"Are you sorry for what you have done?" asked the free woman.

"Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, Mistress!" wept Feiqa, her head down, doing obeisance to one who was a thousand times, nay, infinitely, her superior, the free woman of the peasants.

"You may live," said the free woman.

"Thank you, Mistress!" wept Feiqa, head down, shuddering and sobbing uncontrollably at the free woman's feet.

"Have you learned anything from this, Feiqa?" I asked.

"Yes, Master," she wept.

"What?" I asked.

"That I am a slave, she said.

"Do not forget it, Feiqa," I told her.

"No, Master," she sobbed, fervently.

"Will you stay the night?" asked the free woman.

"With your permission," I said.

"You are welcome here," she said. "But you will have to sleep your animal outside."

I glanced down at Feiqa. She was still shuddering. It would be difficult for her, I supposed, at least for a time, to cope with her new comprehension concerning the nature of her condition.

"I do not allow livestock in my house," said the free woman.

I smiled, looking down at Feiqa. To be sure, the former rich young lady of Samnium was now livestock, that and nothing more. Too I smiled because of the free woman's concern, and outrage, at the very thought of having a slave in the house. This seemed amusing to me for two reasons. First, it is quite common for Goreans to keep slaves, a lovely form of domestic animal, in the house. Indeed the richer and more well-to-do Gorean the more likely it is that he will have slaves in the house. In the houses of administrators, in the domiciles of high merchants, in the palaces of Ubars, for example, slaves, and usually beautiful ones, for they can afford them, are often abundant. Secondly, it is not unusual either for many peasants to keep animals in the house, usually verr or bosk, sometimes tarsk, at least in the winter. The family lives in one section of the dwelling, and the animals are quartered in the other.

"Go outside," I told Feiqa.

"Yes, Master," she said.

"Would you like a little more food?" I asked the free woman. "I have some more." She looked at me.

"Please," I said.

She took two more wedges of yellow Sa-Tarna bread. I put some more sticks on the fire.

"Here," she said, embarrassed, She drew some roots, and two suls, from her robe. They had been freshly dug. Dirt still clung to them. She put them down on the stones, between us.

I sat down cross-legged, and she knelt down, opposite me, knees together, in the common fashion of the Gorean free woman. The roots, the two suls, were between us. She rocked the child in her arms.

"I thought you could find no roots," I smiled.

"Some were left in the garden," she said. "I remembered them. I came back for them. There was very little left though. Others obviously had come before me. These things were missed. They are poor stuff. We used to use the produce of that garden for tarsk feed."

"They are fine roots," I said. "and splendid suls."

"We even hunt for tarsk troughs," she said, wearily, "and dig in the cold dirt of the pens. The tarsk are gone, but sometimes a bit of feed remains, fallen between the cracks, or missed by the animals, having been trampled into the mud. There are many tricks we learn in these days."

"I do not want to take your food," I said.

"Would you shame me?" she asked.

"No," I said. "Share my kettle," she said.

"Thank you," I said. I took one of the roots and broke off a bit of it in my hand. I rubbed the dirt from it. I bit into it. "Good," I said. I did not eat more however. I would let her keep her food. I had done in this matter what would be sufficient. I had, in what I had done, acknowledged her as the mistress in her house; I had shown her honor; I had "shared her kettle."

"Little Andar is asleep," she said, looking at the bundled child.

I nodded.

"You may sleep your slave inside the threshold," she said.

"Throw back your hoods, pull down your veils, females!" laughed the wagoner. The women crowding about the back of the wagon, many with their hands outstretched, the sleeves of their robes falling back, cried out in consternation.

"a€”if you would be fed!" he added.

These women must be new, I thought. Probably they had come only recently to the wagons, probably trekking overland from some contacted village, perhaps one from as far away as fifty pasangs, a common range for the excursions, the searches and collections of mounted foragers. Most of the women I had seen following the wagons, at any rate, knew enough by now to approach them only bareheaded, as female supplicants, too, to be more pleasing to the men who might possibly be persuaded to feed them, with their hair visible and loose as that of slaves. Similarly, most had already discarded or hidden their veils, even when not begging. They did not even wear them in their own small, foul, often-fireless makeshift camps near the wagons, camps, to be sure, to which men might sometimes come. It had been discovered that a woman who is seen with a veil, even if she has lowered the veil, abjectly and piteously face-stripping herself, is less likely to be fed than one with no veil in evidence. Too, of course, it had been quickly noted that such women, too, tended to be less frequently selected for the pleasure of the drivers. The men with the wagons had not seen fit to permit the women the dignity of veiling. In this, of course, they treated them like slaves. "Please!" cried a woman, thrusting back her hood and tearing away her veil. "Feed me! Please, feed me! The others, too, then almost instantly, hastily, each seeming to hurry to be before the others, some moaning and crying out in misery, unhooded and unveiled themselves.

"That is better, females," laughed the driver.

Many of the women moaned and wept.

They were now, to be sure, I mused, in their predicament and helplessness, even though free women, as the driver had implied, little more then mere females. One could probably not be more a female unless one was a slave.

"Feed us!" they cried piteously to the driver, many of them with their arms outstretched, their hands lifted, their palms opened, crowding and pressing about the back of the wagon. "We beg food!" "We are hungry!" "Please!" "Feed us, please!" "Please!"

I looked at their faces. On the whole they seemed to be simple, plain women, peasant women, and peasant lasses. One or two of them, I thought, might be suitable for the collar.

"Here!" cried the driver, laughing, throwing pieces of bread from a sack to one and then another of the women. The first piece of bread he threw to the woman who had been the first to unhood and face-strip herself, perhaps thereby rewarding her for her intelligence and alacrity. He then threw pieces to certain others of the women, generally to those who were the prettiest and begged the hardest. Sometimes, not unoften, these pieces of bread were torn away from the prettier, more feminine women by their brawnier, huskier, more masculine fellows. Where there are no men, or no true men, to protect them, feminine women will, in a grotesque perversion of nature, be controlled, exploited and dominated by more masculine women, sometimes monsters and mere caricatures of men. Yet even such grosser women, sometimes little more than surrogates for males, can upon occasion, in the hands of a strong uncompromising master, be forced to manifest and fulfil, realizing then for the first time, the depths of their long-denied, long-suppressed womanness. There are two sexes. They are not the same.

"More, more, please!" begged the females.

Then, amusing himself, the driver tossed some bits of bread into the air and watched the desperate, anxious women crowd and bunch under it, pushing and shoving for position, and trying to leap upward, thrusting at one another, to snatch at it.