I twisted on the great couch, in misery. Nowhere more than on this world had I felt my femininity, a
I twisted on the great couch, in misery. Nowhere more than on this world had I felt my femininity, and nowhere else, naturally enough, I suppose, had I felt it more keenly frustrated. I wondered what it was, truly, to be a woman. I had had a strange dream. I had awakened into it, or had seemed to awaken into it, from another. In the preceding dream I had been on my hands and knees on the tiles of a strange room. I was absolutely naked. There was a chain on my neck and it ran to a ring in the floor. Drusus Rencius, standing, was towering over me. He carried a whip. He was smiling. I looked up at him, in terror. He shook out the long, broad, pliant blades of the whip. It was a five-stranded Gorean slave whip. I looked at the blades, in terror. “What are you going to do?” I asked. “Teach you to be a woman,” he said. I had then seemed to awaken into another dream. In this one was Ligurious. I felt portions of the coverlet being wrapped about me, between my shoulders and thighs. My arms were pinned to my sides, within the coverlet. I whimpered. It seemed that I was only partially conscious. Then I became aware of someone else in the room, bearing a small, flickering lamp. Ligurious held the coverlet with his right hand, holding it together, holding me in place, helplessly within it. With his left hand, it fastened in my hair, he pulled my head back painfully. This exposed my features to the lamp. I sobbed, responding to this domination. “Do you see?” he asked. “Is it not remarkable?” “Yes,” said a woman’s voice. I gasped. It was as though I looked upon myself. She, as I had earlier in the day, wore the robes of the Tatrix. She, too, as I had, wore no veil. In the madness of the dream, in its oddity, it was surely I, or one much like myself, who looked upon me. How strange are dreams! “I think she will do very nicely,” said Ligurious. “That, too, would be my conjecture,” said the woman. Ligurious moved his right hand, grasping the rim of the coverlet, tight about my breasts. “Do you wish to see her, fully?” he asked. I whimpered. I realized he could strip the coverlet away, baring me in the light of the lamp. “You are not so clever as you think, Ligurious,” she said. “Do you think I do not see that you, in stripping her, would be, in effect, and to your lust and amusement, stripping me, and before my very eyes?” “Forgive me,” smiled Ligurious, first minister of Corcyrus. “Pull the lower portion of the coverlet down further,” she said. “You have revealed too much of her thighs.” “Of course,” he smiled, and adjusted the coverlet, drawing it down, over my knees. “Men are beasts,” she said. “You well know my feelings for you,” he said. “They will go unrequited,” she said. “Content yourself with your slaves.” I feared the woman bending over me. I could sense now that even if she seemed superficially much like me, at least in appearances, she was in actuality quite different. She seemed highly intelligent, doubtless more so than I, and severe and decisive. She seemed harsh, and hard and cold. She seemed merciless and cruel; she seemed arrogant, impatient, demanding, haughty, and imperious. Such a woman I thought, as I am not, is perhaps a true Tatrix. Surely it seemed more believable that such a woman might hold power in a city such as Corcyrus than I. The lamp again approached more closely. Again my head was pulled back, helplessly, firmly, forcibly. “She is not as beautiful as I,” said the woman. “No,” said Ligurious. “Of course not.” Then my hair was released and the two figures took their way from the room. I had then twisted on the couch, freed myself of the confinements of the coverlet, and, sensible of the effects of the wine, or perhaps a containment of the wine, had fallen into a dreamless sleep. I heard movements outside the door. The guard was being changed. I could not lock the door from the inside. Yet I lay nude, on my back, on the great couch. I wondered if this was brazen. I rolled to my side and pulled my legs up. I bit at the silken coverlet. I wondered if there was a Tatrix within me. I did not think so. There was something else in me, I feared, something that I had only become clearly aware of on this barbaric world, this world in which I must be true to my femininity, and in which there were true men. -- source link