Chapter 16
Ilsa
My Herra began to fuck my face.
As if from the top of the cell’s dome, four or five feet over his blond head, I seemed to look down on the obscene act: a tall, strong man thrusting his manhood in and out of a naked, bound young woman’s mouth.
Face fucking. Fucking her face.
I had never experienced anything so degrading. I had never watched such a thing happen to a girl, even on some terrible porn video, perhaps out of the corner of my eye on a guy’s unguarded screen.
I had heard the phrase, though… and every time I had wished I hadn’t, because of the scarlet blush it had instantly brought to my cheeks.
Hovering there, above myself, I understood, with a clarity that arrived too late to do me any good, the expression that the artist had somehow captured on the faces of the women in the carvings, in the cavern of the longship.
It didn’t really represent suffering, but it didn’t represent pleasure, either.
It seemed to occupy a territory between those two things: a place where the body’s experience outpaces the mind’s capacity to categorize it, and the face simply gives up trying to manage its own appearance, as the person inside the body the man is using floats upward and gazes down upon herself as his possession.
Henrik’s hand at the back of my head had no cruelty in it.
That was a thing I had not expected, could not have predicted from my prior experience of the world, which had not included anything like face fucking.
My Herra held me in place firmly and steadily, with obvious certainty about his right to use me for his pleasure.
That certainty… the complete, unhurried confidence that communicated itself through his palm…
brought a perverse need between my thighs that made me contract the muscles there in a shameful quest for satisfaction.
Instead of satisfaction, though, I only achieved more arousal, and I sobbed around the thrusting phallus at the urgency of the sensation.
He moved slowly at first. My jaw ached with the stretch of accommodating him. I gripped the iron posts until my knuckles hurt, and I breathed through my nose in the measured rhythm Nymphobus Oceanus had taught me in the intake room.
I focused on the breathing. The breathing gave me something to do, some small agency, a task I could perform correctly or incorrectly.
“Good,” Henrik said, above me. His voice had changed again.
The lecturing quality had gone. What remained was lower and rougher and stripped of its careful construction, like a building under construction, before the siding goes on.
“Good girl. Your mouth feels good on my tol. Keep breathing. Take your Herra.”
I took my Herra.
The phrase assembled itself in my mind as if I were quoting it in a scholarly article: take your Herra. As if it were a line I had found in a primary source I had adduced. As if I could hold it at arm’s length on the end of an academic footnote and examine it from a safe distance.
But I was on my knees between iron posts in a volcanic stone cell under Palermo, with a Viking’s massive penis in my mouth, and his large, warm hand holding my head still, so that he could enjoy himself.
He taught me his rhythm, and my body learned it, the way a body learns physical tasks…
not through understanding but through repetition, the accumulation of small adjustments, the gradual discovery of what works and what doesn’t.
I squeezed again, down there, and it worked. To my absolute horror, I produced a whimpering sound in the back of my throat that I could not have described as distress.
Henrik heard it. I knew he heard it because his hand stilled for just a moment, and then his thumb moved along the back of my skull in a slow arc that seemed almost involuntary, as if he hadn’t decided to do it.
As if my small, treasonous sound had reached him somewhere he hadn’t expected to be reached.
Then the rhythm resumed.
I thought, from the elevated perspective at the top of the dome where it seemed I could form ideas, about the bride saddle.
About the compulsion I had felt there in that bridal chamber, the little stone room like this one but also unlike it.
I had spent considerable effort since that afternoon explaining to myself that my lewd conduct had represented merely an artifact of isolation and physical stimulation and the particular vulnerability of a confined space.
I had been alone, I had told myself. I had been overstimulated. The vision had been a product of academic obsession and a nervous system pushed past its usual operating parameters.
I definitely wasn’t alone now, though. Henrik’s fingers tightened slightly at the back of my head, and he pressed forward a little further than before.
Take your Herra.
I made another whining, whimpering noise.
My hips shifted, my knees bending a little on the kneeling stool.
The welts on my thighs and bottom, which had settled into that deep, pulsing warmth, seemed to intensify with the movement, and between my thighs the slickness that Giovanna had so thoroughly documented with her professional fingers became something I could feel with every small shift of my weight.
A Viking… Herra Henrik… a big, strong man was using me, I thought.
He used my mouth for his pleasure, steadily and with every indication that he intended to continue doing so until he had taken what he wanted, and my body’s response to this fact was to clench and ache and need in a way that bore no relationship to anything I had ever decided about myself.
The tree came to the edges of my vision.
Not fully, not with the overwhelming totality it had carried in the bride chamber.
Just at the periphery: a suggestion of roots coming down through the volcanic stone, a whisper of branches somewhere above the low dome of the cell’s ceiling.
The cold I could sense among the boughs didn’t seem unpleasant.
I breathed through my nose, gripped the iron posts, and received my Herra. The tree waited at the edges of things the way it had apparently always been waiting.
Abruptly, Henrik pulled his cock from my mouth. The warm weight of him vanished from my mouth. My jaw ached in his absence with a relief that I couldn’t entirely separate from a mortifying, helpless movement of my tongue, as if in search of a hard penis to please.
He disappeared from my field of vision, moving behind me, and every nerve in my body oriented itself toward the sound of his footsteps.
They sounded deliberate. He seemed to do everything that way, without hurry.
It didn’t seem to have anything to do with casualness…
but everything to do with absolute confidence in the outcome.
My Herra had no need to hurry, because he knew he would get exactly what he wanted.
I heard the soft sound of something being laid on the stone floor behind me, and then his hands found the clips at my ankle cuffs and freed them from the lower rings of the posts.
Then his left arm came around my waist. Without further warning he began to pull me backward and at the same time to lift me up, off the kneeling stool.
He pressed his right hand onto my back, bending me at the waist. He lowered me a little, to the thick mat I realized he had set on the floor to receive me.
His hand kept pressing, and I let out a sob as he bent me all the way over until my elbows rested on the stone, and my face rested atop the kneeling stool.
My Herra, apparently satisfied with the position of my back, took his hand from there and used it to take hold of the stool and push it forward and away, leaving my face free to descend until my forehead touched the smooth stone between my wrists, still bound to the iron poles.
Then I felt his hands between my thighs, drawing my knees apart on the mat, exposing me completely.
I understood. I understood with a full-body certainty that arrived in my stomach first and then moved outward to my fingers, my toes, and the suddenly very acute skin of my freshly bared places.
“Wait,” I said. My voice came out smaller than I intended. “Herra Henrik, please… wait? I need… please, just…”
He didn’t answer with words. The broad palm of his right hand came to rest again on the small of my back. A thrill of fear and helpless arousal shot through my body at that touch.
“Please,” I said again, to the stone floor. “Please, Herra. Please, I… I’m a… I mean, I’ve never…”
“I know,” he said. His voice came from behind me, above me, and the quiet certainty of it settled over my spine like a hand.
“I know, lille en. Your sweet little fisse has never known a man’s hard tól.
That will change very soon, for you are a bed thrall now.
It will hurt at first, but you will endure it, and soon enough you will learn to enjoy your service on my reer. ”
His hand moved a little, in a soothing circle. It seemed to communicate that he knew exactly who, what, and where I was and that he had no intention of proceeding without me.
Which was, I realized, not the same as proceeding slowly.
“Please,” I said, my voice cracking entirely. “Please, I need… please just…”
His fingers moved from the small of my back, tracing downward with a patience that seemed designed to make language impossible.
They traveled over more and more shameful territory until they found the slick, aching center of me.
The sound I made against the stone floor had nothing scholarly in it at all.
My Herra began to work me. He fondled and rubbed and pressed inside me with the same knowledge he had demonstrated before, sure and steady and entirely without hurry.
The orgasm that had been building since Giovanna’s intake room, the jade-colored bath, and the preparation bench gathered itself from its long, maddening suspension and began to rise.
The tree came back to the edges of my vision.
The roots went down. The cold between the roots and the branches seemed to move through me in waves that alternated with the heat from my master’s touch.
“Please,” I heard myself say, but it sounded different now. The word had turned itself inside out somewhere between the first time I had said it and this time. It no longer meant please stop or please wait or please give me back some portion of myself that I recognize.
This please meant something else entirely, something that the women in the carvings had known and that the cushion in the alcove had absorbed across however many centuries, something that my body had apparently been oriented toward since long before I had found the mosaic with its inscription in Younger Futhark.
“Please, Herra Henrik,” I whispered, my forehead pressed against the volcanic stone, my bottom raised, my back arched, and his fingers moving with their terrible, patient knowledge.
“Please what, Ilsa?” he asked, his voice a low growl as he crouched over me like a ferocious beast set to devour its prey.
“Please…”
He took his hand away, and again I felt how cruel patience could be.
“Oh, God…” I whispered.
“Please what?” my master murmured.
The words that came next horrified me even as I heard myself say them, even as I understood with absolute, mortifying clarity that I meant every one.
“Please… take me. Please. I want you to… I need you to…”
His fingers returned. My hips bucked against his hand and I let out a desperate sob.
“Please what?” Herra Henrik repeated.
“Oh, God… please… please fuck me, Herra,” I moaned.
The silence that followed had the quality of the moment before lightning, when the air changes, the hair rises, and the world seems to hold its breath.
In that silence, with my face against the stone floor of a cell beneath a Sicilian city and my bottom raised in offering, I understood to my distress that this man had in fact already begun to make me his.
Something about his patience… something about the way he clearly had no intention of violating me except to the extent that apparently, crazily I craved violation…
I was falling for him.
The thought arrived with the clarity and the terrible inconvenience of a finding that overturns an entire theoretical framework: all at once, the way the right translation of a difficult inscription sometimes arrives—suddenly obvious, suddenly the only reading that makes sense of every element, and completely, irreversibly true.
I was falling for Henrik Magnusson, my master, my appointed Herra. The man whose hand worked my pussy relentlessly, preparing me still further for my true initiation as his submissive sexual servant… his bed thrall… his kneppet?j… his fuck toy.
Oh, I thought. Oh, no.