Prize of Gor by John Norman Page B

thrust stumbling forward. Behind her, as she sought to keep her balance, hands outstretched, she heard a sound, as of the closing of a gate. She whirled about, and rushed forward, only in an instant to find herself to her dismay grasping heavy, narrowly set bars. She was in a cell.
    “I have not been treated well,” she told the young man before whom she stood.
    “How do your lessons proceed?” he asked.
    “Twice,” she said, “I was denied my evening meal!”
    “On the whole,” said he, “I gather that you have been doing well with your lessons.”
    “I am not a child!” she said.
    “But you must try to do better,” he told her.
    When she had assured herself that she was indeed in a cell, and that it was locked, a cell abutting on a dismal, stone-flagged, dark corridor, much like the one she had glimpsed from her room, or apartment, perhaps even the same, she discovered that she was clad differently from what she had been before. Instead of the long, long-sleeved, ankle-length, white gown of fine material, coming high, modestly, about the neck, she now wore a simpler white gown, of less fine material, with half sleeves, and its hem came midway upon her calves. The garment had a rounded neck, which permitted her throat to be seen, in its entirety. Her slippers were gone and she wore instead sandals. She cried out, angrily, and shook the bars, and demanded to be returned to her former quarters, and her earlier finery. The material of the gown she wore was from the wool of the bounding hurt, which is distinguished from the common hurt not only by its gazellelike movements, particularly when startled, but by the quality of its wool. It is raised on this world for its wool. The cell was not really uncomfortable. It was large, and its floor was covered, for the most part, with a woven fiber mat. In it there was a cot, and a stool.
    There was also a mirror in the cell, to her right, on the wall, as she would face the cell door.
    It was not, however, the sort of mirror with which she was familiar, for it was rather more in the nature of a polished metal surface, set well within the wall. There was no way it could be removed from the wall, at least without tools, or shattered, perhaps to produce fragments of glass.
    Since her image was not so instantly and clearly available to her as it would have been in a more familiar sort of mirror, she approached it more closely, puzzled, and peered into it.
    She then gave a soft cry of surprise, for she did not immediately recognize her image in the surface.
    To be sure, it was she, but she as she had not been for perhaps ten years. The woman who regarded her, wonderingly, from the metal surface might have been in her late forties, not her late fifties.
    She put her hand gently to her face. Certain blemishes to which she had reconciled herself were gone. There seemed fewer lines in her face. Her throat seemed smoother to her. Her entire body felt differently. It seemed somewhat more supple. Certainly the occasional stiffness in the joints was not now afflicting her, not that it always did. It was not so much that her body did not ache, or that she was not in pain, as that she had the odd sense that something might now be different about her, that her body might not now be so likely to hurt her, in that way, as it had in the past. To be sure, that conjecture, that intimation, that timid hope, might, she supposed, prove illusory.
    She was not long left to ponder her surprising situation before her lessons began again. This time there were only three young women, and they were not the same as before. Too, whereas they treated her with respect, they did not seem as deferential, or concerned to please, as had been their predecessors. She did not seem to have the same easy familiarity with them as with the others; they did not, for example, seem to see her in the role of a dignified older woman, one entitled to respect in virtue of her years, and weakness. Clearly they did not regard her