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Saturday night::::: Gorean Audio Book reading
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Weekly Story
i recently (re)discovered an amazing series of stories on an older Gorean website that seems to be dead. i'm in no way trying to pass off these as my own, but it would be a shame to let them pass into obscurity. i love these stories as they were written when folks had such a love and imagination when it came to Gor, and demonstrates what real slave and Master interaction would be in the harsh world of Gor.If you pass them on, please make sure the original writer gets the credit.
Enjoy!
"The Curiosity of a Kajira"
by sterva(Bg)
The girl who came out of the tavern alcove glowed with unusual radiance, even for a Gorean slave-girl who has been well- used.
Kayla, her name was. She was an Earth girl, a barbarian, like me. Whether Kayla was her Earth name or a slave name her Masters had given her, I did not know. My own barbarian name-- well, I am forbidden to speak my former name. It no longer exists. My Master, Valerus of Ar, a physician, had allowed me no name at all when he first bought me from the slavers. He put his collar about my throat and had me branded and called me simply ‘girl' or ‘slave' for several months. It was agony for a proud Earth girl whose name had been not unknown in her own world. It taught me that I was not a celebrity on Gor. I was a slave.
Eventually, quite casually, he named me Mindar, after a small bird of the Gorean rain forests. He told me that the bird pecked in the bark of flower trees for succulent grubs and bugs, just as I pecked endlessly at the world of Gor for juicy bits of knowledge. I could not help myself. I had always hungered to know things. He did not mean the name entirely as a compliment, and he sometimes quoted an old Gorean saying to me: curiosity is not becoming in a kajira.
Then again, sometimes he made use of the things I learned.
When he called me by name at all, he usually called me Minda. When he was displeased he called me Mindar. When he was very displeased he whipped me.
I adored my Master. I desired him. Sometimes I hated him, and hated myself for being so utterly and completely his slave.
Kayla had gone into the alcove with Pyrrhus, a fat merchant with flat cold eyes like silver tarsks. She had whispered to me, when we were both in the kitchen drawing bowls of paga for our Masters, that she felt her belly burning for Sacrator, a much younger, much more handsome merchant who was part of Pyrrhus's rather boisterous party that night. Sacrator had been ignoring her, she murmured, but she continued to hope. She mimicked the winding of talender flowers into her hair for Master Sacrator, and laughed. Of course she had no real talender flowers. She was naked but for her tavern collar. Her hands were empty but for the bowls of paga that she carried.
Kayla had drooped a bit when it was Pyrrhus who ordered her to the alcove. But she had no choice. She went. My own Master caught her arm and kissed her thoroughly as she walked past, laughing at her and chiding her for her long face. The men around him cheered him on. Kayla smiled at his words, but to me it seemed to be a rather stiff and forced smile.
And now she had come out of the alcove, her eyes luminous, her mouth soft, every line of her body liquid with delight. I watched her, feeling my own body shudder suddenly with helpless need. My Master was talking to one of his friends, sipping his paga, ignoring me as I knelt beside him. But perhaps he felt the frisson of desire that passed through me, because his hand dropped to the back of my neck, gripped my collar casually.
You are property, the gesture said. Nothing more. Writhe with your need, slave girl, and be silent. Perhaps I will use you later.
I hated him. I wanted him desperately.
"Kayla."
It was Pyrrhus, come out of the alcove behind the radiant tavern slave. He did not look as happy as she did, which was odd. He looked rather tense. My mindar-curious mind pecked at the fact that Gorean men did not usually come out of tavern alcoves looking tense.
"Paga for everyone," Pyrrhus said. "Begin with my old friend Sacrator."
Kayla said nothing, but immediately went over to where Sacrator was lounging cross-legged on a pile of furs. She knelt before him. How very beautiful she was, a naked collared girl, her skin golden in the torchlight, her open empty palms upturned to the Master before her. Her thighs were parted so that nothing would be concealed from him, her shoulders pressed back to lift her deliciously-shaped breasts for his enjoyment. Her rich dark hair tumbled down her back in a luxuriant profusion of curls.
She bent to her task as Pyrrhus had commanded her, still unspeaking. She was trembling. She opened a bota of paga that had been thrust under a fur to keep warm, a half-used bota of paga that Pyrrhus and Sacrator and their merchant friends had already drunk from. She filled the bowl. She touched it to her belly, to her heart, in token of her desire and devotion. Then she lifted it to her lips. Her hair fell forward, hiding her face. She kissed the rim of the bowl with slow, lingering care. I saw her throat ripple a little. I frowned. In this tavern, slaves were not permitted to taste paga from the bowls they served. I myself had never tasted paga at all.
Kayla offered up the bowl. Her lips were parted now, for the first time
since she had come out of the alcove. They were wet, glistening. She was smiling.
"A most loving and hot-bellied slut serves you paga, Master Sacrator," she murmured. Her Gorean was still Earth-accented, her voice sweet and husky. "Kayla prays that the drink will please you, and that her service will find favor in your eyes."
Sacrator grinned. He had a fine white smile, open and friendly. He took the bowl and swilled down the paga without stopping for breath. "It pleases me indeed," he said. "My thanks, Pyrrhus, old friend. Perhaps I will see if I can put the same look on the slut's face that you just--"
Suddenly he stopped. His face twisted. His back arched, his legs thrusting forward in spasms. He screamed like a woman and began to convulse.
Kayla started back. I could see her face plainly in the light of the torches. She was stunned. She was horrified. Her eyes slewed to one side like a terrified animal's. Then her face changed, her mouth worked, and she doubled over on the tiled floor.
My Master was up and moving, with that deceptive unhurried- looking quickness that physicians use in an emergency, so as not to cause unnecessary panic. But even so he was too late. I could see it in his face. By the time he reached Sacrator's side, Sacrator was dead.
Kayla twitched for a moment longer, her fingernails making a dreadful noise as she scrabbled at the tiles in agony. Then she too lay still.
* * *
"The paga," my Master said, in his cool clipped voice, "was poisoned."
A hostile little murmur ran through the tavern. The laws of Gor are not like the laws of Earth. There is an act called "murder," which does have legal consequences. But not all killings on Gor are considered murder. Slaves, for example, can be killed by free persons with absolute impunity. Free men can kill each other quite legally over points of honor, if the fight is open and fair. Poison, however, was a coward's weapon. A woman's weapon. To give a free man poison was most definitely murder.
Sacrator's body had been decently composed and covered and borne away. The tavern kettle slaves had started to drag Kayla away to the offal heap, but my Master had stopped them. I was not sure why. My Master was interested in poisons, and perhaps he intended to dissect the carcass later on.
No one else had been allowed to leave. Guardsmen of the city were stationed at the doors, and one of the chief guardsmen, an investigator into irregular matters, was standing beside my Master, nodding as my Master spoke.
I was kneeling next to the stone wall just inside the door, my leash doubled short and clipped to one of the slave rings set into the stone. My feelings continued to swing fiercely, intractably from desiring him to hating him and back again. I could have helped him, because of what I had seen. But he leashed me to a ring like an animal and turned away. I knelt quietly, the tiles of the floor cool and hard under me, raging in my heart. I had felt his whip, and I knew better than to rage in any other way.
Lycus, the tavern keeper, was raging quite openly. Raging, and sweating profusely with fear. One paga slave more or less meant nothing, of course. But Sacrator had been a rich and well- connected merchant, popular and influential among his caste brothers. For him to die from drinking poisoned paga in Lycus's tavern was tantamount to a death sentence for Lycus himself. It would certainly be a death sentence for his thriving tavern. Who would patronize a paga den where men convulsed and died after drinking the paga?
"My paga is the best in Ar," Lycus said. "And they all drank from the same bota, Sacrator and Pyrrhus and Tarchon and the rest."
My Master smiled, a sardonic quirk of his mouth that I knew very well. It meant you have not been listening to me, you fool. "I have drunk your paga myself," he said. "And ‘the best in Ar' is not necessarily how I would describe it. I am not saying that there is anything wrong with your paga, Lycus. I am saying that the paga Sacrator drank was poisoned. Poisoned with an extremely concentrated extract of kanda root. The symptoms are unmistakable."
"But how?" Lycus was wringing his hands. "And how did the slut die, then? My tavern slaves know they will be thrown to the sleen if they drink from a man's bowl. No man wants a beast's leavings."
I clenched my teeth, feeling the weight of the collar about my throat, the tautness of my leash, feeling the hot blood mounting up under my skin. A beast's leavings. I was not a beast. And yet I was. Under the touch of my Master I became a beast, gasping and shuddering and begging helplessly. Under the touch of my Master I knew intensities of sheer physical pleasure that wiped out everything but animal need.
A beast's leavings.
But I had never felt such pleasure on Earth.
I remembered seeing Kayla's long slender throat ripple. She had drunk from the bowl. Even though she knew her Master would throw her to the sleen for doing it, she had dared. It had brought her nothing but an agonizing, ignominious death, twitching and scrabbling on the tiles. But she had dared.
Why?
"That is the question, Valerus," the chief guardsman said. "How? Did someone put the poison in the bowl while Sacrator's back was turned?"
"No, no," spoke up one of the other merchants who had been in the party of Pyrrhus and Sacrator. "I was talking to him. He never put the bowl down until he gave it to the slut to refill."
"It was in the bota," Pyrrhus said. His voice was as fat and ponderous as he himself was. "It had to be. Perhaps it had settled to the bottom. Unfortunately the bota is empty, so we will never know."
"The extract of kanda root," said my Master coolly, "does not settle. Particularly in the concentration that would be required to effect such quick deaths. But here, Titus--" He smiled again, this time at the chief guardsman. "Let us clear up this point, at least. I will prove one way or the other, once and for all, whether the paga in the bota was poisoned."
He walked towards me, and a moment before he unfastened my leash from the slave ring I knew what he intended to do. I stared at him, my breath taken away. He looked at me and jerked on the leash.
"Come, Mindar," he said.
I rose, my legs like water, and followed him. I had no choice. My collar was steel and the leash was heavy leather. He was my Master.
I loved him. I hated him. I belonged to him. Once in the night I had sobbed that I was willing to die for him. Now it appeared as if I was going to be called upon to make good what I had said.
"Take the bota," he said to me. "Rinse it with clean water, and pour the rinsings into a clean bowl."
One of the tavern slaves crept up and placed a bowl and a pitcher of water on the low table next to the bota. I sank to my knees, not so much from obeisance but simply because I could no longer stand. I opened the bota, my hands shaking with horror, and tried to pour the water into it. Most of the water slopped onto the floor. Enough went into the bota. I swirled the water in the bota and poured it into the bowl.
The concentrated extract of kanda root was deadly. If the paga in the bota had been poisoned, even the rinsings from the empty bota would leave me writhing and scratching on the tiles. Choking. Dying. Dead.
"Drink it," he said.
I thought my heart would stop. I looked up at him. His clear gray-green eyes were inscrutable.
I closed my eyes. The world seemed to stop.
I lifted the bowl and drank.
I could feel the water burning in my throat, in my stomach. I choked a
little, coughing a mouthful back into the bowl before I was able to drink it all.
On Earth, the bota would have been sent away to a laboratory for tests, and lawyers would have argued endlessly about whether the tests were done correctly, or whether the bota itself was admissible as evidence. I knew this, because on Earth I had been an investigative reporter, one of the best, pecking here and there for juicy facts, commanding rich contracts and prime-time television segments. Being curious had been my profession, and I had been very good at it. I had delved deep into many murders, and I knew how evidence was tested.
Here on Gor, things were much simpler.
If I died, the paga in the bota had been poisoned. If I lived, it had not.
I was only a slave.
I waited. Was the faint bitter taste in my mouth the normal taste of paga, or was it the taste of paga combined with the deadly kanda root?
The bowl was empty. I waited.
After a moment my Master smiled. He reached out and rested one hand on my head, stroking my hair gently, for all the world like a caress. He was pleased. I was alive. I was breathing and my heart was beating and my Master was pleased with me. I thought I would faint with joy.
"So you see, Titus," my Master said to the chief guardsman, "the paga in the bota was not poisoned."
"The girl put it in the bowl, then," one of the merchants said.
"Where would a slut get such a deadly poison?" Pyrrhus objected. "And how could she have concealed it? I say it was in the bota, regardless of Valerus's tricks." He glowered at my Master. "Lycus should be impaled for his carelessness."
The tavern keeper paled. "My paga is good," he insisted. "And my slaves
are well-trained. If the slut put poison in the bowl, she was bribed by someone else."
"A dozen people were watching her," Pyrrhus said. "There is no way she could have put anything into the bowl."
All of a sudden I knew that she could have, and I knew how. My throat closing with fear, I had coughed some water back into my own bowl before draining it. Back into the bowl.
Kayla's throat, rippling in the torchlight. Her lips glistening.
She had not spoken a word, from the moment she came out of the alcove until after she had kissed the rim of the bowl.
She had not sipped from the bowl. She had spit something into the bowl. She had had the poison in her mouth. Although in such concentration it was deadly enough that simply holding it in her mouth would have killed her in the time it had taken her to walk from the alcove to Sacrator's furs. Perhaps in a--
"Master," I said suddenly. "May I speak?"
He looked down at me. He frowned. My heart sank.
But he had named me Mindar. He knew that I learned things, winkled things out, put odd facts together. Even though curiosity was not becoming to a kajira on Gor, sometimes my Master made use of the things I learned.
"Whisper to me," he said.
I came to my feet. He was tall, and I had to stand on tiptoe to put my lips beside his ear. I could feel the heat of his body, and the heat in my belly, simmering. I desperately wanted to please him.
"I beg you, my Master," I said, "to look in her mouth."
My Master understood immediately. He nodded me curtly back to my knees, then made a gesture to the kettle slaves. They dragged Kayla's carcass to the center of the room. My Master crouched down beside it, jerking the lolling head back by its glorious mane of hair, pinching the jaw open.
With one finger he withdrew a film of limp, almost transparent membranous material. No one would ever have noticed it, not in a dead slave's mouth, not unless they had been particularly looking for it. My
Master glanced up at me, a single look. It said, good girl, Minda
"This is how she managed to keep the poison in her mouth," he said. "It was sealed inside this bit of--" He looked at the stuff fastidiously. "--tarsk's intestine, I would say. Perhaps a verr. In any case, all she had to do was bite down on it when she kissed the rim of the bowl, and let the liquid inside run into the paga."
Everyone turned and looked at Pyrrhus.
"I know nothing about it," he said. "I did not use her mouth. And I certainly do not converse with slaves. She could have had it in her mouth all night. Anyone could have given it to her. You, Tarchon."
Tarchon blanched. He was one of the other merchants, and he was known to have wanted spaces in the market stalls of Ar that Sacrator had tied up
with long leases. Like the mindar bird, I pecked all kinds of interesting facts out of the slaves I met and whispered with.
"Not I," Tarchon said. "We may have had our differences, but Sacrator was my friend."
"Perhaps someone who was not even here," Pyrrhus said. "There's no telling how long the slut had that membrane of poison in her mouth."
"It is rather pointless to try to lay blame on someone else, Pyrrhus," my Master said calmly. "When it was you who murdered Sacrator."
"I!" The injured innocence was so thick in Pyrrhus's voice that a kailla could barely have waded through it. "Why would I murder my old friend?"
I knew then that he was guilty.
And I knew why. Slaves' whispers had spoken of trade routes down through Turia, routes that Sacrator had commanded and that Pyrrhus wanted. Wanted badly.
What I did not know was how my Master intended to prove his words.
I looked at him. He had straightened to his full height. He smiled, and I realized that slaves were not the only ones who whispered.
"Because you wanted his Turian trade routes," my Master said. When he wanted to, he could make his voice as cold and cutting as one of his surgeon's scalpels. "And because you are the only one who could have given her the membrane of poison to use."
"Don't be ridiculous, Valerus," Pyrrhus said. There was a sneering note in his voice. "I tell you, she could have had it in her mouth all night. I challenge you to prove otherwise."
"What did you tell her?" my Master said. "That it was some sort of aphrodisiac? That it would make Sacrator desire her above all others? The foolish slut. Everyone in the tavern could see that she had been burning for him all night. And when she came out of that alcove, she looked as if she had been given the one thing she desired more than anything else in the world."
The one thing she desired...
Kayla's radiant face. That liquid way she walked, every line of her body exuding sinuous, sensuous desire. Just looking at her had made me shudder with a slavegirl's need, from where I had been kneeling at my Master's side.
I knew my Master was right. I could feel it. Kayla had thought she was
going to her heart's desire. Instead she had gone to her death.
"If you can prove what you say," Titus the chief guardsman said, "I suggest that you do it, Valerus. If not, we will begin to question the slaves."
I held my breath. Slaves were questioned under torture on Gor.
"Very well," my Master said. "As the slut was walking to the alcove, she had a damned long face about it. I prefer the sluts around me to smile. Do I not, Minda?"
The answer burst upon me. I grinned. I could not help myself.
"Yes, Master," I said.
My Master grinned back at me. He had a devastating smile when he chose
to use it. A single smile of my Master's made me more fully his slave than a hundred strokes of his whip. I felt hot wetness blooming deep inside my body.
"Perhaps the rest of you will remember that I took hold of the slut," he went on. His voice was soft but a little crackling, like fur with an electric charge to it from being stroked in the wrong direction. I had learned that when my Master spoke in the crackling-fur voice, he was amused.
"I took hold of her, " he said again, "not two steps away from the alcove. And I kissed her. In front of a dozen men, who cheered me on."
All of a sudden everyone in the room seemed to stop breathing. Pyrrhus stood, clenching and unclenching his fists.
"When I kiss a slave," my Master said, "I am not backward about it. And I assure you, Pyrrhus, you could have used that slut's mouth for any purpose you chose. Including conversation. She had no membrane full of poison concealed there, before she entered the alcove."
Pyrrhus lunged for my Master. Two of the guardsmen caught him just in time. It would not have mattered if they had not. My Master is interested in steel, and how it is forged. He has to be, of course, as he is a surgeon, and uses only the finest scalpels. But he collects more exotic edged weapons simply for pleasure. And the moment Pyrrhus moved, I had seen a glint of silver leap from my Master's boot into his hand.
"You rotting piece of river garbage," Pyrrhus panted. "Those trade routes should have been mine. You excrement of a she-urt. You pestilential lump of dung of a three-toed quala. You impotent son of a--"
He would have gone on in the same vein, but my Master started to laugh aloud. The guards dragged him away.
"I thank you, Valerus," the chief guardsman said. "You have a flair for getting at the truth of things, it seems."
"I also have a clever slut," my Master said. His voice was entirely neutral and it was impossible to tell if he was pleased or not. "It was an ingenious plot, my friend. What better place to poison a man than in a crowded paga tavern, where a dozen men are drinking from a dozen different botas? With the slave dead, too, there would have been no one to speak against him."
"A lucky thing," Titus said with a grin, "that you dislike slaves with long faces."
"Indeed," my Master said. "Well, I mmust be off. Heel, Minda."
I rose and went to stand in the heel position, at my Master's left and a little behind him. With my eyes lowered I offered him the strap of my leash. He took it casually, without even looking at me.
Suddenly I had to know the truth about the rinsings from the bota, even if it earned me a whipping. Even if he threw me to the sleens. I had to know.
"Master," I burst out passionately. "Please. I beg you for permission to speak."
The silence stretched. I held my breath. At last he said, "Speak."
I looked up. I could not stop myself. My heart felt as if it would burst.
"Did you know," I cried, "when you commanded me to drink the water-- Oh, Master, did you know it was not-- Were you sure that the bota had not been poisoned?"
Titus and the rest of them laughed. My Master smiled. He tugged on the leash and I felt my collar tighten.
"Curiosity," my Master said, "is not becoming in a kajira."
