"Drink this," said Drusus Rencius.
What is it?" I asked, startled. It seemed he had produced this almost by magic. It was a soft, leather botalike flask drawn from within his tunic.
"Slave wine," he said.
"Need I drink that?" I asked, apprehensively.
"Unless you have had slave wine," he said, "I have no intention of taking you through the streets clad as you are. Suppose you are raped."
I put the flask, which he had opened, to my lips. Its opening was large enough to drink freely from. "It is bitter!" I said, touching my lips to it.
"It is the standard concentration, and dosage," he said, "plus a little more, for assurance. Its effect is indefinite, but it is normally renewed annually, primarily for symbolic purposes.
I could not believe how bitter it was. I had learned from Susan, whom I had once questioned on the matter, the objective and nature of slave wine. It is prepared from a derivative of sip root. The formula, too, I had learned, at the insistence of masters and slavers, had been improved by the caste of physicians within the last few years. It was now, for most practical purposes, universally effective. Too, as Drusus Rencius had mentioned, its effects, at least for most practical purposes, lasted indefinitely.
"Have no fear," said Drusus Rencius. "The abatement of its effects is reliably achieved by the ingestion of a releaser."
"Oh," I said. I knew this, of course. Susan had told me.
When a female slave is given the releaser she knows that she may soon expect to be hooded, and bred.
"Could it not be sweetened?" I asked.
"I have chosen that you drink it as it is," be said, "as it is normally drunk."
