There were tears in my eyes. I pulled futilely against the thongs on my wrists. You are very pretty, as a slave," he said, regarding me, musingly, his hands on my ankles. He moved my ankles, tight in his grip, slowly, widely apart. I could not prevent this. Then angrily, he closed them. "No," be said. "It would be too long much like her." Then, with a loop of thong, he crossed my ankles and tied them together. I could not rise to my feet now. He then looped a thong from my ankles to a slave ring near the foot of the dais. I could not now even squirm from my place. "Doubtless she will be naked in the sack," he muttered to himself, "as naked as a slave. The in-human beasts will have done that to her.' I must try not to look at her more than is necessary.".

He then, quickly, rose from my side and went to the side of the room. He loosed the rope there, that rope going up to a ring in the ceiling, and then down to the sack.

I fought frenziedly to free myself. I could not do so.

Hand by hand, he lowered the golden sack to the tiles. He then opened it and drew forth from it the vulnerable, quivering body of a naked woman. She looked wildly at him. She was bound head and foot. She was gagged.

"They have put you in a collar!" he said. "How dare they have done this!" She struggled to kneel to him. I do not even know if he, in his agitation, realized this. The collar, of course, was the collar of Hassan. He had put it on her in Ar, and had apparently never removed it.

"No!" cried Ligurious. "The beasts! The beastsl They have put your fair thigh under the iron!"

I recalled that Hassan, in Ar, had informed her that the' would make a stop first, before proceeding to his lodging That stop, I now realized, must have been the shop of metal worker.

There the slave mark would have been burned into her thigh. It would already be on her, thus, when shi was carried over his threshold, naked and on his shoulder, a slave.

The hands of Ligurbious fumbled at the cords on he ankles, and then on her hands. He was sweating. She knelt frightened, her back to him.

"What have they done to you!" he cried. "What have they done to you!" She knelt with her back to him, her head down, frightened.

Could he not see what they had done to her?

She was not the same woman he had known. He had known a cold, supercilious, arrogant woman, one who had been petulant and harsh, one who had been cruel, severe an~ demanding, an imperious and haughty slut. This, now, was not she. There were many differences. For example, she knelt now rather than stood, and she was now naked, rather than regally robed and bedecked. Too, of course, on her neck, now there was a locked, close-fitting, steel slave collar, and on the thigh, of course, might be found a certain, meaningful mark one apprising all who might find it of interest of her status that it was bond.

Too, for those who might, find such thing interesting, it might have been noted that her master, Hassan apparently had her on a careful diet and exercise program Her body was now vital and healthy, and excitingly curved far beyond anything that one commonly expects in a free woman.

But all of these things, in their way, were perhaps rather trivial or external. The most important difference about her how were internal differences, deep, profound differences, differences which manifested themselves beautifully and unmistakably in such things as appearance, carriage, attitude and behavior. These differences were doubtless consequences of having been helplessly in the hands of Hassan, the Slave Hunter. These were the major differences in her. She was now soft and vulnerable; she was now extremely feminine; she was now informed and mastered; she was now, in the thousand ways in which this can be true of a woman, slave.

Ligurious tore the gag from her.

"Master," she sobbed.

"You know me," he said. "I am Ligurious!"

"Yes, Master," she said.

"Do not call me "Master,'" he said, his voice throaty with emotion. I saw that he was only too eager to hear this word from her. He was fighting himself. But even this innocent title, doing little more than recognizing the place of his maleness in the order of primate nature, and surely a suitable expression on the lips of a female slave, such as she now was, alarmed him. Too long bad he idolized this woman. He was not yet ready to see that she had become real; it seemed he desperately wished to keep her as some remote, cherished illusion. On the other hand, there was a painful ambiguity in his relationship to her, probably one that she had once fully exploited.

This had been evident in his attitudes toward me. He had, at various times, I had understood, seriously considered subjecting me to his pleasure and, rather clearly, I think, in the modality of the uncompromising master. In this, he had, I think clearly evidenced his desire to use her in the same fashion. He had wished to use me as a proxy for his longed-for domination of her. Our resemblances, however, had apparently been too close. Each time he had refrained from doing so. I do not think he truly desired me, or at least not other than as a man might casually desire a girl he sees in a paga tavern or, say, one of the girls he might notice chained in a row on their mats on a side street, but he did desire her. Ligurious was truly a master; he had proved this with other women; similarly, in most circumstances, had he so much as snapped his fingers at me, I would have thrown my legs apart for him; this was not the modality though, for whatever reason, in which he related to this other woman; he seemed to see her as some frosty ideal of perfection, as something finer than and different from all other women, as something of which he might scarcely be worthy, as something to which he should perhaps dare not aspire, as something almost untouchable and abstract. In his mind he condemned her to perfection; in this fashion he kept her from being a woman. Hassan, of course, did not see her in this fashion. In his arms she would not find herself cheated of herself. This is not all that unusual, incidentally. A woman revered by one man as an icy goddess is often another man's pleading, licking slave. Ligurious, to his fury, as a timid swain, would never get a hundredth from her of what Hassan, her master, might command with a casual word. But this, of course, was only to be expected. She was, after all, Hassan's slave.

"But you are a free man," she whispered. "What are you doing here? What are you doing? Where is Hassan, my master?"

"Do you wish to be impaled?" he asked.

"No!" she said.

"Your body!" he suddenly cried,' looking at her. "It is that of a slave!" "Yes, Master," she wept, trying to crouch down and cover her breasts with her hands.

"And the collar on your throat, and the brand, superb!"

"Thank you, Master," she wept. "No," he suddenly cried, much to himself; "It cannot be!" Then, not looking at her, he angrily pointed to the tunic, on the tiles near me. "Put that on," he said. "Be quick! In the halls they will think you are she."

"Yes, Master," she said.

I struggled again to free myself, and could not do so.

In a moment Ligurious had freed my ankles of the thong that fastened me to the slave ring and dragged me by the arm across the tiles to the golden sack. There, putting me to my stomach, he began to replace my bonds with those she had worn. This, presumably, is what Hassan would have done had he himself been effecting this change of slaves.

"It is so small," she said, pulling down at the sides of the slave tunic. I looked up at her, angrily. It was the slave tunic Miles of Argentum put us all in. We all wore it, all of his girls. To be sure, in it she was well displayed, and as what she now was, a slave.

My gag was then replaced with the one which she had worn. The wadding was packed into my mouth. It was still wet from her saliva. It was then secured in place. I was then thrust feet first into the golden slave sack. My head was thrust down. The sack was tied shut over my head. In a moment I felt myself, bit by bit, helpless in the sack, being hoisted upward. The rope was then secured, and, miserable and frightened, I swung slowly back and forth in the darkness of the sack until, eventually, there was little more movement than that connected with the tension of the rope, and my own small, occasional movements.