Free Mercenaries of Gor by John Norman

you," he said.
    "Yes," said Genserix.
    "Yes," said Sorath.
    "Yes," said the others.
    "Thank you," I said. "I am grateful for your welcome. I (pg. 59) thank you, too, for the food and drink I have received here, for the heat and light of your fire, and for your fellowship. I thank you for your hospitality. It is worthy of the best things I have heard of Alars. I would now like, if I may, in my own way, and of my own free will, as it will now be clearly understood, to do something for you, something that will help, in a small way, to express my appreciation."
    Genserix and his warriors looked at one another, puzzled.
    I turned to Feiqa. "Strip," I said.
    "Master?" she asked.
    "Must a command be repeated?" I inquired.
    "No, Master!" she cried. In an instant she was bared.
    "Stand," I said. "Lift your arms over your head." Instantly she complied. She was then very beautiful, standing thusly in the light of the fire, before the barbaric warriors of Genserix, in the Alar camp.
    "Such women," I said, "may be purchased in the cities." There were appreciative murmurs as the men drank in the fire-illuminated beauty of the naked slave.
    "Dance," I told Feiqa.
    "I do not know how to dance, Master," she moaned.
    "In every female there is a dancer," I said.
    "Master," she protested.
    "I know you are not trained," I said.
    "Master," she said.
    "There are many forms of dance," I said. "Music is not even necessary. It need not even be more than beautiful movement. Move before the men, and about them, Move as seductively and beautifully as you can, and as a slave, saying, crawling, kneeling, rolling, supine, prone, begging, pleading, piteous, caressing, kissing, licking, rubbing against them."
    "Do I have a choice, Master?" she asked.
    "No," I said, "absolutely not."
    "Yes, Master," she said.
    "Would you prefer your pretty flesh to be lashed from your bones?" I asked.
    "No, Master!" she said.
    "And as the evening progresses, and as men might desire you," I said, "you will please them, and fully."
    (pg. 60) "Yes, Master," she said.
    "You are a slave, an absolute and total slave," I reminded her.
    "Yes, Master," she said.
    One of the fellows, then, began to sing, "Hei, Hei," and clap his hands.
    Feiqa danced.
    The men cried out with pleasure, many of them joining in the song, and keeping time with their hands. I was incredibly proud of her. How joyful it is to own females and have absolute power over them! Seldom, indeed, I imagined, did the rude herders of the Alars have such a vision of imbonded loveliness in their camp, and in their arms. Such delicious females were not allowed in their camps, I gathered. The free women did not permit them. They probably had them hidden in wagons, until they could be sold off, or killed. How beautiful Feiqa was! What incredible power she exercised, though only a helpless slave, over men! How she pleased them and made them scream with pleasure! How incredibly basic, how fundamental, how real she was! I then felt a sudden, poignant sorrow for the women of Earth. How different Feiqa was from them. How far removed delicious, exquisite Feiqa was from the motivated artifices, the lies and fabrications, the propaganda, the demeaning, sterile, unsatisfying, reductive, negative superficialities of antibiological roles, the prescriptions of an unnatural and pathological politics, the manipulative instrumentations of monsters and freaks. I wondered how many of the women of Earth wished they might find themselves in a collar, dancing naked in the firelight before warriors in an Alar camp.
    "Disgusting! Disgusting!" cried the free woman, Boabissia, in her leather and furs, having returned to the fire, and she rushed forward, a stout, thick, short, supple, single-bladed quirtlike whip in her hand. She began to lash Feiqa, who fell to her knees, howling with misery, a whipped slave. "We do not allow such as you in an Alar camp!" cried the free woman. Feiqa put her head down. Again the lash fell on her. I leaped to the free