Chapter 20 #2
“Magnusson trains them well,” said another voice, from somewhere aft of me. I felt hands on my hips, and then the blunt, insistent heat of a second man pressing from behind against the entrance to my vagina.
No longer virgin, murmured a dream voice in my head. Your Herra took you… fucked you… you are open and available…
I cried out around the cock in my mouth, which made the man using my face grip my head more firmly and make a low sound of appreciation. The one behind me pushed forward steadily, without haste, filling me in a way that my dream body received with a helpless, shuddering clench.
“—the East,” the first man said again, his voice rougher now, his rhythm deepening.
“Whatever rises there, it concerns Ymir’s body.
The old accounts speak of it. The body of the first giant, from whose flesh the world was made.
Someone in the East understands the old knowledge.
Not our knowledge, but knowledge of the same root. ”
“A rival understanding,” said the man behind me, his hands tightening on my hips. He thrust forward and I sobbed, and the sound came out muffled and distorted around the hardness in my mouth. Neither man paused for it. “Or an enemy understanding. If they learn to use what Ymir’s body holds—”
“Then the tree suffers,” said the first man, simply.
Yggdrasil, I thought. Yggdrasil suffers. The thought arrived with the clarity of something I had already known and had simply waited to remember.
The man using my face came with a guttural sound and held my head very still. I swallowed because there was nothing else to do, and the man behind me gripped my hips harder and fucked me with a quickening urgency that built on everything my bound, helpless body had already been made to feel.
I felt the pressure of my chin against the bench when the first man withdrew.
I hung my head, my cheeks burning with shame at how aroused their brutal use of me had gotten me.
I looked down, at the ribs of the longship’s hull and breathed through my nose and felt the second man spend himself inside me with a grunt of satisfaction.
He withdrew. He said something to someone else. I heard footsteps on the deck planking.
A third man came around to my head and crouched to gaze into my eyes.
He looked younger than the other two, with a scar along his jaw that reminded me of Henrik’s scar, though the face seemed very different.
He looked at me with the frank, assessing expression of a man examining a tool made by another man, for a purpose they both understand well.
“Henrik Magnusson is a lucky man,” he said, to the others, though he kept his eyes on me. “Mouth and fisse both fit for a jarl’s pleasure.”
He took my face in his hands, tilting it up slightly, and the gesture was almost tender in its deliberateness, which somehow made it more profoundly dismaying, for my dream self, than roughness would have been.
“And he will take her r?vhul on the bride saddle when he brings her home.”
He shook his head, his expression displaying honest envy of Henrik’s good fortune.
“She’ll go to the tree then. I’d wager a good sword on it.”
“Use the slut’s mouth and stop philosophizing,” said one of the others, from somewhere near the stern.
The young man with the scar smiled, and opened my mouth with his thumb, straightening at the same time to present his massive phallus to my lips. I received him.
He talked more while he used me. All three of them talked, over my body and across the breadth of the longship.
It seemed the conversation of men on a long voyage who have done everything there is to do for the ship, and so have returned to talking as the only remaining occupation.
They said more about the East, about the traders’ reports, about the pattern of what had been reported and what it meant.
I listened, without being able to follow or make any actual sense of the words.
The motion of the hull rocked me against the bench with a slow rhythm that matched and then counterpointed the rhythm of the man using my face, and the bindings at my wrists and ankles held me in my place with a totality that I had stopped fighting somewhere between the first man and the second.
I was a bed thrall on a longship. This was what bed thralls on longships were for.
My dreaming self had accepted this with a completeness that my waking self would need some time to examine.
The young man came, shooting his warm essence down my throat, and I received that too.
He withdrew slowly. His thumb moved along my jaw in what I thought might have been a gesture of genuine gratitude before he straightened and moved away.
I lifted my face again, my lips numb and strange as I worked the ache from my jaw.
I could just see over the opposite gunwale where the sea stretched abeam the longship’s voyage, enormous and gray and cold and entirely indifferent to the small wooden vessel moving across it.
The horizon lay very far away, a clean line between the gray water and the gray sky, and for a moment it was simply that: water and sky and wind, the creak of the rigging and the smell of salt.
Then I saw it.
It stood at the horizon, or behind it, or perhaps the horizon was simply the place where the eye stopped and the tree began—I couldn’t determine the geometry precisely, and some part of me understood that the geometry didn’t matter. It was there. Yggdrasil.
The trunk seemed too wide to measure and the branches moved in a wind that had nothing to do with the air filling the longship’s sail.
The roots went down into the sea itself, or into whatever lay below the sea, below the world’s floor, into the place where the world’s foundations rested on nothing at all.
It loomed over the sea the way a mountain looms over a valley, present in a way that made everything else feel provisional. The ship, the men, the sea itself—all of it temporary and small against the tree’s permanence.
I lay bound to the bench and looked at it.
My body ached with the use the three men had made of me, and between my thighs the warmth they had left there pulsed with my heartbeat, and I was a bed thrall on a longship being carried East toward something that concerned the body of the first giant from whose flesh the world was made.
Yggdrasil stood at the edge of everything and waited, as it had apparently always been waiting, with the patience of something older than patience itself.
I could not reach it. Not from here. Not with my wrists bound to the bench’s iron rings and the horizon between us. But I understood, with the same below-threshold certainty that had been assembling strange pictures in me since the café, that the distance was not the point.
The point was that I could see it, there, looming over my dreamscape.
I woke with salt on my lips, and it took me long moments to remember that that brine must have come from my tears at my brutal defloration on my new master’s cock, rather than the brine of the sea.