Epilogue #2
His hand moved first over my hip, then to the curve of my backside.
He parted the cheeks, and stroked there idly for a few moments, calming me or exciting me further, I couldn’t quite tell which.
Then his fingers found the little place that still retained all its power to humiliate me.
Even accustomed as I had become to this use, I could never feel that first slick pressure at my anus without a rush of acute self-consciousness.
It was too intimate, too naughty, and too tender all at once.
I made a tiny sound.
“Relax,” he murmured.
I obeyed as best I could. His fingers worked patiently, opening and soothing, and with each gentle intrusion I felt the old contradiction intensify. I was used to this. My body knew how to yield. The ring of muscle softened under his hand far more readily than it once had.
None of that diminished the thrill of degradation.
If anything, the familiarity made it more psychologically naked.
I could no longer tell myself this was purely force, purely education, purely something done to me from outside.
I had learned to welcome the act. I knew what it did to me, and I wanted it anyway.
That knowledge turned the shame from accident into medium.
It made the blood roar in my ears and the tree stir almost at once, just under my consciousness.
“Good girl,” Henrik said quietly when my body opened for his fingers.
Then the broad, slick head of his cock replaced them.
I drew in a breath and let it out carefully.
The pressure there, no matter how often I submitted to it, always felt impossibly specific.
It felt like the male world laying claim to the most hidden and embarrassing point in me and making me discover, to my disgrace, that I became more myself under that claim.
He pressed forward very slowly. The ring gave way. I gasped into the furs.
“That’s it,” he said. “Easy.”
The stretch resolved into fullness by degrees. The old pain had softened over the months from a crisis into an ache, but that ache still carried enough edge to light up the same pathways. Shame flashed through me with almost chemical swiftness. My mind caught fire in the familiar pattern.
I was a pregnant woman lying on her side in a hidden Viking chamber while her master gently pushed his cock into her anus because she had asked him to.
The thought itself sent me upward.
It happened so fast that I scarcely distinguished bodily sensation from ascent.
Henrik still moved with exquisite care inside me, and at the same time I felt my consciousness gather and rise through the trunk I no longer needed to seek laboriously.
I had traveled the route too often now. The metaphor came when called. The canopy opened almost reflexively.
The leaves above me were green and silver with northern light.
For a moment I only hovered there, suspended in the strange doubleness I had come to know: my body in the furs, the weight of Henrik’s manhood lodged in my bottom, his hand on my hip; and also my self among boughs immense enough to hold weather and time.
I expected at first some mission, some branch leading toward intelligence, some pressure of other systems touching ours.
Instead I found stillness.
No, not stillness. Summer.
The transition came with such gentleness that tears pricked my eyes before I understood why.
The air changed from mythic abstraction to something I could almost smell: warm grass, salt, a sweetness like clover and sun on dry earth.
The branch gave way to a slope. I stood, or seemed to stand on a meadow that tipped softly toward a blue-gray sea.
The light had the long, slanting richness of a northern evening in high summer, when everything seemed both mild and impossibly vivid.
Grass brushed my bare ankles. Wind moved through it in little silver runs.
Beyond the slope the North Sea shone under a pale sky, not violent now but deep and breathing and familiar in some place below thought.
Children’s voices rang out behind me.
I turned at once, and the sight of them struck me so hard with joy that for a moment I simply put my hand to my mouth.
Three.
The oldest boy ran first, fair-haired and long-legged already, his face open with the serious, intent happiness children bring to play as if it were a form of labor.
A smaller boy followed him, broader somehow in the shoulders even in childhood, his laugh less contained, his whole body more heedless.
After them came a girl with pale hair blown loose around her face, quick and watchful and full of some concentrated feminine certainty that hit me like recognition.
My sons. My daughter.
I knew them before I knew anything else.
They moved around me without fear, without strangeness, with the complete trust of children to whom I belonged and who belonged to me.
The younger boy grabbed at my hand and then let go again because he had already seen something in the grass he needed to show me.
The girl leaned briefly against my hip, warm and solid, before darting away.
The eldest turned back from the crest of the slope to make sure I followed, responsible already in the way first children often are.
I laughed.
The sound startled me, because it held no hysteria, no shame, no fractured disbelief. It was the laugh of a woman standing squarely in the middle of her life.
I looked down at myself. My body seemed older, yes, but not dimmed. Stronger through the hips. Full through the breasts. Rooted. I wore a simple summer dress. The wind pressed it lightly against my legs. On my chest rested my grandmother’s pendant.
The sea lay beyond us. The meadow rolled around us. Somewhere not far away I sensed a house before I saw it, white walls perhaps, or pale wood weathered by salt, and windows facing west.
Henrik’s hand had gone between my thighs, his fingers knowing as always on my clit and in my needy, empty sheath.
As I started to come, I saw him, in the vision, a distant figure on the shore, waving to us, his family, beckoning to us to come home and eat what he had caught for us in the little bay.
I could feel that somewhere the Sons of Odin waited for our return, that the vision’s scene represented a respite from our eternal labors like the one we had here in Sicily, making the naughtiest kind of love in the medieval ship sanctuary.
Life, I could see, even as I cried out into a second orgasm, my hips moving between my master’s cock and his skillful fingers, had so many joyful moments in it, of every kind: pure and innocent…
focused and laborious… hot and shameful…
visionary and mysterious… intellectual and scholarly… loving and tender.
I could never see them all, even from the highest bough of Yggdrasil. I would never stop trying, though.
“Yes, Herra,” I gasped. “Oh… oh… yes…”
The End