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mouth a handful
    of rence paste. At noon, in the marshes, with the sun burning at meridian, she
    had taken another handful of rence paste from a wallet worn at her waist and
    thrust it in my mouth, again not permitting me the dignity of feeding myself.
    Though it was now late in the afternood and I was hungry I would not ask to be
    fed again from the wallet at her side.
    I cut another rence stem, cut away the tufted, flowered head, and threw the stem
    onto the raft.
    “Over there,” she said, moving the rence craft to a new location.
    She had made little attempt to conceal her beauty from me. Indeed, she used it
    to torment and shame me, using it, like blows and abuse, to increase my
    miseries.
    This morning, before dawn, she had affixed my collar.
    I had spent the night in the open, a foot or two from her tiny hut on the rence
    island, my wrists tied to my ankles, my neck tethered to an oar pole thrust deep
    through the rence of the island.
    Before dawn her foot awakened me.
    “Awake, Slave,” she had said.
    Then, as casually as one might untether an animal, fearing nothing, she unbound
    me.
    “Follow me, Slave,” she had said.
    At the edge of the rence island, where her rence craft was drawn up on the
    shore, as well as several others, together with some rafts for transporting cut
    rence, she stopped, and turned, and faced me. She looked up into my eyes.
    “Kneel,” she had said.
    I had done so, and she had drawn out a handful of rence paste from the wallet at
    her side, and she fed me.
    “Stand,” she had said.
    I did so.
    “In the cities,” she asked, “they have slave collars, do they not?”
    “Yes,” I said.
    Then she had taken a length of marsh vine from a packet on her rence craft.
    The, looking up into my eyes, smiling, close to me, her arms about my neck, she
    insolently wound the vine five times about my neck, and knotted it in front.
    “Now,” she said, “you have a collar.”
    “Yes,” I said, “I have a collar.”
    “Say,” said she, her arms still about my neck, “I am your collared slave.”
    My fists clenched. She stood within my grasp, her arms on my neck, taunting me
    with her eyes.
    “I am your collared slave,” I said.
    “Mistress,” she taunted.
    “Mistress,” I said.
    She smiled. “I see,” said she, tauntingly, “that you find me beautiful.” It was
    true.
    The she struck me suddenly, with savagery. I cried out with pain.
    “Dare you aspire to me!” she cried. “I am a free woman!” Then she hissed out,
    “Kiss my feet, Slave!”
    In pain, on my knees, I did so, to her laughter.
    “Put now the rence craft in the water,” she said, “and attach to it a raft for
    cut rence, Slave. We must cut rence today, and be quick, be quick, My Slave!”
    I cut another rence stem, lopping away the tufted head, and throwing it onto the
    rence craft. And then another, and another.
    The sun, though it was late afternoon, was still hot, and it was humid in the
    delta of Vosk, and my hands ached, and were blistered.
    “If you do not obey me in all things, and swiftly,” had said the girl, “I will
    have the men bind you and throw you to the tharlarion. And there is no escape in
    the marches. You will be hunted down by men with marsh spears. You are my
    slave!”
    “Over there,” said the girl. “Cut there.”
    She moved the craft to a new thicket of rence, and I obeyed.
    It was true what she had said. Naked, without weapons, alone in the delta,
    without aid, without food, I could not escape. It would not be hard for the men
    of the rence islands, in their hundreds, to cut off escape, to find me, if the
    tharlarion did not manage to do so first.
    But most I was miserable in my heart. H had had an image of myself, a proud
    image, and the loss of this image had crushed me. I had lived a lie with myself
    and then, in my own eyes, and in those of others, I had been found out. I had
    chosen ignominious bondage to the freedom of honorable death. I now knew the
    sort of thing I was,