong and the other girls pleading with Thurnus not to break her neck.

Now it should be remarked at this point that the incident could well be cited as yet another instance of Gorean abuse of women; but in actual fact Dina, though useless for her Master’s purpose, is suffered to live and so the number of women actually recorded as having their necks broken for being too weak to pull a plough remains at nil. On the other hand, the lesson is undoubtedly not lost on Thurnus’s other girls, and he may additionally consider that being induced to plea for their sister-in-bondage’s life is a useful reinforcement of their position.

Dina has a strange dream one night in the cage, in which she finds herself in the presence of a man named Belisarius, who orders her to bead a necklace. She finds this disturbing, and does not understand it.

Meanwhile, in the waking world, she is put to hoeing instead of ploughing. She is too small and weak to manage the hoe very well, but at least it is work manageable enough that she is not in imminent danger of having her neck broken. At that, she can count herself lucky, for Melina, the flabby, shrewish mate of Thurnus, interrupts her nagging of him for long enough to volunteer to cut Dina’s throat. Thurnus is a disappointment to Melina for his lack of ambition, and she thinks it no shame to disparage him in front of the very slaves.

Thurnus for his part is far from overjoyed with Dina. She cannot plough, she struggles with the hoe and with yoked buckets, and when he has her help him with the sleen her fear of the animals renders her less than useful. In exasperation he grabs her and demands to know if she is good for nothing, and her shudder at being touched by a man leads to the pair of them doing the nasty there and then, resulting in Melina seeing something that Thurnus considers educational for her and Thurnus himself to conclude that Dina is good for something after all.

Melina evidently concurs. When Thurnus is otherwise engaged one day, and a peddler named Tup Ladletender is visiting the village, she has him look Dina over and invites him to make an offer for her. The price he offers is low, but Melina offers him a still lower one, on condition that he trade her something from his cart. Dina sees what looks like a packet of medicine change hands, but she does not know what it is. Melina of course does not tell her, but she does inform Dina that by the following day she will belong to either Tup Ladletender or Bran Loort.

Ah, Bran Loort. We saw him briefly last issue, a sturdy young man with, perhaps, pretentions to being the “Young Bull” to Thurnus’s “Old Bull”, and he relishes the prospect of getting his hands on Dina, gloating that when he is the village boss Melina will give Dina to him. (This speaks volumes for his ambition: to be someone who accepts rewards from Melina rather than claiming the rewards that please him as of right.)

For the present Dina is put to hoeing once again, ordered to remain at her labours until Bran Loort comes to fetch her. When he does, he brings some friends. These are the peasant lads whom Dina evaded during their game of Girl Catch, for which see last issue, and they are still bearing a grudge over it. Courageously, Bran Loort and his cronies amuse themselves with a pettily cruel game of “putting the slave girl in the wrong” before they settle down to gang-raping her. Then they drag her, shocked and in pain, back to the village.

The first part of Bran Loort’s plan consists of exhibiting the ill-used Dina to her Master and inviting him to go ahead and do something about it, if he thinks he can. But Thurnus refuses to follow the script. He does point out that Bran Loort stands in violation of the Peasants’ Code, in which no man may use another’s property without the owner’s leave, and that Bran Loort had only to ask for permission and it would have been granted. Additionally, Thurnus remarks, Bran Loort has been guilty of the same before, though not with quite the same malice aforethought. This is a matter for Caste discipline, and the council must decide what is to be done. Bran Loort sneers at this. He believes that he and his eight hangers-on are more than capable of ousting Thurnus from his position as Caste Leader, and then it will be he, Bran Loort, who decides whether the council will be called.

Thurnus puts his foot down at this, and offers the would-be Caste Leader a choice of challenges. Bran Loort does not care to take the Old Bull on with either bow or knife, but opts instead for the staff. Thurnus is not unwilling. He looks at Dina and wonders whether the fuss is all over her, but decides that there is more afoot, and has her gagged and put in the rape-rack for now. Meanwhile Sandal Thong slips away on business of her own.

By way of openers, Thurnus sees off one after another of Bran Loort’s henchmen with a few blows of his staff, and then the main event begins. Bran Loort is good, in his way: young, strong and by no means unskilled. But Thurnus is his master to an extent that is almost embarrassing, and it is only a matter of time before the Young Bull is overborne and driven to the ground. Dazedly he orders his followers, such as are able, to gang up on Thurnus, but the crowd’s disapproval is echoed by the far more authoritative sound of a sleen’s snarl. Sandal Thong has fetched these, and is ready to loose them on any who attack Thurnus - which would give pause to many men armed with better weapons than staves.

Melina is outraged at a slave girl’s interference, but Thurnus corrects her; he freed Sandal Thong earlier that day. As for Bran Loort, Thurnus now invites him to help himself to Dina’s favours with his leave and blessing, but Bran Loort finds that his crushing defeat in the one challenge has rendered him thoroughly unarmed for the other, and he flees in disarray, forsaken by all his henchmen who opt to remain behind and endure caste discipline.

But Melina is not yet done. She brings Thurnus a celebratory cup to mark his triumph, and the full horror of the plan strikes Dina. Doubtless the powder Melina purchased from Tup Ladletender was poison, which she is about to administer to Thurnus - and Dina, bound and gagged, cannot even issue a warning. Thurnus, smiling benignly, invites Melina to drink first, and then makes his suggestion rather more forceful when she demurs, until it becomes plain that he will not be gainsaid and Melina is forced to reveal that the drink is poisoned: better to be revealed as a would-be poisoner than to die of that same poison, she evidently reasons.

Thurnus however cheerfully tosses off the cup at a single draught, and reveals that he and Tup are brothers in all but birth and that not only was the powder not a poison, but that Tup tipped him the wink some time before. Confronted with the horror that awaits her, Melina at least has the stomach to beg for honourable death, even death by sleen, but Thurnus enslaves her instead.

A feast is held, with the branding and head-shaving of Melina to entertain the guests, and Thurnus now invites the freed Sandal Thong to accept Melina’s place as his new Free Companion. Sandal Thong refuses. Thurnus and the crowd alike are astonished; but she kneels at Thurnus’s feet and begs to be his slave instead, sensing that this is what she should be to Thurnus. He warns her that what she is asking cannot be undone, and she only reiterates her plea to be collared. This Thurnus does enthusiastically, and he promptly consummates their new relationship.

Dina falls asleep, and wakes to find that she is now the property of Tup Ladletender. It was Melina’s deal that Dina should be Tup’s payment for the powder, and even though the powder was worthless (“But so are you, pretty little Dina”) Thurnus will honour the bargain made by one who is not now in a position to make good on it.

Melina has spent her hours tied to the rape-rack in thought, and when Thurnus announces that she is to be sent home, shaven-headed and branded, to the village she came from, she pleads instead to be kept as Thurnus’s slave. She now realizes that she let her ambition to be the mate of a powerful man blind her to the virtues of the man she actually had, and that this made her a poor companion; she wishes to be given the chance to be a better slave. Thurnus hears her out, and lets her know that her lot will not be easy, but, perhaps moved by her full confession of her faults, he grants her request, and her further wish that he subject her to slave rape - which she plainly finds breathtaking, and not in a bad sense of the word.

Leaving Sandal Thong whipping her fellow slaves into order, Dina once again takes her leave, and Thurnus bids her a not unkindly farewell. Peasant life does not suit her, and Tup Ladletender will doubtless sell her into a more suitable slavery. True, she has some more hard labour ahead of her, beginning with drawing Ladletender’s cart; but she is off to find her proper place in life, at the feet of a man rather than at the traces of a plough.

Chapter Ten

And without very much more ado, Tup Ladletender takes Dina to market. On the way they pass a caravan belonging to a much wealthier merchant, the great Mintar himself (remember him? If not, read “Tarnsman” again) and come after a while to a keep named Stones of Turmus, an outpost owned by the great southern city of Turia. There she is to be sold and there, no doubt, an entirely different kind of life awaits her.

But, after the excitements of the lengthy Chapter Nine, we are wearing out our welcome for this month, and it will be time enough to find out what kind of Pleasure Slave Dina will make in the next instalment. Therefore, though as I write these words it is not quite Christmas, I wish my readers a Happy New Year and invite them to rejoin me a month hence, when we will take yet a fourth peek between the covers of “Slave Girl of Gor”.

I wish you well,

Socrates