Chapter 25
Ilsa
“There was a time, many hundreds of years ago, when we believed what the skalds sang, about the women we claimed as bed thralls and mothers of our children. That for those to whom the gift came, their visions and dreams held literal truth, sent from Asgard, and any contradictions among them, or differences from what actually occurred, sprang from the v?lva’s own failure to report exactly what she had seen. ”
I felt my brow crease as I tried to follow my master’s logic.
Sven nodded from the screen in agreement, but Henrik seemed to be telling Leo Aetnaeus and Bellatrix Hestiaea something different from what he had told me.
A moment later, though, his reasoning fell into place for me as he continued, and I gained a new piece of this extraordinary puzzle.
As shameful as it all was, my intellect couldn’t keep from finding the cryptic history utterly fascinating.
“Over the last century, though, we have studied our annals and our v?lur’s visions in a scientific way, and we have understood that what they see—both in their waking visions upon the bride saddle and in their dreams after we claim them—comes from the extraordinary acuity of their unconscious minds.
A bed thrall like Ilsa can interpret the world in ways of which no other human we know is capable. ”
A bed thrall like me. A rare kind of bed thrall, apparently. A v?lva in the making, according to the men who kept those records in the archive beneath Rouen.
As my Herra went on, speaking in his measured, exact way, I took my hands from my stomach and let them rest at my sides, the wrist cuffs clicking softly as my arms descended.
The skin of my belly felt warm and slightly tacky where I had rubbed.
I stared at the curved stone ceiling and felt the confusion of what was happening inside me arrange itself into something I couldn’t ignore.
First… that crazy pride. Sven Hallstrom had called me rare.
The leo, who had watched my binding with amber eyes that seemed to find most things beneath full attention, had granted my progression, too.
And my Herra had said nothing really specific, but as he spoke I could feel his gaze on the side of my face: steady, present, and containing more information than its surface suggested.
Underneath the pride, though, utter degradation. The two things were not opposites in this room and had apparently never been, and I had begun to understand that this world had somehow been built precisely on that fact.
And underneath both of them… an emotion I had identified in the cell with the same awful clarity I had brought to the inscription in the mosaic border…
affection. It had no business existing. It was objectively insane, a textbook case of so many things my rational mind could name and diagnose and explain, and it existed anyway with the same impervious, illogical-but-spiritually-true rootedness as the Worldtree in the volcanic stone beneath my hands and knees.
I felt it most acutely when I looked at Henrik’s face, which I kept trying and failing not to do.
It produced in him no visible response except that small, almost involuntary crinkle at the corners of his gray eyes that I had begged myself to stop noticing.
He looked at me, then. I looked away first. He continued, and more of the puzzle took shape in my mind even as I tried to push away the idea that I had fallen in love with the modern Viking who had brought so many fascinating, shameful, needed things into focus for me.
“Each v?lva’s mind and imagination therefore construct her own language,” my master said.
“Together, she and her Herra discover how to read that language: some matters are clear, others darker. At the same time, though, we have also—rather to the surprise of many of our sages, Sons of Odin and the experienced v?lur we call our m?er alike—verified the importance of certain universal symbols, handed down to us in the annals. A dream in which a new v?lva sees Yggdrasil from the rowing bench, on a longship, where she has been shared is one of those.”
“And what does it mean?” Giovanna demanded. “This seems like a lot of Nordic nonsense to me.”
My eyes traveled to the woman I had learned to call my mistress. On her face I saw an expression that seemed to mingle skepticism with something else I took a moment to identify.
Envy? Yes, absolutely: Giovanna, somewhere deep down, wished she had the gift I apparently did. I felt a tiny smile play across my lips. I quelled it immediately as a thrill of fear of my mistress’s mastix traveled through my body.
Leo Aetnaeus spoke next.
“Our Ostia agents, like the bellatrix here, are often employed as intelligence analysts. We know the power of the submissive intellect and imagination. We have never identified anything so… mystical about it.”
From the monitor, Sven broke in.
“We must ask you to trust us. You may also verify. Henrik, do you have any objection to Bellatrix Hestiaea continuing to witness your training of your bed thrall, and to participate as the bellatrix chooses? We, like you, have a tradition of teaching our girls to pleasure one another.”
I bit my lip. I didn’t know whether to dread my mistress’s continued role in my mortifying, thrilling development as my Herra’s fuck toy or to welcome it.
“I have no objection,” Henrik replied. “And to answer your question, bellatrix, this symbol has been found to mean that there is a world-changing event on the metaphorical horizon. New v?lur dreamt that way before Sweden invaded Russia in 1707, and before the Nazis invaded Norway in 1940. You may call it coincidence if you like, but if you allow me to do as I wish with Ilsa, we may well be able to prove the symbol’s validity to your satisfaction. ”
“And what is it you wish to do?” Leo Aetnaeus asked.
“I want to bring her back to our longship cavern,” Henrik said.
He had his hands on the back of a chair, and his voice had shifted into the register I had learned meant the proposal of something formal.
“To the bridal chambers. I want to remove these leathers, and break her, nude on the bride saddle, with strap and reer.”
He looked at the leo first, then at the screen.
“If I take her properly—whip her well, then take her r?vhul with the proper authority on the saddle, entirely naked as the old rite demands—I think she’ll go to the upper branches. I think we’ll get the full vision. Not fragments. Not the horizon.” He paused. “The tree itself.”
The words took a moment to reach all the way through the warm spell his theoretical account of dreams and visions seemed to have cast over me. When they arrived, they arrived all at once. Whip her well… take her r?vhul… with the proper authority… on the saddle.
The bride saddle. He meant to do it… what he had promised in the cell…
the thing he had said would open the path upward, the path to the branches…
and he meant to do it in the cavern, near the longship, in the place where the carvings showed women in exactly the posture he was describing, with exactly the expression on their faces that I now understood from the inside.
I bit my lower lip very hard. My fingers found the edge of the bench and gripped it.
On the screen, Sven remained quiet for a long moment.
I could see the rough-cut stone of the Rouen chamber behind him, and the dim light there caught the edges of his blond hair.
He seemed to be thinking—not hesitating, but thinking with a deliberate thoroughness, as if searching his memory of the annals of his mind, wanting to give them their due weight before he spoke.
“Yes,” he said at last, and the single syllable carried the formal quality of a pronouncement. “Bring her to the cavern. Put her on the bride saddle and break her there, and let her go to the tree.” He paused. “I will take Mary’s anus on my own saddle here in Rouen at the same time.”
Leo Aetnaeus frowned. “You will…” he began, clearly working to grasp the import of Sven’s words.
“I will have my own v?lva riding the bride saddle while Henrik’s does, there in Sicily,” Sven said.
His voice was measured, but carried an edge of challenge.
I thought I could tell he had proposed something that the evidence supported even though it sounded impossible.
“To see if they can find each other in the branches of Yggdrasil.”
My master had begun to nod.
“To see if Ilsa’s encounter with the Chinese woman represents a real possibility.
To see if v?lur can somehow be together when they travel the trunk and the boughs, and at the same time to see if we should think of whoever is behind that girl—the man disciplining her and his comrades, if he has them—as a force that can send women to Yggdrasil as we do. ”
Sven’s pale eyes moved to me briefly, and then back to Henrik. Then he nodded, and spoke musingly, going back over the facts.
“Ilsa described the Chinese woman as looking up at her from a lower branch, after her master had just taken her anus with his cock.” He let the silence hold for a moment.
“So I want to know if she can see Mary, if they both go to the tree at the same time. We don’t know, from a scientific perspective, how it could possibly work. If it does work, though…”
Giovanna nodded, a look of grudging satisfaction in her eyes.
“We want to know about it.”
The silence that followed felt to me as if several people were doing arithmetic simultaneously and arriving at slightly different sums. The leo’s amber eyes moved between the screen and Henrik with the expression of a man being asked to accept a methodology he finds irregular.
Giovanna’s dark gaze was on Sven’s face with a focus that was its own form of skepticism, despite her obvious interest.
“Very well,” Leo Aetnaeus said, finally, his voice decisive and his chin descending an inch or two for emphasis.
“Bellatrix, you should feed and water your columba, and then perform the rite of deligature in front of your nymphobus, here in the mithraeum. After that, dress her and bring her to the office. We’ll have a car take the three of you to Capo Zafferano. ”
“Deligature?” my Herra asked, frowning a little. I swallowed hard as I tried to piece together the etymology. Not from delegate: the leo’s Italian accent left no doubt about that, the i clear in the word’s center.
“Untying,” Giovanna told him. “When a columba goes forth without her leathers, she must be taught to wear them in her heart.”
Taught. I felt my forehead crease.
“Interesting,” Sven said from the monitor.
“We have similar ideas about, shall we say, the dialectic of bondage and freedom, and its relationship to civilization. And as you know, my Mary is also a columba of your order. I find the leathers productive of a good deal of helpful reflection in her, whether she’s wearing them or not. ”
Mary… the other bed thrall. What was she like? What had she been through? Would I see her, somehow on the tree? They all pronounced the name in its English form—was Mary British? American?
“Henrik, would you join us in the refectory after you shower and dress?” Giovanna asked. “Then you can see that your girl is well taken care of, as well as witness the rite of deligature, so that she knows you will hold her accountable for the lesson the nymphobus and I will deliver.”
“Of course,” my master responded. “I look forward to it.”
I had almost forgotten that unlike the four others present—the three in person and the virtual one on the screen—I alone lay naked and bound and spread open on a bench, listening to them decide how to dispose of my body. It came back in a rush as my master turned his full attention to me.
He came to stand next to the bench, looming over me in his red robe, a smile on his face high above me.
My heart raced as he stooped, suddenly. My Herra put his left hand behind my neck, raising my face slightly from the cushion wedged there, while his right hand took gentle hold of my collar in his long fingers, as if to remind me of its presence.
I whimpered into his mouth as he kissed me long and roughly, invading my mouth with his tongue, teaching me to acknowledge his ownership.
When he finally broke the kiss and drew back his own face, I saw a light in his eyes that brought helpless warmth to my chest even as my stomach lurched in fear of what it meant about me and my future.
“I’ll see you soon, lille en,” he told me. “Be a good girl for your mistress.”