Chapter 29
Henrik
The drive to Capo Zafferano took forty minutes. I spent most of it watching Ilsa.
The sedan’s tinted windows made the Sicilian morning seem slightly unreal, the coast passing in bright fragments: stone walls, flashes of sea, scrub, terra cotta-roofed villas set back from the road.
Giovanna sat opposite me with the composure of a woman attending a board meeting.
Mateo looked as though he had slept little, which I suspected meant he had slept not at all.
Ilsa sat beside me in her sundress with her hands folded in her lap, back very straight, as if posture might save her from feeling the welts on her bottom or the fact of what waited at the journey’s end.
It didn’t, of course. I could see that in the tiny adjustments she made against the leather seat. In the way her thighs remained close together. In the occasional swallow, the movement of her slim throat above the sundress’s neckline.
I let the silence work upon her.
At one point she glanced at me. Only briefly, and through the reflection in the darkened glass rather than directly. I met her eyes there and watched her drop them at once.
Good girl.
My own body had begun to answer the proximity of the cavern long before the road bent inland.
I felt it first not as lust, though lust was certainly present, but as something like a returning alignment.
The cave under Capo Zafferano had become, in my mind, a kind of balance sheet written in stone: ancient assets, long undervalued, suddenly called back into circulation by the right girl, the right vision, the right convergence of time and blood.
Ilsa had found it. She had seen from the rowing bench and the bride saddle what a bed thrall without a Herra should not see.
That did something to me… and so did the dress.
Another man might have preferred her naked.
I found the cotton far more provocative.
Civilization laid lightly over submission had always struck me as a more dangerous sight than exposed flesh.
Her pale hair had been retied. The little flowers on the dress made her look as if her innocence had returned.
Perhaps it showed that I had traveled far from the shores of medieval Denmark, but my sweet bed thrall with her intimate charms presented in pink lingerie and a flowered sundress swelled my manhood even more intensely than she would have without a stitch of clothing allowed her.
When we turned off the main road, Giovanna crossed one leg over the other and looked at me. “Your expression has changed, Henrik.”
I smiled a little. “Has it?”
“Yes.” She looked toward Ilsa, then back to me. “You look less like a businessman.”
Mateo made a small sound through his nose that might have been amusement.
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” I said.
“You should,” Giovanna replied. “In my experience, men become more honest when they stop pretending commerce is their native language.”
“Commerce is everyone’s native language,” I said. “Most people are simply not fluent in it.”
Ilsa went very still beside me. I felt certain she understood what I meant. From one point of view, as wrong as it might well seem to someone of less intelligence, she knew she was a trade good, just as the naked bed thralls on the longships had been, long ago.
A very valuable trade good—one with whom I had no intention of parting.
When the car finally stopped, I got out first.
The air carried salt and pine. Capo Zafferano stretched before us in hard Sicilian light, the sea below immense and brilliantly indifferent.
The driver opened the other doors. Giovanna emerged with sleek urban poise intact, her heels entirely unsuited to the rough ground.
Mateo followed, narrow and watchful. Then Ilsa stepped out.
For a moment she simply stood there, the light on her hair almost too bright to look at directly.
I watched the place touch her.
I saw the change at once. Her breathing altered.
Her eyes moved past the visible landscape, not unfocused exactly, but focused at a depth beyond the ordinary one.
A small shiver went through her that certainly hadn’t come from any physical chill; it could only, I thought, have come from recognition.
* * *
Ilsa
I had come here only two days before, but though I recognized everything, to the level even of individual boulders and thickets of scrub pine, it all seemed different and new—and yet also known to some other, deeper part of me.
We started down the same path I had taken, in the direction of the rocky beach below, but Henrik quickly began to lead us an entirely different way.
He put one hand lightly at the small of my back and guided me around an outcropping I could have sworn would take us right over the cliff.
We passed through a narrow cut in the rock screened by scrub and shadow.
Giovanna had her heels in her left hand, looking as fashionable barefoot in the wilderness as she had at the agency office in her expensive shoes.
Mateo wore a stoic expression, as if he couldn’t even feel the emotion of surprise.
I could, though: I turned my head to stare back at the path with a little shock of professional humiliation.
I had been here before. I had studied the terrain.
I had found the cavern, the ship, the carvings, and still I had missed this approach entirely.
The hiddenness of it felt deliberate in a way the rational part of me instantly wanted to analyze and catalogue, while some lower part simply accepted that a man like Henrik would know the truer way in.
The stone cooled the air as soon as we entered. The light changed. The world outside dropped away with startling speed, replaced by the mineral dimness and the smell of dust, salt, ancient damp. My pulse jumped.
Henrik walked ahead of us with the confidence of someone returning to a family property. I followed, Giovanna and Mateo behind us, and as the passage widened and the chamber opened, I felt my whole body recognize it before my mind began naming what I saw.
The longship… the drake… with its dragon prow… waited there in the half-light.
It did not look less impossible at my second viewing.
If anything, it looked more so: the worn timbers, the ribs of the hull, the benches, the stern rising with that carved austerity that had already entered my dreams. The sight struck me in the chest with such force that for a moment I had to stop walking.
Henrik did not comment. He only went to the ship and laid his hand on the gunwale as if greeting an old accomplice.
“There,” he said, to Giovanna and Mateo. “And here.”
He showed them the carvings first along the wall and then the panels nearer the bridal chamber, the women bent over saddles and benches, men behind them, the stylized branches rising above, the visual grammar of submission and voyage and use.
I watched Giovanna’s face while she examined them. For the first time since I had met her, I saw something close to unguarded interest. Impressed attention, even, sharpened by rivalry with the very idea of a tradition almost as old as, and perhaps deeper than, her Roman one.
Mateo stepped nearer to one carved panel, scarred hand raised but not touching. “This is older than I expected,” he said quietly.
“Yes,” Henrik replied.
“And explicit,” Giovanna murmured, her dark gaze moving over a figure of a woman displayed in the midst of having her anus penetrated by a warrior’s enormous phallus, her expression somehow a mix of rapture and agony. “Not decorative. Instructional.”
Henrik glanced at her. “Exactly.”
My master had left me to stand a little apart from them.
I listened, and I became aware with growing clarity that something had begun to happen inside me the moment we had crossed into the cavern.
My mind clothed it instinctively in spiritual language because that seemed the easiest vocabulary available to consciousness for this kind of total bodily recognition.
The place felt charged. It felt as if it had itself awakened, and then awakened something inside me.
It felt as if some old, feminine thing in me had lifted its head and remembered itself.
But I knew perfectly well that there was no reason to invoke anything supernatural, and the resulting cognitive dissonance almost felt cruel…
as if I were being forced to shatter the lovely illusion of enchantment that a deep part of me wanted to cast over the fact of my helplessly submissive sexuality.
My body had been trained. My mind had been trained.
Only for a scant twenty-four hours, but with incredible intensity and, apparently, incredible efficiency.
The rituals, the fear, the shame, the orgasms, the beatings, the collars and benches and commands had built a pattern in my nervous system, and now the cavern, with its ship and its carvings and its association with everything that had already been done to me and discovered in me, struck those hidden strings all at once.
My unconscious answered symbol with symbol.
My flesh answered the sacred-seeming context with shameful need.
It felt mystical because human beings are built to experience the deepest operations of their own embodied minds that way.
Knowing that did not diminish it in the slightest.
If anything, the explanation made it more intense. More helplessly real.
I looked at the rowing bench.
I could see, with mortifying clarity, my own body over it as it had been before, and at once I wanted more.
Desperately. Something in me wanted to go further into this system of meanings written directly onto the body.
I wanted to know what the old rite actually did to a woman’s mind when her intellect was no longer pretending to stand outside it.
I wanted, with a hunger that dissolved several layers of self-deception in a single instant, to descend more deeply into the non-miraculous mystery of the v?lva: how a woman was trained to submit…
to display… to suffer the greatest indignity, her master’s hardness in her most intimate place… to climax on command…
I wanted to know how she could find in that condition, whole regions of perception and understanding normally hidden from herself.
I felt my breathing change. My pussy had begun to pulse. I knew, with mortification and with a strange almost scholarly awe, that I was becoming wet simply from standing in the cave, looking at the ship, and knowing what they all knew about me now.
Henrik turned.
His eyes found me at once, as if whatever had awakened in me had indeed called to him and he had heard it in a register beneath language. I don’t think I moved. I think my body simply gave itself away in posture and breath and face.
He came to me in three strides.
“Look at you,” he said, but the words sounded unlike his usual words. Rougher. Lower. Less like an executive and more like the carved men on the wall, the ones who did not need to justify use because use was already part of the order of things.
I swallowed. “Herra—”
He caught the front of my sundress in both hands and tore it straight down.
I gasped. The sound seemed very loud in the cavern.
The cotton gave way with shocking ease. Cool air hit my skin and then his hands were on me.
He stripped the ruined dress from my shoulders and down my arms, dragged the pink bra away, hooked his fingers in the lace of the panties and ripped those too.
The tiny pretty things Giovanna had put on me became shreds in moments, their civilized femininity annihilated by male impatience.
I heard Giovanna take a breath behind me. Mateo said nothing.
I stood naked in the cavern again but for the pendant, warm again at my neck.
Wunjo… for v?lva, now and from this moment forward.
My skin rising in gooseflesh, my breasts bare, my hairless sex exposed and already embarrassingly slick.
Henrik looked down and made a sound that went straight through me.
“Yes,” he said. “I thought so.”
I covered nothing. I didn’t know if I had forgotten, or if I knew better than to try to hide from my Viking Herra.
He took my arm and turned me, then propelled me toward the ship.
I stumbled on the last step because my knees had gone uncertain.
The bench met the front of my thighs. He pushed, and I bent over it at once, palms catching on the worn wood, my cheek nearly touching the same surface I had laid myself over, and then my dream body had known as my deflowered body had slept.
The old smoothness of it against my skin sent such a vivid rush through me that I whimpered.
My body remembered. The pendant dangled away, over the end of the bench, leaving the memory of its warmth behind, in my chest.
Henrik’s hand spread over the small of my back.
Another took hold of my braid, pushing at the back of my head to bend me lower.
I could feel the open exposure of myself behind, the vulnerable spread of thighs, the ache of need.
I heard his zipper, the rough drag of fabric.
Then his palm came down once, hard, on the already marked flesh of my bottom.
I cried out.
The blow seemed to complete the circuit. Pain flashed over the lingering welts from Giovanna’s mastix, and under it my pussy… my cunt… my fisse… I clenched and flooded with fresh wetness so shamelessly that I could feel it.
“Henrik,” Giovanna said behind us, her voice very calm and therefore somehow more intimate with what she was witnessing. “You weren’t exaggerating.”
“No,” he said.
Then he thrust into me.