After a week I wondered what she would be like.

I turned from the market streets into a street of shops and stalls, the bazaar, which, in Tor, is most commonly reached through the market gate.

“The Aretai will act,” I beard one man telling another.

I paused before a given stall, where light, walking chains were being sold. They were strung over racks rather like parrot perches. Without much haggling, I bought one, which seemed to me pretty. They are adjustable, with rings, from a length as small as two inches, for security, to a stride length of about twenty inches. Two keys are provided, each of which fits both ankle-ring locks. I also purchased a set of slave bells, of the thong as opposed to the lock variety.

They are less expensive than the lock variety; also, they may be tied at various places on the body, about the neck, the wrist, the ankle, about the thigh, about the arm, etc.; it is delightful to bell a girl; she may not remove them, of course, without her master’s permission.

I passed by the door of a slaver’s house. High in the house, through one of the narrow windows, I saw a girl, looking out. She smiled, and put her arm out through the window, waving. Her face pressed against the bars. She was collared.

I blew her a kiss in the Gorean fashion, brushing it upward to her with my fingers.

I looked into a shop where pottery was being turned. To one side of the wheels, along a wall, sitting among many bowls and vessels, a boy, with his finger, was carefully applying bluish pigment to a large, two-handled pitcher. When the pitcher was placed in the kin this pigment would be burned, hardened, into the glaze. The kilns were in the back of the shop.

“The Kavars, even now, are hiring lances,” I heard.

The rugs of Tor are very beautiful. I paused to look upon several of them, hanging in stalls, many others, lying on top of one another, in great, shaded piles. It takes five girls more than a year to make certain of these rugs. The patterns, memorized by the callers, some of them blind, are intricate, and passed down through families. They are made on simple looms and the pile is knotted onto the warp and weft. Some of these rugs have as many as four hundred knots per square hort. The hort is approximately an inch and a quarter in length. Each knot, by a girl, a free woman, is tied individually by hand. There are many varieties of such rugs. Almost all are incredibly beautiful. The dyes used in the malting of these rugs are, on the whole, natural dyes, vegetable dyes, some made from barks and leaves, and roots and flowers, others from animal products, crushed insects, etc. At various places in the bazaar, from a latticework laid between the buildings, numerous skeins of wool hung, dyed in various bright colors, drying. The carders and the dyers, incidentally, are subcastes separate from the weavers. All are subcastes of the rug makers, which, itself, interestingly, perhaps surprisingly, is accounted generally as a subcaste of the cloth workers.

Rug makers themselves, however, usually regard themselves, in their various subcastes, as being independent of the cloth workers. A rug maker would not care to he confused with a maker of kaftans, turbans or djellabas.

I looked up at skeins of wool hanging from the wooden poles between the flat roofs. They were quite colorful. The finest wool, however, is sheared in the spring from the bellies of the verr and hurt, and would, accordingly, not be available until later in the season. The wool market, as was to be expected, was now slow.

I passed the door of another slaver’s house. I swung the light walking chain casually in my hand. It would look well on the slim ankles of the lovely Miss Blake-Allen.

I passed a fellow inlaying wood, and the shop of a silversmith, and stalls filled with baskets, some of which, grain baskets, were large enough to hold a man. In another place tanned, dyed leathers were hanging, purple, red, yellow. I passed a boy in a shop using a bow lathe. He spins the wood with bow and string, held in his right hand. He uses his left hand and his right foot to guide the cutting tool. Djellabas and burnooses, sleeveless, hooded desert cloaks, were being sold in another stall. The burnoose can, as the djellaba cannot, because of the sleeves, be thrown back, freeing the arms. One who rides the swift kaiia, who handles the scimitar and lance, chooses the burnoose.

I passed another stall, in which mats were being sold. These are used for various purposes, sometimes vertically for screens, more normally, horizontally, for sitting and sleeping. They can be tightly rolled and occupy little space.

Among them I saw rough-fibered slave mats, and among those, the coarsest of all, submission mats, on which the female slave may be forced to perform for her master.

There were sellers of scarves and sashes, veils and haiks, chalwars and tobes, and slippers and kaftans, and cording for agals. Too, there were cloth merchants, with their silks and rolls of rep cloth. Cloth is measured in the ah-il, which is the length from the elbow to the tip of the middle finger, and the ah-ral, which is ten ah-ils. I saw sleeve daggers. I brushed a mat salesman away.

In another stall a slave girl was being vended. I watched her for a time dance before me, then I turned away.

I smelled veminium oil.

The petals of veminium, the “Desert Veminium,” purplish, as opposed to the “Thentis Veminium,” bluish, which flower grows at the edge of the Tahari, gathered in shallow baskets and carried to a still, are boiled in water. The vapor, which boils off, is condensed into oil. This oil is used to perfume water. This water is not drunk but is used in middle and upper-class homes to rinse the eating hand, before and after the evening meal.

At one place, on a stone shelf, under awnings, several girls, chained naked, were for sale, interestingly, at set prices. It was a municipal sale, under the jurisdiction of the courts of Tor. One brown-skinned girl, black-eyed, no more than fifteen, kneeling, her wrists and ankles tightly chained, looked up at me.

She was being sold to pay her father’s gambling debts. I purchased her, and freed her.

“Where is your father?” I asked.

“At the gaming tables of the Golden Kaiila,” she wept.

I looked at her. She was comely. I looked to the discarded chains on the stone shelf. Other girls there held out their hands to me. I looked again at the girl.

“In another year,” I told her, “you will kneel again on the stone shelf, beneath the awnings.” I regarded her. “Then,” I said, regarding her, “you will be too beautiful to free.”

“I must hurry home,” she said, “to prepare supper for my father.”

I watched her run, shamed, through the streets. She was lovely. I had little doubt that, in time, she would wear slave bells. Even if she were not to be sold by the magistracy of Tor I thought it not unlikely that she would fall to the noose of a slaver.

“Buy us! Buy us, Master!” cried the other girls on the shelf.

“Be slaves,” I laughed to them, turning away.

They wept. I heard the lash fall among them.

Here and there in the bazaar I made purchases.

Twice I was passed by pairs of guardsmen, in white robes with red sashes and scimitars, the police of Tor.

Not five paces behind them I saw a ragged cutpurse cut the wallet of a merchant, dropping its contents into his hand and, bowing and whining, twist away in the crowd. The merchant huffed away. The fellow had done it neatly. I recalled a girl named Tina, once of Lydius, now of Port Kar. She, too, had been an excellent thief. My own coins I kept in belt pockets, within my robes, save for a small wallet at my side. I went about Tor now as a traveler from Turia, a small merchant. I checked the wallet at my side. It was intact.

Some other thieves had not done so well in the bazaar. Several right hands, severed, were nailed to a board on which salt prices were affixed.