I then returned to the couch, and sat upon its edge. She then left the couch,that she might kneel on the tiles before me. I looked down at her. How beautifulare enslaved women.

"Perhaps," I said, "you might speculate on what business brings the emissary ofSamos of Port Kar to my house this morning?"

"I, Master?" she asked, frightened.

"Yes," I said. "You once served Kurii, the Others, the foes of Priest-Kings."

"I told all that I knew," she exclaimed. "I told all in the dungeons of Samos! Iwas terrified! I held back nothing! I was emptied of information!"

"You were then valueless," I said.

"Except, perhaps, as I might please a man as a slave," she said.

"Yes," I smiled.

Samos himself had issued the order of enslavement on her. In Ar I had presentedthe document to her and shortly thereafter, as it pleased me, implemented itsprovisions. She had once been Miss Elicia Nevins, of Earth, an agent of Kurii onGor. Then, in Ar, a city from which once I had been banished, I had caught andenslaved her. In those compartments which had been her own in Ar she had becomemy capture, and had been stripped and placed in my bonds. In her owncompartments, then, at my leisure, I had branded her and locked on her fairthroat the gleaming, inflexible circlet of bondage. Before the fall of darkness,and my escape, I had had time, too, to pierce her ears, that the full degree ofher degradation and slavery, in the Gorean way of thinking, be made most clear.

To Gorean eyes the piercing of the ears, this visible set of wounds, inflictedto facilitate the mounting of sensual and barbaric ornamentations, iscustomarily regarded as being tantamount, for most practical purposes, to asentence of irrevocable bondage. Normally ear- piercing is done only to thelowest and most sensuous of slaves. It is regarded, by most Goreans, as beingfar more humiliating and degrading to a woman than the piercing of a girl'sseptum and the consequent fastening on her of a nose ring. Indeed, such anaperture does not even show. Some slave girls, of course, are fixed for both.