A Gorean Storean

A war camp is a noisy place- everyone seems to feel compelled to call out to one another at the tops of their voices, and the clash of arms and rhythmic pounding of men's boots and their call and response as they pass at all hours, seem to fill the world. Women's voices too- laughing, sobbing, gasping- girls with soft little hands that pluck at her like gentle, curious birds, their questions musical and incomprehensible as birdsong. They stare at her even as they draw her in to their tasks, showing her what to do quite patiently and kindly, but she thinks wryly- you'd think I was from another planet or something.

She likes the Gorean girls though- they're sweet. They have blazing rows between themselves over trifles that are forgotten in a matter of minutes, their respective sides of which they indignantly explain to her - she thinks they tend to forget she doesn't understand what they're literally saying because in general terms it's fairly obvious to her- and she's glad that they seem to accept her-they've given her the nick-name Earth-girl- and even come to her when they're upset, but she also thinks to herself that she sort of wishes she weren't improving the little Gorean she knows with conversations like:

Earth-girl: to the disheveled young girl in a ripped ta-teera and a flood of tears with visible lash marks on her back who just threw herself into the tent and flung her arms around me: Oh my God, Binah! Were you whipped?

Her: Ai, Earth-girl! Ma Vanashe (something something something)!

EG: Honey, did he hurt you? Let me look at it...

Her (turning back to face me and shaking her head impatiently): Ma Vanashe (SOMETHING SOMETHING SOMETHING)!

And she bursts into tears again and cries bitterly while Earthgirl holds her, and Earthgirl finally figures out that she's saying "I displeased my Master." The fact that she got whipped is tangential to that- she's crying because she displeased him.

And Earth-girl rather wishes she didn't have a strong enough degree of self -reflection to realize she understands that feeling a lot better than she wishes she did.

Vol of Thentis has at least one emotion that she's been able to identify; she thinks of this emotion as "angry-happy."

Angry-happy is relatively rare. Tempists blow in and out; sometimes he slips her a smile or wink, but he is for the most part inscrutable. But when he shoots his bow (Thunderbolt wheeling perilously low into the rocky narrow valleys that make up the outskirts of the camp) and he shoots a Tabuk, or a Tarsk, he swears excitedly in Gorean and clasps her wrist, hard, so enthusiastic in his vicious joy that he simply has to share it with someone, and she, clinging for dear life behind him, ceases for that one moment to be girl, Kajira, mat and kettle girl: angry-happy is when he acknowledges her humanity.

He's the only man around here who does. She thinks the Gorean Kajirae are kind of flakey, with way too much drama for her taste, but they at least look at her and talk to her and smile back when she smiles. She feels not so much pity as a defiant feeling of affinity for these women conditioned to desire nothing but slavery. Everyone wants to be good at what they do, to be good at what they are.

I used to consider I was a pretty damned good barista, in my pre-concubinage days.

The other warriors though, swarming the camp, striding figures in leather and mail that look right through her and give her a chilly feeling; they look at her but they don't see her, and she wonders if they believe that there's a person there to see at all.

If anything they look pissed at me, like they're not the reason I'm here in the first fucking place.

She feels profoundly unwelcome at these times, even as indifferent eyes run over her all-but-naked body, utterly cut off in a way that neither language, nor mores can fully account for. Even as she resents being treated as if she were beneath contempt, she has a terrible, half-acknowledged feeling that she might be.

The girls who weep aloud too often are invariably mocked and whipped.

These guys would tell me to look for sympathy between shit and syphilis in the dictionary, if only they could read and knew what a dictionary was.

So she cries alone. She does her work; she weeps.

She irons tunics; she weeps for home. She dusts wooden tables and chairs; she weeps for her parents, fights and tears and all. She fetches and heats water; she weeps because there are, as far as she's seen, no chocolate chip cookies on this planet.

She had Bina help her sew a super-cute Camisk; She washes and brushes and shaves and does what she can with her hair, (they're said to like it loose and flowing by the girls, each of whom is apparently an expert at pleasing men and rarely reach such a consensus). But she feels deeply, achingly lonely, too thin and pale and tattooed for this world of nubile, rounded flesh of Kajirae and the robust, hairy limbs of the warriors in almost absurd contrast, their bodies ranging from a lean easy power to sword and sorcery hyperbole, yet all, in some inexplicable way, completely different from her own.

I don't belong here.

The devices on the shields and heraldry of the Warriors, which speaks complex volumes to Warriors and Kajirae alike but fails even to include Earth-girl in a mass e-mail; the rankings and rivalries and orders of precedence of which she is only vaguely aware; the suddenness with which the warriors move at mysterious summons, and she has only the most marginal of places in any of it, feeling superfluous and under foot, marginal, and a line from the Dixie Chicks flickers through her mind- "they watch you dancing without the sound." Only now does she understand the sourwood twist of that honey voice as those words rode the anger of fiddles; she remembers the sobbing backbeat and shudders with an angry, silent sob.

They watch you dancing without the sound.

They stood about as she leaped up on tiptoe, watching as she stretched as high as she could to beat the dust from a costly carpet of her Master's; The pay of Warriors consists, of course, largely of plunder, and it fell to her to see that the treasures which now adorned the tent of Vol of Thentis (itself gift from the foe) should be clean and orderly. Although the men watched avidly as her camisk rode up to reveal her, they spoke and laughed quite contemptuously though of course she could understand very little. But certainly she understood enough to know that they were appraising her like an animal; even had she understood every word, it would have made no matter, as they each of them exhibited a healthy disdain for whatever faculties of understanding the earth-wench might possess, if any.

Her long legs trembling from straining to reach; her arms numb; a stitch in her side.

Her tautened buttocks were revealed again by her slit, too-short garment, and her clumsy effort to straighten it served only to pull the two panels of the camisk apart further, revealing pale flesh that would shrink from these cold gazes if it could.