Priest-Kings of Gor - selected highlights.

The Gorean woman, for reasons that are not altogether clear to me, considering the culture, rejoices in being a woman. She is often an exciting, magnificent, glorious creature, outspoken, talkative, vital, active, spirited. On the whole I find her more joyful than many of her earth-inhabiting sisters who, theoretically at least, enjoy a more lofty status, although it is surely true that on my old world I have met several women with something of the Gorean zest for acknowledging the radiant truth of their sex, the gifts of joy, grace and beauty, tenderness, and fathoms of love that we poor men, I suspect, may sometimes and tragically fail to understand, to comprehend.

Yet with all due respect and regard for their most astounding and marvellous sex, I suspect that, perhaps partly because of my Gorean training, it is true that a touch of the slave ring is occasionally beneficial.

When a master wishes to make use of a slave girl he tells her to light the lamp of love which she obediently does, placing it in the window of his chamber that they may not be disturbed. Then with his own hand he throws upon the stone floor of his chamber luxurious love furs, perhaps from the larl itself, and commands her to them.

The words were spoken very softly, very slowly, haltingly, painfully, and it must have cost the proud girl of Treve much to speak them. "I have dreamed," she said, "since first I met you, Tarl Cabot, of wearing - your collar and your chains. I have dreamed since first I met you of sleeping beneath the slave ring - chained at the foot of your couch."

It seemed to me incomprehensible what she had said.

"I do not understand," I said.

She shook her head sadly. "It means nothing," she said.

My hand fixed itself in her hair and gently turned her face up to mine.

"-Master?" she asked.

My stern gaze demanded an answer.

She smiled, my hand in her hair. Her eyes were moist. "It means only," she said, "that I am your slave girl - forever."

I released her head and she dropped it again.

To my surprise I saw her lips gently kiss the cruel leather thong which so tightly bound her wrists.

She looked up. "It means, Tarl Cabot," she said, her eyes wet with tears, "that I love you."

I untied her wrists and kissed her.

Then to my astonishment she smiled up at me. "It is good to belong to you, Tarl Cabot," she said. "I love belonging to you."

"I don't understand," I said.

"I am a woman," she said, "and you are a man, and stronger than I and I am yours and this you knew and now I have learned it too."

I was puzzled.

Vika dropped her head. "Every woman in her heart," said Vika, "wants to wear the chains of a man."

"All else has failed!" cried the Initiate, weaving back and forth, his hands in the air. Then he began to mumble prayers very quickly in archaic Gorean, a language in which the Initiates converse among themselves and conduct their various ceremonies. At the end of this long but speedily delivered prayer, refrains to which were rapidly furnished by the Initiates massed about him, he cried, "Oh Priest-Kings, let this our last sacrifice turn aside your wrath. Let this sacrifice please your nostrils and now consent to hear our pleas! It is offered by Om, Chief among the High Initiates of Gor!"