Free Beasts of Gor by John Norman Page A

he said.
    The man groaned.
    I grinned, and left the vicinity of the tables. I would have preferred to have had better odds, but I had managed to place my bet before they had more than doubled against poor Centius of Cos. I stood now to win a hundred golden tans. I was in a good mood.
    I turned my steps toward the main market. I would look at the goods on the long wooden platforms. Perhaps I would buy a girl for the night and sell her in the morning.
    In a few minutes I saw the silken summit of the gigantic sales pavilion, its pennons fluttering, its blue and yellow silk billowing in the wind.
    I saw male slaves thrusting a cart filled with quarry stones. It left deep tracks in the rain-softened earth.
    I smelled verr, closed in shallow pens, more than a pasang away. The air was clear and sparkling.
    I came to the great sales pavilion, but it was now roped off and quiet. There was much activity, and bustle, however, among the platforms. Here and there slaves were being thrown food.
    I mingled with the crowds among the platforms. There are hundreds of such platforms, long, raised about a foot from the ground, far more than one could easily examine in a day’s browsing. They are rented to individual slavers, who, reserving them before the fairs, would rent one or more, or several, depending on their riches and the numbers of their stock. Small signs fixed on the platforms identify the flesh merchant, such as ‘These are the girls of Sorb of Turia’ or ‘These slaves are owned by Tenalion of Ar’.
    I penetrated more deeply among the platforms. A girl, kneeling and naked, heavily chained, extended her hands to me. “Buy me, Master!” she begged. Then I had passed her and she was behind me. I saw two girls standing, back to back, the left wrist of each chained to the right wrist of the other. “Handsome master, consider me!” cried a girl as I passed her. Most of the girls knelt or sat on the platforms. All were secured in some fashion.
    “Scandalous,” said a free woman, to another free woman, who was passing near me.
    “Yes,” said the other free woman.
    “Candies! Candies!” called a hawker of sweets near me in the crowd. “Candies of Ar!”
    “Buy this candy of Ar, Master!” laughed a chained girl to me. I roughly fondled her head, and she seized my wrist suddenly in her chained hands and desperately began to press kisses upon it. “Please,” she wept. “Please!” “No,” I said. I pulled my wrist away and continued on. She sobbed, and knelt back in her chains.
    “I will make you a superb love slave,” called another girl to me. I did not respond to her.
    On a rounded wooden block a naked slave girl knelt, her wrists braceleted behind her. Her head was back. One of the physicians was cleaning her teeth.
    By another platform a slaver’s man was moving along the platform. He carried a large, handled copper tureen filled with a watery soup. The slaver’s beauties, chained together by the neck, knelt at the edge of the platform. Each dipped her cupped hands twice into the tureen, and lifted them, drinking and feeding, to her mouth. They then licked and sucked their fingers and wiped their hands on their bodies.
    Sales take place at night in the pavillion, from a sawdust-strewn block, under the light of torches, but girls may also be sold directly from the platforms. Indeed, many girls are sold from the platforms. Given the number of girls at the fair, and the fact that new ones are constantly being brought to the platforms, it is impractical to hope to market them all from the block. It is just not feasible. At the end of every fair there are always some hundreds of girls left unsold. These are usually sold in groups at wholesale prices In sales restricted to professional slavers, who will transport them to other markets, to dispose of them there.
    “Do you think you could make me kneel to you?” asked a girl sitting on a platform, with chained neck and ankles, her knees drawn up, chewing on a larma