Chapter 4
Ilsa
The chamber felt small, but not confining. It felt… cozy. I stood over the terrible thing… the horrid bride saddle. I needed to know.
For research.
I needed to understand the artifact from the inside, so to speak—the arrangement of the thing, the practical reality of its design, the way a medieval craftsman had thought about the female body when he built it.
That was the academic justification I assembled in my mind with the speed of long practice, even as my hands had already moved to the hem of my tee shirt.
I folded it after I had drawn it over my head.
I folded my tee shirt with the same methodical neatness I brought to the sorting of potsherds, and I set it on the floor.
Then my cargo shorts, unbuttoned with fingers that I refused to acknowledge were trembling.
Then my bra. Then—and here I stared at the wall for a moment and breathed and kept going—my panties.
All of it eminently sensible for an archaeologist: the tee shirt was white, but the rest, from cargo shorts to bra to panties, was resolutely beige. Not the clothing of a girl who would stand naked in the light of her torch, in a secret cavern, in front of a thousand-year-old bride saddle.
Scholarship. Obviously, I wouldn’t write this particular experiment up.
I would write about the bride saddle, though.
From a feminist perspective, of course. Whatever I experienced here would give the article I would write, about our new understanding of the history of the Normans in Sicily, in light of the extraordinary find I had made, a special force.
When I raged against the medieval Vikings and their oppressive cult, I would be able to rage from an informed perspective.
I put my hands on the smooth wooden bars attached to the beam that rose from the front of the saddle.
I swallowed hard as I swung my right leg over the padded central assembly, which did resemble a narrow, abbreviated saddle.
With a humiliating little whimper, I bent my knees so that my naked flesh just touched the surface of it.
The whimper became a whine as I realized that the leather felt warm.
Warm, the way the rowing bench had been warm, the way my grandmother’s pendant was warm.
Somewhere in my mind I understood that the warmth came from my perception of what was happening, rather than from any real heat—let alone some supernatural effect.
But it felt to me as if the terrible saddle had been waiting for a feminine body and now expressed something very close to welcome.
I lowered more of my weight onto it slowly, the way I might make my way into water of unknown depth, one hand on each of the curved handles at the front.
My knees found the padded rests that were spaced with an exactness that suggested the craftsman had known precisely what the average young woman’s body looked like and how it bent.
He or she had clearly cared about the comfort of the girl who must ride the saddle.
I found that notion, given the context, both touching and terrifying.
The central ridge of the saddle pressed against me where I could feel myself to be shockingly, helplessly wet.
I made a new sound. A very quiet sound, but in the acoustics of the stone chamber it came back to me from the walls.
I gripped the handles harder and breathed through my nose, and in my mind—because I could not seem to stop my mind from doing this any more than I could stop my hips from doing what they were now doing—I heard a voice.
Ride.
Not my voice at all: a man’s voice, very deep. Low and unhurried, speaking in Old Norse. The same voice from the longship vision, but closer now, filling the chamber the way the warmth filled the leather beneath me.
Ride, girl. Move your hips. Learn what my saddle teaches. You will need to be open and ready for the tool when I take what belongs to me.
My hips moved. I moved them. I did this deliberately and then I did it because I had lost the ability to stop.
The ridge of the saddle fit the shape of my body with a thoroughness that seemed designed rather than accidental…
and of course it was designed… which somehow represented the most overwhelming thought I had yet managed in this cavern full of overwhelming thoughts.
Someone… some Northern craftsman… had built this thing to do exactly this.
Someone else… a captive girl… had sat where I was sitting, rocked the way I was rocking, gripped these handles with whitening knuckles while a man stood behind her and watched.
That’s it. Open for me. Your r?vhul must be ready. I will take you there very soon, and you will learn to welcome me.
My face burned so furiously that I could sense the interface of the heat radiating off my own cheeks with the cool air of the cavern.
The degradation of the fantasy—the specific, terrible degradation of it—was doing something to me that I had no language for, because no words I possessed had ever been used for this particular circumstance.
Naked on my master’s bride saddle. Riding… rubbing… my… my fisse… back and forth… so slippery down there… so needy…
There was a knob under the padding, right below my clit. My pussy couldn’t seem to get enough of it. I rocked, and the saddle rewarded me with a slow, building pressure that gathered at my center and began to climb.
I was going to come. I couldn’t help it.
How could I help it? My little fisse needed it so badly.
The girls who had ridden this saddle before…
they had had the cock in their mouths and their pussies already, hadn’t they?
So much luckier than I, with my body untouched by a man’s hardness… unopened… unused…
I kept my left hand on the handle. I moved my right hand back.
My face, if possible, burned hotter. My fingers, shaking now in earnest, found the cleft of my bottom.
I understood from the carvings exactly what the bride saddle was designed to present, to position, to offer up—the specific part of a woman that a Viking warrior on his way home from a successful raid had apparently considered his particular and personal prize.
I touched myself there with two trembling fingertips and let out a cry of shame and need and pleasure that echoed off the walls.
Good girl, the voice said, in the language of men who had sailed cold seas and taken what they wanted without apology. The praise seemed to land in the center of my chest, and I came apart.
It started low and rose. It rose past anything I had managed on the rowing bench or in any private moment of my entire adult life, which had not included many private moments of that kind because I had been extremely busy with my academic career and also, I now understood, had simply never had the correct stimulus.
The correct stimulus, apparently, was medieval sex furniture and a phantom Viking’s voice telling me I was a good girl for touching my own anus while I rocked myself to orgasm in a secret limestone cavern.
This information about myself arrived simultaneously with the orgasm, which felt both exquisite and deeply inconvenient.
I cried out. The sound bounced off every wall. I pressed my fingers harder against the impossibly sensitive, shamefully pleasurable place my right hand had found. The orgasm extended itself, crested again, and I gripped the handle so hard my knuckles ached.
And then the tree came back.
This time it arrived in my imagination with the full weight of something real…
all the more real for existing in a different dimension, truer than the one I had inhabited until this moment.
It had waited for me, with enormous patience, for exactly this moment—for the precise instant when my rational mind’s grip on itself finally, entirely, gave way.
The cavern disappeared. The bride saddle did not disappear—I could still feel it beneath me, still feel the ridge, the warmth, and the ache of my own fingers—but around it the limestone walls dissolved and in their place rose something so vast that my mind could not hold its edges.
I understood, with the small part of my intellect that had not drowned in sensation, that this was what the volur had described.
This was what the Norse chronicler Snorri had gestured at, inadequately, when he set down what the seers told him.
A metaphor, certainly. A symbolic language for an internal state, even. But also the actual structure of the thing, the immensity of the Worldtree, its roots going down into three darknesses that I knew without knowing how I knew them, its branches spreading into the cold between worlds.
I was on it. I was traveling along it the way you travel in a dream, with the logic of dreams, without moving my body at all, except for the naughty thing my hips and my haunches couldn’t stop doing.
The small rational part of me—the part that had gotten a 4.
0 through my undergraduate years, written two journal articles, knew the Younger Futhark, and could read Old Norse with a dictionary—was watching from a great distance and thinking, with a calm that was really just shock wearing scholarship’s clothing: this is the prophetesses’s vision.
This is precisely what the primary sources describe. The volur went to the tree.
The rest of me simply arrived there.
I moved along a bough—was moved, perhaps, since I had no sense of directing myself—and the bough extended further than I had expected.
As though the tree were larger than its own mythology.
The cold between the branches was absolute but not unpleasant, and the light that filtered through the leaves was a color I had never seen before and could not name now, even though I had seen it.
Green, like a real tree in spring, and red-gold, as in autumn; both at once, but definitely not the brown that should have resulted. Ultragold or infragreen? Somewhere inside me, a wild spirit giggled at the nonsense.
Then I was looking down.