Barbarian of Gor Chapter Seven

 

How difficult can it be to help a woman escape from a travel Inn, when in actual fact the Innkeeper would allow her to walk free anyway?

 

Not particularly difficult, it has to be said.

 

But I had to make it seem difficult. 

 

“A man has arrived,” said pretty Leda. “I think he is a metal worker.”

 

Of that there was little doubt. I saw him drop a heavy leather hold all containing all manner of tools and implements onto the flagstones of the inner courtyard. He was here to work. 

 

Leda stood before me in the corridor that connected the main room of the Inn to the kitchen. She was barefoot, wore a white tunic with light blue trim, and sported a steel collar about her throat. “Do not be overly concerned,” I reassured her. She was perhaps five feet four inches tall, with wavy light brown hair and a slightly upturned nose that was endearingly cute. Her lips were wide and expressive. Her breasts were beautifully formed and straining within the softness of the rep cloth tunic, where the plunging neckline offered an enticing vision of her bosom. “There are many reasons why a metal worker might call on this Inn at short notice.”

 

I watched as Leda looked furtively around. She was loitering beside me instead of working. A slave might be punished for such laziness. Leda, of course, wasn’t a slave, but she feared the Innkeeper might make her one.

 

“A metal worker brands women.” She flexed the toes of her left foot as she stood there.

 

“That is true.” I felt a curious desire to reach out and touch Leda, my left hand perhaps on her sweetly turned hip, and my right hand cupping her left breast through the rep cloth, but I had to remind myself she was a free woman. I had lived on Gor long enough now to have developed a strong desire for women, far surpassing the lesser urges I had felt on Earth. 

 

“You have a plan?” She stepped closer to me. “A plan to get me past the high walls of the courtyard?”

 

“I do.” I so much wanted to reach out and touch Leda, kiss her, press her to the wall and, lifting the thin hem of her short tunic, take her for my pleasure. Women excite me immeasurably since I was brought to Gor. They have no idea - no idea truly – how desirable they are to men. If they knew, they would probably fear ever stepping onto the street. We want them. And we want them in collars, with a brand on their left thigh. 

 

“You are looking at me,” she said, after a moment’s silence. “I know that look.”

 

“The tunic suits you. It hugs your bosom.” I smiled as I saw her blush and place a soft hand across the valley between her breasts. 

 

“I feel almost as naked as I was last night.”

 

“You were very beautiful last night. You are very beautiful today.”

 

“I…” she hesitated. There was something on her mind and I could guess what that might be. “I can trust you? I mean… can I trust you? Truly?”

 

“You have little choice, it seems, Leda. Who else can you turn to? A metal worker is here.”

 

“The money I paid you. The coin. I can get more, in time.” It was clear she feared the possibility that I might betray my word and, once having taken her from this walled Inn, I might enslave her myself. She was caught between a rock and a hard place, believing firmly that she was doomed to slavery if she remained here, but might face a similar fate if she fled with me. 

 

“You question my word? My honour?” I pretended to mild offence, the way a Gorean man might.

 

“No! I didn’t mean to insult you. But I am scared. I don’t know you. I need to trust you.”

 

“The choice is ultimately yours, pretty Leda. I have taken coin.” I gazed at those luscious breasts again, straining against the thin white fabric of the slave tunic. 

 

“I will… pay you a second time… in another form of coin… if you keep your word.” She swallowed, hard, coming to a decision. 

 

“Another form of coin?”

 

“You… I know that look. You like me.” She swallowed hard on the words again. “You possibly want me. I’m just saying, there is no need for you to enslave me. I will allow you… permit you… to…”

 

“To what, Leda?”

 

“I will permit you to enjoy me, if you keep your word. There is no need for force. I will not resist.”

 

Her face was flushed red now.

 

“You offer me your use? You seek to bargain with your charms?”

 

“I do,” she said, softly. “So that you won’t feel the need to enslave me yourself. Do you understand?”

 

I smiled. She was, it seemed, an intelligent woman, who understood the fragility of her situation. And so she was offering me what she knew I could easily take, outside these walls, in the hope it would be enough to sate my appetite. 

 

“Are you white silk, pretty Leda?”

 

“That is a very intimate question. Certainly not appropriate to a free woman.”

 

“Are you white silk?”

 

“Surely you know the answer? Last night in the kitchen when you….” She recalled my fingers probing for the gold coin. 

 

“I do not think you are white silk.”

 

She nodded, confirming what I already suspected. “I am not ignorant of the touch of a man. I am not some skittish vulo. I can give you what you want.”

 

“Come with me.” I took her hand and led her quickly up the stairs to the first floor where the private rooms lay. 

 

“Where are we going?” Slaves were not permitted upstairs unless they were cleaning the rooms. And while not a slave, herself, she wore a collar and possibly assumed slave rules applied to her. “I want to know what your plan is!”

 

I ignored her question at first, simply choosing instead to lead her to the heavy locked door behind which lay the cubicle room that Laetitia had rented. Then I knocked, before placing the key in the first of the door locks.

 

“Roland?” It was Laetitia’s voice from the other side of the door. 

 

“It is me.” The key turned and I then repeated the action with the second key. “Are you decent?” I asked.

 

There was hesitation in her voice. “I am robed.”

 

“And veiled?” I enquired. I gazed to either side of the corridor. There was no one about but us. 

 

“This is your companion?” enquired Leda. “The woman who sat at your table?”

 

“Yes. Her name is Rhea.” It was the name we’d decided on in advance. Rhea? Are you veiled?” I wasn’t going to open the door while her features were bare. 

 

“A moment, please.” 

 

I imagined her quickly reaching for the simple homespun veils and winding them about her lower face. Unlike the expensive veils of a city woman, Laetitia’s lone veil would be a long length of cheap semi-gauze that when wound several times about the lower face like a scarf, would conceal her features adequately. 

 

“I am veiled,” she said. And so I then opened the door. Laetitia stood in the small space beside her cot bed. She looked every inch the lowly peasant girl in her plain, simple spun garments. 

 

“Inside,” I said to Leda, guiding her shoulder with the palm of my left hand. As soon as she was inside I closed the door firmly behind us all.

 

Leda looked about the bare, plaster board room. “How is it you can afford a private room?” she asked.

 

“I sold what I had when I fled my village. This is my companion, Rhea. Rhea, this is Leda. Despite her collar and tunic, she is a free woman and she requires our aid.”

 

Laetitia had already rehearsed her part, and accordingly she stepped forward to greet Leda, touching her fingers to Leda’s, and offering veiled kisses to the side of Leda’s face. “I have been told of your ordeal, Lady,” said Laetitia, playing her part rather well I thought. “How you have suffered!”

 

“Yes,” said Leda, simply enough. “I have suffered.” She gazed about the room again, before gazing back at me. “And now? What is your plan? Tell me.”

 

“My plan is to walk you through the gates of the courtyard in Rhea’s clothing. You will appear to just be one of the many free women staying at this Inn last night.”

 

“Oh? So simple?”

 

“Simple enough if you have the garments to comprise a disguise, and you have me to hand to ensure no one intervenes. A woman leaving on her own would be suspicious. A woman beside a man, not at all suspicious.”

 

“Yes,” said Leda. She placed a hand to the hem of her tunic skirt and self-consciously tugged at it. By the time she raised her hand back to the clear valley between her breasts, the hem line was already siding back towards its original length. Rep cloth stretches both ways. And yet girls new to a slave tunic always think they can adjust their modesty. 

 

“You will dress in Rhea’s garments, Leda. I have explained matters to her.”

 

“That is kind of you,” Leda said to Laetitia. “You will be rewarded, girl. I promise you that.”

 

I smiled, unseen, as Laetitia curtsied clumsily in front of Leda. It’s what a lowly peasant girl might do before her betters. She was rather good at playing the part, I thought. In fact, Laetitia had been looking forward to being part of the deception. It seemed an exciting ‘lark’ to her – something that might alleviate the boredom of a long journey by road.  

 

“I shall leave you both to it, then. Rhea will remain here and will not open the door to anyone once we leave.”

 

And with that I stepped back outside, closed the door, and stood beside it with my back to the wood. I could imagine that inside the narrow room both girls would be undressing together. I smiled, imagining the awkwardness with which Leda might now speak a few polite courtesies to the ‘peasant girl’ as she received her simple homespun robes. There was no possibility of Laetitia donning the slave tunic, of course. Laetitia would simply have to remain naked until I returned. With the security of the double locked door, that shouldn’t be a problem. Nevertheless I had asked Laetitia whether she was comfortable with being naked in her small room for an ahn or two.

 

“It won’t be a hardship, beloved,” Laetitia had said.

 

“There is no need to call me that in private, Lady.”

 

“Oh.” She smiled and looked to the side, her eyes sparkling mischievously. “And yet an actor rehearses his part, yes?”

 

“True.”

 

“I like calling you beloved. The word sounds nice.”

 

I waited several ehn, for it’s my experience that women are never in a hurry to disrobe, nor to dress themselves. I leaned against the door and thought I heard giggles and whispered snatches of hushed conversation between the girls. Yes, Laetitia was playing her part well, for I didn’t think it was Leda doing the giggling. But who knows. 

 

Then, after fifteen to twenty ehn, I heard a soft knock on the other side of the door. It was Leda. “I am ready,” she said in a soft voice. I opened the door a fraction and then a little more as Leda slipped from the room through the narrow gap I had made. It wouldn’t do for me to catch a glimpse of the Tatrix’s daughter while she was naked. Leda now wore Laetitia’s simple peasant gowns and veil. I heard a quick scuffle as Laetitia climbed onto her cot bed and covered herself with the sheets. There was another giggle, and I began to wonder whether she was actually play-acting, or whether this ridiculous pantomime deception was fun for her. 

 

“Am I convincing?” asked Leda.

 

“You could be any peasant girl fleeing the imminent fall of Corcyrus,” I said, as I gazed at her.

 

“You think Corcyrus will fall?” she asked.

 

“Isn’t that what you want, agent of Argentum?”

 

“It’s complicated,” she said. “Do not judge me. I am a woman.”

 

“And women have little sense of honour, it seems.”

 

“It’s not like that,” said Leda. “We do what we must to survive in these harsh times. Have you never betrayed your codes for sake of your own life or the lives of those you love?”

 

“I have not betrayed my codes for coin,” I said. “There is the difference.” 

 

“Do not judge me. You do not know me.” She adjusted the drape of her veil. “You know nothing of me.”

 

“Are you truly a Lady of Corcyrus?” I asked. “Or a foreign agent claiming to be such a woman?”

 

“Does it matter? Either I am a traitor to my city, or I am a spy. Neither possibilities are tolerated on Gor.” There was no hood to her garment, and so her hair was plain to see. That had been deliberate, for I preferred Laetitia’s now dyed-brown hair to be visible as we travelled, in case people were looking out for a red head. I ran a hand through Leda’s hair and felt her flinch. “What I offered… that is for when you get me to safety, not before.”

 

“You are in a poor position to bargain with me, Lady,” I said.

 

“Perhaps. But you will not taste my lips nor touch my body until you have earned those things.” She seemed defiant, which amused me. Perhaps she was naïve. Perhaps she didn’t understand how truly helpless she might be beyond these courtyard walls, in the countryside, if I chose to take her there. Or perhaps she trusted to my honour. 

 

“You seem to value your charms rather highly,” I said. “There is no shortage of wriggling freshly branded slave flesh during war time. You are not that special.”

 

“And when you taste my lips, and when you feel yourself inside of me, you will understand why I value myself so highly. You will not be disappointed.”

 

“Oh?” I smiled. “You think you will be as delicious as a slave in the furs? Do you wriggle well to a man’s touch?”

 

She seemed displeased with my question. “We are wasting time. Let us leave.”

 

And so we did. And, yes, it was simple enough to walk down the wooden steps, through the corridor, out the door and across the courtyard, with no one seeming to care. The Innkeeper certainly didn’t care. The Lady’s accounts had already been settled, after all.

 

“I am still collared beneath these simple gowns,” said Leda in a whisper as we approached the main gate.

 

“You wish us to go back and perhaps ask the Innkeeper for the key?”

 

“No, of course not. I simply wish to know how you will remove the collar from my throat?”

 

“All in good time, Leda.”

 

“You do have a plan for that? I cannot wear a collar. I cannot.”

 

“And yet you do wear a collar.” I nodded to the broad shouldered man who stood guard by the gate. A stout wooden cudgel lay with arm’s reach of his right hand.  

 

And then moments later we had left the guarded perimeter of the walled Inn and were walking along the road towards a copse of trees in the far distance. It was a beautiful late morning, with a vivid blue sky and intricate traces of white fluffy cloud drifting by. The grass was a deep, lush green and the vegetation thrived the way it does when the air is fresh and unpolluted. Gor is a beautiful and natural world, and I often wonder whether this was how Earth looked before industrialisation. 

 

Leda paced herself to my left hand side. She had put her faith and trust in me, which was either a brave move, or a desperate one. To any passing eye she was a simple peasant girl. Only I knew that she wore a steel collar beneath her garments.

 

“What are you thinking?” she asked as we steered ourselves from the road, towards the distant tree line. “Tell me.”

 

“I’m considering your offer, Leda.”

 

“I see.”

 

“Not many free women would be so bold as to offer themselves the way you did.”

 

“Not many free women have my survival instinct. Over the years I have become a realist. I know what men want, and I know what I am prepared to give, if necessary. I am not unattractive to men.”

 

We reached the edge of the trees. From where we stood the deep copse provided the camouflage I desired. Once we were inside, the road would be a distant memory. 

 

I wasn’t surprised when Leda hesitated upon entering the tree line. “Why are we going in there?”

 

“It is a safe place to hide you until I can fetch Rhea.”

 

She glanced at the road. It was some way distant from where we would hide. No one would pass us by. No one would see us. We would be hidden from view.

 

“It’s a little late to be nervous,” I suggested.

 

“Perhaps.” She turned and touched my arm. “Am I to simply hide? Nothing more?”

 

I smiled. “It was a generous offer, Leda.”

 

“And you want me?” She asked. “Of course you want me. Of course.” 

 

“I don’t know. You are a peculiar woman. I’m not sure I fully understand you.”

 

I led her through the trees and into a small clearing where we were unlikely to be disturbed. The ground here was carpeted in a soft moss. 

 

“So?” she said. She stood in plain view of me. 

 

“And now you undress, Leda.”

 

There was a sharp intake of breath. “You are going to put me to use? But here? Now?”

 

“Undress, Leda.” I gestured with my hand.

 

She stood there and began to strip, deliberately slowly. I thought she would be ashamed, but her gaze held mine as she loosened each bow in turn. I watched as she kicked off her cheap slippers and then began to unthread the simple linen bow ties that held her robes together. She had no under things beneath the gown. Peasant women can rarely afford such things. 

 

And then she stood there, barefoot and naked, amongst the soft moss. Yes, she was a beautiful woman. My eyes were drawn to the smooth surface of the metal collar that was locked about her throat. I experienced a sharp intake of breath. 

 

“Bundle your clothing together and give it to me,” I said as I produced a length of binding fibre from my belt pouch.

 

“I don’t understand? What are you doing?”

 

“I am going to secure you, Leda, so you don’t wander away until I come back with Rhea. The clothes are to be returned to my companion.”

 

“They are my clothes!”

 

“No,” I laughed. “They belong to Rhea.”

 

“Then what am I to wear?”

 

“Did you not bring the slave tunic with you?” No, of course she didn’t have it with her. It was back at the room. I should have checked.

 

“No. Of course not. Why would I?”

 

“It’s your garment.” I saw her back stiffen. I saw her take a step back. 

 

“Please, no. I need gowns.”

 

“We don’t have spare gowns. The tunic will be practical for our travels.”

 

“I thought…” She presented herself to me, rather boldly I thought.

 

“You thought what?”

 

“I thought I was told to strip because you wanted to kiss me, touch me…”

 

I laughed. “You are a beautiful woman, Leda, but I am not driven by my cock. Such things can wait. All in good time.”

 

“Please let me earn the robes,” she said as she stepped closer. “I can please you better than your free companion can. I know that.” I felt her hand on my bare arm. I felt the softness of her body press firmly against mine. I felt the first stirring of arousal on my part.

 

“You are a strange free woman, Leda.”

 

“That is not truly my name,” she said. “It was given to me last night.” She lifted her chin, showing me her lips. They parted, softly, wantonly. I felt her left hand touch and cup my groin, encouraging a vigorous reaction from my body.

 

“Leda, this is not negotiable,” I said.

 

“Kiss me. You may kiss me. Taste what you can have.”

 

I kissed her, and yes, she kissed well. Far better than you might expect a free woman to kiss. But if she thought she could compete with collared slaves, she was in for a rude shock. She had no idea how a slave girl might kiss a man. But still, I was hard from that kiss and my breathing was shallow as she ran her hands over me.

 

And then, suddenly, without warning, she scratched me with her nails. It was a deep scratch across my arm, drawing blood.

 

“Leda!” I was angry. And at first I mistook that long scratch from the nails on her right hand as some sort of forceful play, but as soon as I saw her rapidly  spring back and pace away from me, I understood something was wrong.

 

“Leda?” I took a step forward, and as I did so, the naked, collared girl increased the distance between us.

 

She said nothing, but there was a smile now on her face, and it was then that I knew I was in trouble.

 

“Leda!” I said again, but as I spoke I suddenly felt a dizziness that I struggled to overcome. My sight seemed to wobble and I had to clear my eyes. “Leda?” I couldn’t feel my legs. I gazed down at the ground and saw the grass seeming to flow like water. I saw the grass suddenly rise towards me and then fall back again. I felt dizzy, nauseous.

 

“Leda… what have you…”

 

I was suddenly flat on my face. I had fallen without even being aware of it. I no longer felt a centre of gravity in my body. I tried to get up, but my arms felt like two sponges, flopping in front of me.

 

“Leda…” Now I felt like I was spinning on some sort of slow moving centrifuge. 

 

“I told you that is not my name. Just give in to the drug, Roland,” she said, softly, as she stood there, her hands on her hips, looking down at me. “You really don’t have any choice.”