Chapter 3
Ilsa
I told myself I would examine the rowing benches for structural evidence of the construction methods.
I knew enough about longship construction that I could probably have noticed details that would give some idea as to its date.
The timbers were extraordinary—the degree of preservation seemed almost impossible by any natural standard.
I obviously needed to understand the treatment that had been applied, and the benches in particular showed signs of use that I needed to document.
That represented my professional reasoning and I committed myself to it as I bent to inspect the benches more closely.
They were very smooth. That was the first thing I noticed when I ran my hand along the nearest one.
Not smooth in the way of weathered wood, or in the way of simple age.
Smooth in the specific way of surfaces that have been touched, repeatedly, by human bodies.
The grain had been worn to a softness that I recognized from handling other artifacts of intimate use: devotional objects like prayer beads and the stalls of monastery chapels.
This smoothness constituted a record of bodies’ movements atop the bench.
I looked at the iron fittings I had noticed, set at the bench ends and also in the middle. Small rings, hammered into the wood at intervals that I now understood even more clearly—with a clarity that had arrived like a hot wind—were not for nautical purposes.
And the pattern of wear on the bench, to my dismay, echoed the placement of those fittings. These benches had not been sat upon, moved upon, by the mighty glutes of Viking warriors as they rowed their way through rough seas back from their raids to their coastal villages.
I put both hands flat on the bench, moved them along the symmetrical wear marks that looked not like a warrior’s strong backside but like a young woman’s midriff.
The movement hadn’t been along the axis of the vessel but perpendicular to it.
The wood grew warm under my palms more quickly than I thought it should. The warmth moved up through my hands the same way the pendant’s heat moved through my fingers when I clasped it, and I heard myself make a sound that I would not willingly have made in company.
I was not in any company. I kept returning to that fact. I was entirely alone in a sealed limestone cavern beneath a Sicilian cliff, and no one in the world knew where I was. The inscription had said first voyage, and the benches were smooth with the memory of bodies, and my body was…
I sat down on the bench. That seemed like a reasonable thing to do. I had been on my feet for hours.
I sat down and the warmth of the wood seemed to come through the thin canvas of my cargo shorts immediately.
I put my hands in my lap, and I looked at the carved walls of the cavern from this new vantage point: the longship scenes, the women on the rowing benches, their faces turned up or pressed down or simply opened on their new masters’ huge cocks, their expressions in the careful rendering of the long-dead artist showing the same thing I had refused to acknowledge for the last hour.
I named it now, as clinically as I could, sitting on the bench with the warm wood underneath me. I knew that expression. I felt that expression, happening to my own face, in the privacy of a sealed cavern where thank God no one would ever see it.
Arousal.
My hand moved. I watched it move the way you watch something happen that you’ve decided not to stop.
The waistband of my shorts. The elastic of my underwear. And then—
Oh.
Oh, I was—
I had known, in an abstract and deeply suppressed way, that I had gotten warm down there.
I had known it since the village scenes, since the table, since the woman between the two men whose carving I had moved the torch away from fastest. I had known it, managed it, and maintained a running academic commentary in my head that had functioned as a kind of insulation.
The insulation had disappeared. My fingers had found the truth of my body. That truth was urgent and specific and very difficult to reframe as scholarship.
I lay back on the bench. The wood was warm along the full length of my spine, and the iron ring was cold against the back of my wrist where I accidentally touched it. I looked up at the ceiling of the cavern lost in darkness above me, I let my knees fall open, and I stopped pretending.
The vision came slowly at first, the way the mosaic had emerged from the earth, a detail at a time.
First, a deep forest. A root descending into dark water.
A branch moving in a wind I couldn’t feel.
Then… I was on a longship—not this one, not a preserved and landlocked relic, but a moving ship on a cold gray sea.
There was a man looming over me, his huge body framed against the sky.
He stood there, looking down at me with the unhurried certainty of someone who had all the time in the world and no intention of wasting a moment of it.
He was naked. His enormous cock jutted from his lap in wordless threat. Of course it was enormous. The carvings had established this as a categorical feature of these men, and my imagination, apparently, had taken thorough notes.
His hands were on my hips. His voice was in a language I shouldn’t have been able to understand and understood perfectly.
Be still, he said, or something that meant that. The sea will take us home. You will learn.
I had never… I was a virgin… I had never had a man’s hands on my hips in that specific configuration of hungry intent. The fact that these hands existed only in my own mind made them no less vivid and no less effective.
He turned me over. In the real world—if this fantastic cavern could be called that—I turned myself over.
I realized that my unconscious mind had figured out the way the iron fittings worked and transferred the understanding to my fantasy.
Two rings to secure a girl’s wrists… two to secure her knees, face down and bottom up, at the end of the bench, so a warrior could…
I felt the blunt pressure of him against me, from behind, mounting me like a stallion… finding me, the impossible size of him pressing at the entrance to my desperate pussy. My back—my actual back, on the actual bench, in the actual cavern—arched, pushing my bottom upward.
A girl restrained on the bench wouldn’t have been able to touch herself, but I could.
I thrust my right hand down inside my shorts, inside my panties, and I made it real.
I pushed two fingers inside, up against the barrier of my virginity.
I whimpered at the heat and the wetness I found.
My fingers moved faster and faster as in my mind’s eye my new master took what belonged to him.
The pendant felt hot against my breastbone, confined by my tee shirt and moving slightly with the obscene bucking of my hips against my hand, over the ancient rowing bench where, surely, dozens of medieval girls had met their maidenhood’s end.
The rune-carved disc pressed against my sternum, feeling almost like a brand.
I gasped and my eyes flew open. The cavern… the ship… the rowing bench opposite mine… they all swam back into focus and the vision…
The tree. Yggdrasil. Not the mosaic version, not the carved limestone version, but something vast and real and absolutely indifferent to me, its roots going down into places that had no names, its branches touching worlds I had no framework for.
The shape of it, massive, somehow overlaid atop my sight of the cavern’s dimness, the sound of the ancient wood creaking under me.
I snatched my hand out of my shorts and rolled off the bench onto the deck of the ship.
My heart was slamming against my ribs. I gripped the bench edge with both hands and breathed and waited for the tree to recede. Slowly, it did, though to my dismay it seemed to remain in my vision, too, like the outline of an after-image.
The cavern came back more fully, though. The ship. The torch I had set on the bow thwart, still lit. The iron rings. The smooth wood.
I stood up, pulling myself upright with the help of the bench, warm now with my body’s embarrassing heat. My legs felt unreliable.
I was a doctoral candidate in archaeology and I had just almost masturbated myself to orgasm on a Viking longship in a secret sanctuary.
I picked up my torch and I walked further into the cavern.
I understood, without examining the understanding too closely, that I had no intention of moving toward the entrance, though I also understood that that’s where I should have been headed.
The inscription had said this chamber as though there were others.
I found the narrow passage at the back of the cavern. It had a carving above its lintel; the same interlocking knotwork I had seen in the mosaic and then, in much greater profusion, around the obscene images on the cavern wall next to the longship.
I went through the doorway.
The passage beyond was not natural limestone.
Someone had worked it, extended it, lined the walls with the same deep-relief carving that covered the main cavern, though here the scenes were different: processional rather than narrative, figures moving in sequence toward something at the far end.
The torch threw long shadows that made the carved figures seem to walk beside me.
Chambers opened on either side. Alcoves, really, each with a heavy timber door that stood open, and each containing…
I stopped at the third one, once my mind had processed the structure that occupied a prominent position at the center of each chamber.
I had been looking at its shape on the cavern walls for the last hour: the curved wood, the padding, the horizontal bar for a girl to hold onto as her Viking master enjoyed her.
The ergonomic design that I had understood intellectually and now began to understand in a different register entirely, because here it was not a carving.
Here was the object—the device—itself. Here it was a real thing made of real wood, real leather, and real iron fittings, standing in the illumination of my torch with the same remarkable preservation as the ship, waiting patiently for an occupant, through long centuries of absence.
A… a bride saddle, something in my mind supplied, from some obscure corner of my Norse material culture reading.
I must have read a description, at some point.
My cheeks filled with heat. I had read a description in a questionable work of nineteenth-century scholarship, and then I had promptly repressed the knowledge.
That was what I had been looking at in the homecoming scenes, the women bound to it with their bottoms thrust backward past the edge of the saddle to receive their masters in their…
R?vhul. The Danish word I wished I didn’t know, but the word I couldn’t keep myself from imagining these Norman warriors—Danish in ancestry—using as they approached the ‘brides’ they’d won with their iron-tipped spears and meant to enjoy with their fleshly ones.
I saw it, in my mind’s eye: the huge, naked man towering over the naked young woman, commanding her to mount the strange, frightening device.
“You’ll ride my saddle and take me in your r?vhul now, girl.”
She mounted, trembling with fear. His broad hands helped her, fondled her, roused her.
“That’s it,” he growled, his manhood hardening as he touched and watched. “Ride now… move your hips and rub your little fisse back and forth on the leather… get yourself ready to take the tool in that sweet hole…”
I stepped back from the doorway. My shoulder hit the passage wall.
Then, as if drawn by an enchantment, my feet moved the other way, into the chamber, toward the bride saddle.