Dancer of Gor

I sat on the long, heavy, wooden platform, raised about a foot from the dirt, one of several in this exposition area, in this annex to the sales barn, naked, my feet tucked back, near my left thigh, my ankles crossed, my left hand on my left ankle, my weight muchly on the palm of my right hand, on the bench. A chain was on my neck, an individual chain. It was about five feet long. It ran from a ring set in the platform to my collar. On the upper portion of my left breast something was written, inscribed there with a grease pencil. I had heard that it was the number "89." I could not read it. It was my lot number.

"Out, out, hurry!" had said the man this morning, pounding with his pointed stick on the linked, metal mesh of the cage" s roof. We had mostly backed out, for the cages were narrow, and then remained there, in the dirt, in the gray light of the early morning, on all fours. During the morning and afternoon of the day before, when we had first arrived in Market of Semris, after we were caged, other wagons had arrived, and unloaded their own fair occupants, they, too, in short order, to be caged. Still later that afternoon some groups of small, fat, grunting, bristly, brindled, shaggy-maned, hoofed, flat-snouted, rooting animals had been herded in, also with pointed sticks, and they, too, had been guided into identical cages. We had looked out of our cage, our fingers hooked in the mesh, to other cages, some of them with girls in them, some with the fat, flat-snouted, grunting, short-legged, brindled quadrupeds.

"Those are tarsks," said one of the Gorean girls.

I nodded.

They were not to be sold that night, however, I had gathered. We had learned that that night tarsks were not to be sold, not «four-legged» tarsks, at any rate. I recalled the other footprints we had seen in the dirt, left over, probably, from the day before, those smaller, lovelier, daintier, high-arched prints, doubtless those of girls. I did not know where they were. I would later learn that they were in the exposition area, on the platforms, where we, the next day, would find ourselves. The day in the cage had been warm, and the night, too, had not been unpleasant, but, toward morning, it had cool. Happily it had not rained. I shivered. I was glad to be out of the cage, moving now, on my hands and knees, in the dirt, across the courtyard. I had not yet been given clothing on this planet. We had had, however, in the house where I had been trained, blankets in our kennels.

"Stop," had said our herder, he with the stick. "Wait."

We had come to a long, narrow, wooden, calked, semicircular tanklike container, about two feet wide and ten feet long, half buried in the dirt, its forward edge reached by a low ramp. It was filled with a dark fluid. Here we had to wait while a group of fifteen tarsks, one by one, herded up the ramp, plunged into the fluid and swam to the other side where, scrambling out of the container, they shook themselves, and hastened down the descent ramp.

"Now you two-legged tarsks," said the man, waving toward the container with his stick.

We shuddered. None of us, I am sure, cared to enter that dark fluid.

"Do not swallow the fluid," he said.

We looked at one another, from our hands and knees. We would be sure not to do so. We needed no encouragement in the matter. Clearly it would not be simple water.

"You, first, two-legged tarsk," he said to Ila.

"Yes, Master!" she said, hastening to obey, hurrying up the ramp on all fours and plunging into the dark fluid. In an instant she was in the center of the container. A little past that point, one of the men, reaching over the side of the structure, thrust her head under the fluid. Then, in a moment, she was scrambling out of the container.

"Stay on your feet," she was told.