Page 3 of Her Viking Guardian

Heat surged into my cheeks as I started to make out the subject of the vast majority of the carvings.

Most of the figures were naked. Much worse, in most of the scenes…

Oh, God, I thought, my mind exaggerating only a little bit, they’re all fucking, aren’t they?

CHAPTER 2

Ilsa

I was a virgin. Mostly because relationships, I had thought all my adult life, were bullshit. Also because I’d been raised pretty conservatively, and thus when I looked at those walls covered with those frankly pornographic carvings, my face burned like the surface of the sun.

To my horror, though, my face wasn’t the only part of me that had begun to burn.

I made myself look at the carvings the way I would look at any artifact. Methodically. Starting at the left-hand edge of the nearest wall and moving right. That was the scholarly approach. That was what I did.

The men were enormous. That was the first thing the artists had established, with an anatomical frankness that left absolutely nothing to interpretation. The Vikings in these carvings were rendered with the kind of reverent attention to masculine proportion that I associated with the most unambiguous fertility cult imagery I had ever encountered in my coursework—and I had encountered quite a lot of it, in a purely academic capacity, without any of the physical consequences I was now experiencing.

Their bodies stood very tall, and their phalluses hung down almost to their knees when flaccid, in a scene of several warriors bathing. When erect, confronting a young woman upon her knees—as happened over and over in the carvings—the rigid Viking penises seemed to rival the members of donkeys or horses.

Cocks, a voice whispered in my head. Don’t be a prude, Ilsa. You know what to call them. These Vikings are using their huge cocks to fuck their new bed thralls.

I swallowed hard. I tried to silence that whisper.

Phalluses. Fertility imagery.

I looked at the carvings of the women, trying somehow to focus my mind in a different direction from my perception. The artists had taken extraordinary pains to make their beauty clear: high cheekbones, strong jaws, long hair flying loose or pulled by large fists. They were shown in the initial scenes struggling—arms reaching back, mouths open—but the struggle was being attended to.

That phrase, attended to, kept presenting itself to my mind as I moved the torch slowly across the carved limestone.

Attended to. These young women are having themselves attended to.

A Viking with one hand wrapped in a woman’s hair, bending her backward over what was clearly a village table, his other hand working between her thighs while her expression transformed, in the artist’s sequential rendering of a single moment, from something that had started as resistance into something else that to my distress I recognized.

I refused to consider what I recognized in that expression.

The village scenes ran in a continuous narrative band. A coastal settlement. Longships drawn up on the shore. And then the Vikings were inside, and the women of the village were… some of them were running, but the ones who had been caught were being attended to, as I kept thinking of it, in a variety of configurations that the artists had clearly considered important to document comprehensively.

One woman knelt before a seated Viking of spectacular physical dimensions, her hands bound behind her, her head guided forward with a patience that the carving somehow conveyed through the angle of the man’s wrist. Her mouth could barely accommodate the massive shaft atop which the warrior held her face, but somehow the long-dead artist had conveyed that she performed the degrading service willingly.

Another girl bent across another table, like the one I had just been looking at. A Viking stood behind her with his hands on her hips and his rigid phallus thrusting deep into her vagina. Her face—I brought the torch close and then immediately regretted it—wore an expression that was not suffering, or perhaps not only suffering… suffering along with something else that the suffering brought with it, unwelcome but nevertheless a kind of consolation.

Another scene showed a woman between two men, on her hands and knees. The warriors, too, had knelt, so that they could get their enormous manhoods into her, fore and aft. Their handsome faces looked down at where they had entered her mouth and her pussy, grave looks of satisfaction on their faces. I moved the torch away from that one faster than I had moved it away from anything else, which was how I noticed that my hand was trembling again.

Not the scholarly trembling. The other kind.

I pressed my free hand flat against my thigh and kept walking.

The longship scenes came next, and I told myself that the change in setting would help. It did not help. The rowing benches had been rendered in careful detail, and on those benches the women lay or knelt or were positioned by unhurried hands, while the ships moved across a carved sea.

The Vikings took their time enjoying their captives with their huge cocks as they sailed home. I felt certain that was what the artists had above all insisted on showing, in scene after scene: the men did not seem the slightest bit rushed. They had long straps in their hands that they obviously used to ensure their new thralls’ obedience.

The women’s faces in these scenes, as they accepted their new masters over and over in their mouths and pussies, had moved past the ambiguous expressions of the village. They showed something more settled. More undone.

I realized that my free hand was no longer flat against my thigh.

I stopped walking.

I stood in the torchlight with my hand pressed between my legs through the canvas of my cargo pants. I made myself completely still, feeling absolute horror at myself.