"You may dance, Slave," I told her.
It was to be the dance of the six thongs.
She slipped the silk from her and knelt before the great table and chair, between the
other tables, dropping her head. She wore five pieces of metal, her collar and locked
rings on her wrists and ankles. Slave bells were attached to the collar and the rings. She
lifted her head, and regarded me. The musicians, to one side, began to play. Six of my
men, each with a length of binding fiber, approached her. She held her arms down, and a
bit to the sides. The ends of six lengths of binding fiber, like slave snares, were
fastened on her, one for each wrist and ankle, and two about her waist; the men, then,
each holding the free end of a length of fiber, stood about her, some six or eight feet
from her, three on a side. She was thus imprisoned among them, each holding a thong that
bound her....
Sandra then, luxuriously, catlike, like a woman awakening, stretched her arms.
There was laughter.
It was as though she did not know herself bound.
When she went to draw her arms back to her body there was just the briefest instant in
which she could not do so, and she frowned, looked annoyed, puzzled, and then was
permitted to move as she wished.
I laughed.
She was superb.
Then, still kneeling, she raised her hand, head back, insolently to her hair, to remove
from it one of the ornate pins, its head carved from the horn of kailiauk, that bound it.
Again a thong, this time that on her right wrist, prohibited, but only for an instant, the
movement, but inches from her hair.
She frowned. There was laughter.
At last, sometimes immediately permitted, sometimes not, she had removed the pins from her
hair. Her hair was beautiful, rich, long and black. As she knelt, it fell back to her
ankles.
Then, with her hands, she lifted the hair again back over her head, and then, suddenly,
her hands, by the thongs were pulled apart and her hair fell again loose and rich over her
body.
Now, angrily, struggling, she fought to lift her hair again but the thongs, holding apart
her hands, did not permit her to do so. She fought them. The thongs would permit her only
to wear her hair loosely.
Then, as though in terror and fury, as though she now first understood herself in the
snares of a slave, she leaped to her feet, fighting, to the music, the thongs.
The dancing girls of Port Kar, I told myself, are the best on all Gor.
Dark and golden, shimmering, crying out, stamping, she danced, her thonged beauty
incandescent in the light of the torches and the frenzy of the slave bells.
She turned and twisted and leaped, and sometimes seemed almost free, but was always, by
the dark thongs, held complete prisoner. Sometimes she would rush upon one man or another,
but the others would not permit her to reach him, keeping her always beautiful female
slave snared in her web of thongs. She writhed and cried out, trying to force the thongs
from her body, but could not do so.
At last, bit by bit, as her fear and terror mounted, the men, fist by fist, took up the
slack in the thongs that tethered her, until suddenly, they swiftly bound her hand and
foot and lifted her over their heads, captured female slave, displaying her bound arched
body to the tables.
There were cries of pleasure from the tables, and much striking of the right fist on the
left shoulder.
She had been truly superb.
Then the men carried her before my table and held her bound before me. "A
slave," said one.
"Yes," cried the girl, "slave!"
The music finished with a clash.
The applause and cires were wild and loud.
I was much pleased.
Raiders of Gor, pg. 228
