Page 2 of Viking Warriors: Vol. 1-3
The boys would swim in the lake. You should have seen them, kicking into the sunlight as they jumped. They’d disappear under the water and emerge reborn, hair dripping, eyes bright with excitement. All they knew was anticipation of the next jump. It was the same for all their tomorrows, their bodies singing with the pleasure of being alive.
I’d pull off my tunic and leap alongside them, the air cool against my skin, the water chill yet thrilling.
I thought I could be the same. What did it matter that I had no pizzle? Such a little thing, I always thought. Though they were proud enough of them: their pikes, ploughs and pudding pricks. So many names for what lay between their legs.
As for mine, it was without name.Your secret place, my grandmother called it. What was inside? Not much that I could see. It was like another mouth, pink and soft, ridged and smooth, like the inside of my cheek, able to grip my fingers. I would lay my hand there, when I curled in my truckle bed, drawing strange comfort, but I didn’t know what purpose it served.
Until my body began to change, and there was a tug inside me. When I touched between my legs, my fingers were bloodied.
“You’re a woman now.” My grandmother was as pleased as I’d ever seen her. Perhaps, now, she hoped I’d leave off from playing in the forest with the boys, and turn my mind to womanly pursuits.
* * *
Isaw, once, two of the boys, chest to chest, hip to hip, legs wrapped tight. They thought they were unseen, but I was looking, from above, hidden in the branches of a tree.
I watched them.
Hands about their cocks, as if they had but one, not two, joined in stroking.
I touched myself and wished I too had a pike. How easy it looked, to rub that rod upon another’s body, and gain pleasure.
* * *
My grandmother told me how my father died, when the Northmen came. They split him like we do the pigs, she said. Monsters. Gutting a man, to leave his entrails steaming.
She hid under the bed with my mother but isn’t that the first place to look?
They laughed when they found them. Made my grandmother serve her stew, and when they’d eaten it, each took a turn with my mother.
She didn’t cry, my grandmother said. She lifted her skirts and submitted. Brave, some might call it. It kept her alive.
I was born when the January snows fell, and who can say which of those Northmen was my father. What does it matter? I’m half-monster. Half-murderer. Half-something that does not belong. Because of the colour of my hair, and eyes palest blue. Do those things make a person beautiful or ugly? I’d as soon cut the gold from my head.
When I was too small to know her, my mother took a fever and died. My grandmother is strong. It’s her hand that’s raised me. Her hand, and the watchful eye of my aunt; she married our chieftain, and bore a girl, Faline, as dark as I am fair. I was old enough when my aunt passed, for his eye to wander to me, to covet what lies beneath my dress. Men cannot hide their hunger any better than the wolf or the bear.
“Accept him as your husband,” urged my grandmother. “You’ll be safe, and have everything you desire.”
I took her counsel. It appealed to me to dress in finer clothes, and to be admired. My husband would be old enough to have fathered me, and there was something in that which drew my curiosity. He must know so much more than I. What would I learn in his bed?
My days of climbing trees and setting rabbit traps were gone but there were new skills to be learnt, were there not? New pleasures?
On our first night, I laughed when I saw his wrinkled pizzle, tiny beneath his belly. He didn’t name me wife as he pushed me down. I was his teasing whore, a stinking cunt. He wrapped my hair thick about his fist. He had once, I recall, admired the gold of those curls, calling them sun-spun threads. He yanked them from my head as he spurted into me.
I said nothing, and I understood, at last, why my mother had kept from crying out.
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I’d vowed to kill them, or myself, but had chance for neither. What could I do but endure, and hope I’d live another day. I knew that look, as they took the gown from me.
The first, having placed his hands in my husband’s freshly-spilled blood, smeared it, crimson, across my belly, across my breasts. They laughed to see it. He drew his tongue across my skin, tasting death and life. It excited him, for his cock needed no help in finding its way.
I lay upon the bed as they each took their turn. What good would struggle have done? Better to lift my legs and make easy their pleasures. It meant no more than the ram tupping the sheep, or the bull mounting the cow. I’d been bedded enough to take a man, and these were but three.
I was nothing to them, and they nothing to me. They were more vigorous than my husband, their thrusts harder, faster. They were younger, of course, and stronger. Beyond that, I saw little difference in the act of sex. I was a sheath for their sword, a hole into which they might rub to the desired end.
I thought of my mother as they bedded me.
Had they been older, these Northmen, I might have wondered if one were my father. Doesn’t fate play these tricks? To send my own father to rape me would be jest indeed. Such were the ramblings of my mind as they grunted through their labours.
