She obeyed.

"Slave lips," I commanded.

She pursed her lips and then I, gently, kissed them. "That was not so fearful now, was it?" I asked, drawing back.

"What do men, truly, want of slaves?" she whispered.

"Everything," I said.

"And what must a slave give them?" she asked.

"Everthing," I said, "and more."

"I had feared, and hoped, it would be so," she said.

I smiled.

"You see," she said, "I am a slave."

"I know," I said. She was a woman.

"Have you read the Prition of Clearchus of Cos?" she said.

"What is a former free woman of Ar doing reading that?" I asked. It was a treatise on bondage.

" 'The slave," " she quoted, " 'makes no bargains; she does not desire small demands to be placed upon her; she does not ask for ease; she asks nothing; she gives all; she seeks to love and selflessly serve. »

"You quote it well," I said.

"You have read it?" she asked.

"Yes," I said. I remembered the passage clearly. The girl had perhaps, at one tim, memorized it.

"I have always been fascinated with bondage," she said, "but I never expected, then, to find myself a slave."

"Kiss me, Slave," I said.

"Yes, Master," she said.

"Do you fear now," I asked, "as a slave, that you will be rejected?"

"I see now," she said, "as a slave, that it does not matter. It is not mine to fear such things, but rather to see to it that I am completely pleasing. If I am rejected, it matters not, for I am only a slave. As a slave I am nothing. I am meaningless and worthless. Thus what does it matter if I should be despised and spurned? I must then, only, try again, seeking anew, helplessly, to serve and love."

I did not respond to her. I did not think it necessary to tell her, and she would, in any case, soon learn it, that the least of the slave's fears is rejection. Rather she must fear quite the opposite. She must fear that the very sight of her will drive a man half mad with passion, and that he may not wish to rest until he gets his chains on her.

"In the Prition," I said, "Clearchus, of course, is primarily concerned with only one form of bondage, that of the love slave."

"That is true," she said.

"There are many slaveries," I said, "and some are doubtless quite fearful and unpleasant."

"Yes," she shuddered. she had heard, I gathered, of certain agriculteral slaveries, and of slaveries such as those in the public kitchens and laundries. Too, she was doubtless familiar with contempt slaveries and vengeance slaveries. One form of vengeance slavery is the proxy slavery, in which one woman, totally innocent, is enslaved and made to stand proxy for a hate, at-least-temporarily-inaccessibly woman, even being given her name. The proxy, of course, being enslaved, is truly enslaved. Even if the hated woman is later captured the proxy is not freed. She is generally, merely, given away or sold.

"The common denominator," I said, "appears to be that the woman must be totally pleasing and, in all ways, is totally subject to the will of the Master."

"Yes, Master," she said.

"You may now kiss me again, Slave," I said.

"Yes, Master," she said.

I then lowered her to the robe. Her arms were still about my neck.

"Are you going to teach me to be pleasing?" she asked.

"Yes," I said.

"You will then," she smiled, "be imporving, as you suggested, my master's property."

"Yes," I said. "But I am going to do more than teach you how to be pleasing."

"Oh?" she asked.

"Yes," I said. "When I am finished with you, my naked, collared beauty, you will be quite different than you are now."

She looked at me.

"I am going to make you into a man's dream of pleasure," I said.

"Do so," she said.

"Please, please," she wept. "Do not leave me! I beg you! Touch me more, please! I beg you to stay with me! I did not know it could be anything like this! Please, I beg you, touch me again!" She clutched me. Her tears were on my arm and chest.

"Do you beg it, as a slave?" I asked.

"Yes, Master," she said. "I beg it as a slave!"

"Very well," I said.

"What a fool I was as a free woman!" she whispered.

"You were only ignorant," I said.

"I did not know what it was like to be a slave, the helplessness, the sensations."

I did not respond.

"I did not know such feelings could exist," she said. "I never felt anything like them. They are so overwhelming."

"They have to do with dominance and submission," I said.

"I was afraid, in my yielding," she said, "that I might die."

"It was only a small slave orgasm," I said.

She looked at me, wonderingly.

"Beyond what you have experienced," I said, "lie indefinite horizons of ecstasy. No woman yet, I speculate, has numbered them."

"It is so much more than mere physical feeling," she said.

"It is such feeling in a cognitive matrix," I said. "It is psychophysical. It is an indissolubly emotional, physical and intellectual whole."

"I shall now need, often, the touch of a man," she said.

"Yes," I said.

"You have done this to me," she chided.

"It should have been done long ago," I said.

"But now," she said, "what if a man does not choose to satisfy me?"

"Try to be such that he will show you kindness," I said.

She shuddered. She was now much more at the mercy of men thatn she had ever suspected she could be. The slave fires in her belly, as it is said, had now been lit. She was now susceptible to the torments of the deprived slave. Free women, whose sexuallity is usually, for most practical purposes, sluggish and inert, often have difficulty in understanding the desperation and intensity of these needs on the part of a female slave. They think that she is different from, and inferior to, themselves. If they themselves should be enslaved, of course, they are likely to soon revise these opinions. They, too, then may well find themselves moaning and scratching in their kennels, begging rude keepers for their touch, and being despised, in turn, by free women.

"You have ruined me for freedom," she said.

"Do you object?" I asked.

"No," she said. "I want to be a slave. I love being a slave."

"That is fortunate," I said, "for that is what you are."

"I have been a slave for months," she said. "I regret only that I have wasted all this time. I have waited until today to discover what it can be, truly, to be a slave."

"What do you feel about men?" I asked.

"They are interesting and beautiful," she said.

"Beautiful?" I asked.

"To my eyes," she smiled.

"And what else?" I asked.

"I know that they are my masters, that I need their touch and that I wish to serve them."

"Can you conceive of yourself kneeling before a man, head down, begging him for his caress?" I asked.

"Clearly," she said, "now that my sexuality has been awakened."

"Will he accede to your plea?" I asked.

"It would be my hope that he would," she said.

"Sometimes he may, sometimes he may not," I said. "There may come times when you will be grateful for so little as a cuffing or a kick."

"I must accept what I am given," she said. "I am a slave."

I then took her again in my arms. "Yes!" she breathed.

I lay on my side and the girl put a tiny piece of pemmican in my mouth.

I enjoyed having her feed me. She had, earlier, brought me water in her mouth, but, in its transfer, at the touch of her lips, it had only led to a new ravishment of her. I had then gone to the stream to satisfy my thirst.

"It is nearly sundown," I said.

"Then I must be returned to the herd," she moaned. "I must then be taken near the village with the others. I must then be hobbled and, a rope on my neck, be picketed with my string. How can I bear, now, to return to the herd?"

"I doubt that you will now be long kept in the herd," I said.