Vonda is a great center of gladiator training, and for gladitorial combat i was bred and trained. From early childhood where i worked as a kitchen boy to my youth where i started training in earnest, and to reaching my full growth i learned to fight with many different weapons, or none at all, and to kill. Not as a Warrior learns, with honor and courage to fight for His own, but as a slave must, for the bloodlust of the crowd, and to stay alive. There i also learned strict discipline and total obedience, to fear the lash and to savor whatever pleasure fell my way. Indeed, if he lives a gladiator learns much of pleasure, for women of all types, slave and Free, lusty slut and haunty High Caste seek out the embrace and virility of men who live with death. After each victory i lived, and learned these lessons too. But i lived by killing men like me, born to dance with death, or the poor wretches sentenced to die for crime, or those unfortunate enough to displease the powerful. Though i loved the dance, i began to hate death, and i began to wonder, looking through steel bars at people outside the narrow world of the arena, whether life shouldn't hold more....

        With that thought, a gladiator cannot live long. The fight becomes a struggle, and he must stop fighting. Usually by dying....

        The last match i fought i knew i couldn't win. Not because my opponent was more skilled, or stronger, or had more luck, but because in my heart i didn't want to kill him. To refuse to fight was unthinkable, punished by the slow agonizing death of impalement, branded a coward. So i danced my last dance, and lost, his heart untouched by doubt, his sword cleaving my helm in two and leaving me stretched on the sand at his feet. Perhaps he thought me dead already, for he never delivered a final death thrust to the heart, and i was taken unconcious but alive from the arena.

         What happened next i cannot say, except that i remember long, dark meanderings through which sometimes the light of clear thought would shine for a few minutes, then retreat again. The only real memories of that time are of hunger and cold and fear and pain. My owner, A rich Free Woman of high birth, enamored of the games and accostomed to celebrating victory with the use of my body, must have thought me unable to be healed and simply abandoned me to live or die as fate decreed, simply letting me wander away.

        Somehow i wandered to Ar, and finally, a season later, i knew myself again, and my thoughts cleared. Unbranded and uncollared, i lived by begging and scavaging, until at a tavern a Free Woman looked on me again, and realized i was slave, all i had ever been or knew how to be. Suddenly i saw a way to live without killing, if only i could please Her. She looked past my clumsiness and lack of experience and spoke kindly with me, learning what She would. She made arraingement to have me trained to serve, and to learn the ways of a pleasure slave. When She was satisfied that i was dedicated to learning how to be pleasing and finding my slave belly, She collared me, and long were we together, my heart touched with love for the first time in my life. She opened Her own Inn in Tharna, and i learned quickly the ways of a silk slave. I learned to use my body in many ways to give pleasure in everything i did, from the way i moved to serving food and drink to the passions of the couch. Her time was consumed with taking the pleasure i offered gladly.

        But the truth of life is that nothing lasts forever, good or ill. She seemed to grow troubled and became distant. She even had me beaten, not the punishment of the quirt but the torture of the snake, reminding me that i was only slave, and had no hold on Her. Finally She went away, leaving the Inn and selling it to another. Though my collar no longer bore Her name i yearned for Her, distressed by Her rejection after so long at Her feet. Later i learned She was pregnant, and Her choice had been simple, the child before the slave.