The Story So Far: A story taken from the Journal of Lady Zhou Yu, (known to us as Amber) – a slave girl living in the capital city of Thamud. A war currently rages between Talos and Thamud. Amber is a former Chinese military contractor from Earth (Ki) who has been kidnapped and transported to the planet, An. Now transformed into a slave girl, she has been tasked with infiltrating the Qin (the Chinese-like people of An) in order to regain her male body and return to Earth.

Last Chapter: Amber has been trained at the slave school in the ways of a pleasure slave. She discovers that she now likes men but does not have the slave urges of her fellow classmates. At the end of the last chapter, she was sold and is now being transported to her new owner.

Chapter 3 A Servant Girl in Gaius' Household

Dear Reader,

It has been three months since I last wrote in this journal.

The first snows fell last night and there was no possibility of taking a walk after the morning meal. My Master has told me that I should practice my written Thamudi again instead of spending endless hours at swordplay or with my war bow. He hinted that it was behavior unbecoming of his consort, much less someone in my condition; and that he did not wish to be known as a ruler who approved of illiterate women.

As always, I have been obedient.

The armies of Talos have been in full retreat since late autumn, and our scouts have reported only a small rearguard action. Of the 100,000 men who marched against us, about half remain. At least half of these have been taken by food and water borne diseases introduced into their supplies trains by my spies - this service largely performed by the women in their mobile brothels; apparently a necessary evil to curb the unhealthy appetites of these would be conquerors. My Master has ordered the mounted archers to harass any stragglers all the way back to Talos.

We will spend the winter resting and strengthening our defenses against a possible Spring campaign. Every family remains involved in war production whether it be in arrow making or siege defenses, or the standardized spears used by our female conscripts. Once the thaw allows, new wells will be dug within the two border fortress to detect any attempts at tunneling underneath our walls. My Master and I have visited most of the noble families to discuss the new taxes which will be levied in the new year. I have reason to believe that the silver requested will be delivered without much complaint.

Almost all of the frail and elderly have been moved from the border towns to encampments and new villages; and resupplies of wood, stone and food are gradually being transported from inland forests and quarries to the front now that the siege has been lifted.

When my Master returns home each day after surveying our defenses, we take our evening meal alone. He has forbidden any extravagances as long as a Spring war is a possibility. I read to him for about an hour from illuminated texts each evening so that he can properly judge my pronunciation of the High Thamudi expected of courtiers. I have also begun teaching him the basics of weiqi but he always resigns within twenty moves in frustration.

My Master who has been reading my journal over my shoulders is nonplussed that I have not said anything about my life after being sold. As I have indicated previously, his tastes run towards the salacious.

I will continue where I left off.

If you will recall, I was sold privately in the depths of the auction house without the need to ascend the auction block. I soon surmised that I had been deemed unsuitable material for the slave taverns

Instead I had been sold into the house of a feudal lord of Albion, called Gaius. Like much of the nobility, Gaius was born into his riches but he also dabbled in the market place and had fingers in many commercial pots. For this reason, he entertained frequently and was in need of an efficient household. He barely glanced at me two days after I was brought to his villa saying distractedly, “She is rather plain but I think she'll add color to our serving staff.”

Most of the pleasure slaves treated me with disdain as well. I was merely a servant girl, and it was I who served them. My duties were to bathe them, wash their clothes, and serve them at meal times.

In my second week at Gaius' household, I was assigned to a statuesque beauty who would make any man hard with desire. Her long golden tresses reached down to the middle of her back and she had a delightful posterior and hips. She had light blue eyes, a small upturned nose, and a few freckles running across this on to her cheeks. She was wearing a long silk loin cloth but her sizable breasts were bare with each of them crowned with alluring bright pink nipples and puffy areolae.

I knelt and bowed deeply to her saying, “My name is Amber, Mistress, and I am here to serve you.”

She did not reply and the room was absolutely silent for an uncomfortable period of time. As such, I looked up slowly only to see her startled face.

“Do you speak Qin?” she asked me in one of the ancient languages of Ki.

I had not heard anyone speak in my mother tongue for months and was similarly startled but kept my composure. “I do speak Qin. You have an excellent accent, mistress. May I know where you learned my language?”

“I am from Ki just like you. Do you come from [Szechuan] ? That is my hometown as well.”

My accent had given me away. There were many foreigners in the vast lands of the Qin on Ki, and she was hardly unique.

“I am so pleased to hear someone speak my mother tongue,” I told her with a smile. “Perhaps, we could use it in conversation in the privacy of your room. But only it pleases you, Mistress.”

“It would please me very much, Amber,” she said “Please call me, Eumelia. You do not know how happy it makes me to hear your voice.”

We exchanged information on our kidnappings and soon discovered that we had both been taken around the same time. And that we were both serum girls. We had no cause to be embarrassed by our shared fates, nor of our previous livelihoods – we had both been soldiers in our previous lives. I assumed at the time that this was a pattern of behavior, and that our captors intentionally chose men trained to violence for their inexplicable purposes.

“Amber, I do not want to deceive you so I will say this now before I lose the courage.” She looked down and averted her eyes from me. “My name on Ki was [Ma Jun] and I used to be a Qin person just like yourself.”

She looked up again when she heard my sobbing. I could hardly breathe for all the emotions this caused to rise in me.

“Please don't cry, Amber. I have come to accept this.” She hugged me and wiped away my tears.

I was sobbing and gasping but managed to say, “ You don't understand. I'm [Cheng Yi].”

And then we were both crying. What a strange sight we would have seemed to anyone who happened upon us. My old comrade in arms who I had assumed to be dead, now found. My last connection with my old life on Ki. A fringe benefit of my own capture and taken to cover expenses I assumed at the time.

Eumelia's memories of her old life were largely intact and it had taken her months to accept her new body. The slave urges had helped greatly in this respect. When she realized that her new body made her especially attractive to men, she had marched down the road of acceptance with abandon.

“It is not so bad. Our master's guests have a thing for blonde barbarians which is what they take me for considering my poor Talosian.”

I was a servant girl but one who had received training in the arts of the passion slave. Eumelia was no different and more experienced than I was in this respect. She had a tremendous attraction to men and did not shrink from describing her desires – for she assumed that I too could barely quench my thirst.

If anything, she told of her sexual exploits with considerable pride. Her virginity had been given to one of Gaius' honored guests who had then described her sexual abilities to his friends the next day at breakfast even as she knelt by his feet like a cat. She had been fed by hand with morsels from the table and looked forward to seeing him again when he next attended one of our master's feasts.

I would help her manicure her nails, perfume her body, and irrigate both her nether holes for use by the guests. She did not find this troubling for the slave urges had fully taken; but I did.

Where once we helped each other in our preparations for battle, I was now helping my old friend to look her best to service men. Unlike myself, Eumelia had lost all interest in her old abilities. Those were things of the past, and she was eager to cultivate the arts which would serve her best in her new life. She was being given instruction in stringed instruments and conversation; and also gleaned knowledge from the rest of the pleasure slaves in the harem with regards pleasing men.

If she returned early from servicing her guests, I would be ready to bathe and groom her again so that she looked her best. If we had time, we would cuddle and pleasure each other. Our former lives were the furthest things from our mind at these times; and Eumelia was absolutely ravishing, a prime candidate to be given as a gift to men of wealth and distinction.

My own progress was more mundane. I would be employed throughout the household mainly as a cleaner - in the slave quarters, at the dining table, in the boudoir, and in the many private rooms in the villa. Here I was tasked with providing service before and after copulation. There was always food and drink to be served, clothes to be folded and arranged, and detritus to be disposed of. I would clean both the men and women with warm towels if so commanded; and if a master or mistress wished to see me use my mouth to clean up the sexual emissions on their genitals, I would do so unhesitatingly. I knew this much from my days at school.

I was only a servant girl and certainly of less value than then the redwood furniture which adorned Gaius villa. But unlike the furniture, I was privy to every conversation and every indiscretion disclosed in the heat of passion. My owner, Gaius, would question me and the other girls at least once a week concerning these things; though this was often of little help due to the education level of the average servant.

It will not surprise you to know that while the Qin were politically and communally reputed to be wealthy and devious, the Qin as individuals were considered strange, illiterate, and feeble minded. Certainly, they were not considered to be especially civilized. I conformed to all of these stereotypes at least in my early days. The slave school had started me on the road to understanding the main languages of this world but it took me a while longer at Gaius' house to be reasonably fluent – not least due to hours with a tutor at Gaius' expense. If Gaius' wanted spies, he would need to train them, and what better person than an individual who everyone assumed to be a “retarded” Qin girl.

Gaius did not assume I was an idiot but he did expect me to conform to the low cunning my race was often derided for in this world. He would pump me for information at every hour of the day once my level of language acquisition was deemed adequate. I would hand him my neatly written reports on slate boards, and the information would be memorized, sieved, and confirmed to the best of his organization's ability. Sometimes, whatever news I brought him would be the corroborative evidence he needed for a business venture; most of the time it was completely useless and filed away for future use.

At various points during our interviews, Gaius would mumble or curse under his breath. I would politely ask him the reasons for his distress in the tones of warm honey that had been inculcated into me since my days in the school. I would then bow my head while kneeling and offer suggestions as they came to mind in the way of small talk.

When rumors of war were whispered by a minister post-coitally, I would remind him to consider a larger stake in the hitherto humdrum sulfur and saltpeter mining industries. I later described a method to use these ingredients with gum and wooden splints to make matches – an item which I had not seen used in my short time in that land.

A poor crop report hidden from his eyes but not my ears, prompted me to remind him to enjoin his tenants to increase their use of 'horse-hoeing husbandry' and row cultivation, a practice which for some reason was not widely used in Albion.

I would help him sift through reams of old reports from across the continent on various new sightings or technological wonders. The fire wells reported near the Qin homeland certainly caught my attention and I suggested that he could consider a barter for know-how in its transport and use. It was clear to me that the Qin had been extracting natural gas from both shallow and deep boreholes, and transporting the gas across large distances with bamboo and wooden containers. Gaius sniffed and said he would consider it.

Gaius was a well kept middle-aged man but he had no interest in women. He did display some enthusiasm for boys half his age but his main pleasure was money. He kept me permanently in a light wooden chastity device saying crudely that both my brain and my cunt had value, but that he didn't have the time to exploit the latter just yet.

It was only a matter of time before he divined that I had other abilities as well. When one of his business rivals threatened violence in the privacy of his study, I quickly brought the sharpened knife I had stolen from the kitchen to his neck. The aggressor had no reason to consider the small Qin girl serving drinks a threat. He hurled abuse at me and attempted to reach behind to grab me. I simply kept my calm and divided the skin at his neck exposing the subcutaneous fat. He was a small fleshy man and took little convincing of his diminished options.

So it was that I became Gaius' favorite servant girl. At some point, he started treating me less like a servant and more as an inconspicuous bodyguard and a conversation partner. I told him what I deemed to be less important details about life on Ki and he was happy to reveal the workings of his own world.

It appeared that transportation between worlds was uncommon, as was the presence of alien serum girls such as myself and Eumelia. The vast majority of serum girls were derived from men of the large continent which dominated An. As such, I was considered more useful as trading material with the Qin then a pleasure slave. I asked him if there was any way to remove the slave urges which dominated the lives of slaves like my friend. He was non-committal but told me of legends of jungle women called panthers who staved off the effects with a regular intake of herbs. He clicked his tongue and called them man-haters.

To my mind, there seemed little reason for these women to spend their days in a hot sweltering jungle when the more comfortable jungles constructed by men could offer safer refuge. He shrugged his shoulders and repeated that they hated men, and that some of them were marked. Perhaps they were a secret society with occult rituals just like the acolytes of the Seven Gods.

I was marked as well of course and quite early on. By my second week in the slave school, my ears, nose and navel had all been pierced. Ear piercing was considered the most degrading of these for it immediately marked one as a slave girl. I, on the other hand, resented all of it. I knew quite well that these adornments were meant to make me more attractive to men, and seethed with shame and anger at these overt attempts to make me more feminine. I merely tolerated them and my need to be submissive as part of my mission; the completion of which would free me from my female body.

The other girls could not understand my bitterness for the slave urges were fast upon them. I was only partly mollified when I began to find men attractive some weeks later.

Of course, today I gladly wear all the jewelry that my Master lavishes upon me. Indeed, he will be pleased to know I have become like many natural born women in this respect. In the slave school and the harems I have resided in, clothing and jewelry took on an element of ritual display in lieu of physical violence. The aforementioned panther girls would have nothing to do with this.

A number of the slave girls in Gaius' stable had also been branded – this was thought to be especially fitting for barbarians like Eumelia who had been marked on her mons with the Imperium Rose also found on Gaius' heraldry. I myself was tattooed with the same rose on my left hip, it's thorn and tendrils extending and curving around my left thigh. Gaius had decided that this would be more appropriate for a Qin girl. By this time, I had been so thoroughly debased that I no longer cared about being marked as property.

And thus, I spent twelve months with Gaius in relative calm; a calm which I knew could not last. For his lands and coin had grown considerably in that short period; as had his rivals. And Gaius had carelessly failed to placate or dispose of his enemies; nor did he care to be generous with his good fortune as I had repeatedly advised. Even worse, he had foolishly begun to use me far too liberally.

The first sign of this was guests becoming more leery in my presence. There was also the odd shipping agent or manager who would refuse to be served by that “filthy” Qin girl. Gaius’ business rivals were previously quite happy to simply ape his agricultural and commercial plays. For instance, he would buy into spices from the South Eastern Archipelago at immense prices on the open market the moment he received word that a shipment had failed. The other feudal lords were happy to play along and pick up the crumbs at a moment's notice. When he started encroaching into their vested interests in continental agriculture and heating, on the other hand, they had no choice but to bring him down.

First to be displaced were the informants he had cultivated in various government ministries; then select members of Gaius' street gangs who he used as enforcers. Soon a whispering campaign began against me, first among the pleasure slaves and then the general household. It was only a matter of time before I was considered a usurper by both the majordomo and ikbal. Even Eumelia began to treat me more coldly suspecting that I was badmouthing her to Gaius in the privacy of his chambers. The Qin already had a reputation for being ingratiating backstabbers and I could not escape their prejudice.

When items started turning up missing among the pleasure slaves, it was I who they first cast their eyes upon. I protected myself as much as I could but there was only so much a servant girl could do. By the time, I was accused of stealing a noble woman's pearl necklace, there could only be one culprit. Inevitably, the piece of jewelry was found among my clothes. Gaius had no choice but to turn me out. I was whipped, banished to the outer courtyard, and sent to clean the lavatories and chamber pots.

It was an entire month before my sacrifice paid dividends.

Now fully isolated, I had only to wait for my accusers to attack me directly. Only when I had been fully humbled would their confidence be at its highest.

I kept note of anyone who sought to humiliate me further and, even more, those who wished to be rid of me entirely. I was now insignificant enough to be killed off quietly. At first, I only encountered the personal maids of two odalisques who took the time to kick and demean me, but finally after nearly a month, my servant's hovel was visited by two men determined to string me up in an act of assisted suicide. I could not take too many chances with two large males even if they were unsuspecting. I slit open the femoral artery of one of them and allowed him to exsanguinate; the other I crippled by slicing his heel tendons.

This man, and the two odalisques and their serving girls were brought before Gaius for questioning. He needed to know which of the other feudal lords he could ally with in a war; and which others he would punish with violence - for war seemed inevitable, all it required was an opportune time and a valid excuse. We had only to wait and prepare.

I stressed to Gaius the variable if not poor information resulting from torture but he would have none of it. As with his business dealings, he would take whatever information they offered and confirm it by other means. From indolent passivity, he had swiftly shifted to maniacal hostility - he planned to wage a campaign of terror. His spies would infiltrate the towns of the feudal lords who has been fingered and prepare incendiary devices of oil and gas which would destroy the entire grain reserves of these towns – an act which I knew would lead to immense suffering in the winter.

It was I who had given him the knowledge and means for this act of vindictiveness; I who had brought the suspected household spies to him. If thousands now died as a result of famine, it was I who would be chiefly responsible next to Gaius. I suspect that in my previous life on Ki, I might have reacted with a certain amoral nonchalance, but something had changed in me. Was my new perspective the result of a year in chains or the more empathetic viewpoint of a woman, or both?

The die was cast when Gaius was accused of consorting with a Qin witch from whom he had derived largess in exchange for his eternal soul. I would now need to decide whether I would participate in Gaius' war, enjoining him at every turn to mercy; or kill him outright and save the lives of thousands.