Page 6 of Her Viking Guardian

The rune-carved disc pressed against my sternum, feeling almost like a brand.

I gasped and my eyes flew open. The cavern… the ship… the rowing bench opposite mine… they all swam back into focus and the vision…

The tree. Yggdrasil. Not the mosaic version, not the carved limestone version, but something vast and real and absolutely indifferent to me, its roots going down into places that had no names, its branches touching worlds I had no framework for. The shape of it, massive, somehow overlaid atop my sight of the cavern’s dimness, the sound of the ancient wood creaking under me.

I snatched my hand out of my shorts and rolled off the bench onto the deck of the ship.

My heart was slamming against my ribs. I gripped the bench edge with both hands and breathed and waited for the tree to recede. Slowly, it did, though to my dismay it seemed to remain in my vision, too, like the outline of an after-image.

The cavern came back more fully, though. The ship. The torch I had set on the bow thwart, still lit. The iron rings. The smooth wood.

I stood up, pulling myself upright with the help of the bench, warm now with my body’s embarrassing heat. My legs felt unreliable.

I was a doctoral candidate in archaeology and I had just almost masturbated myself to orgasm on a Viking longship in a secret sanctuary.

I picked up my torch and I walked further into the cavern. I understood, without examining the understanding too closely, that I had no intention of moving toward the entrance, though I also understood that that’s where I should have been headed. The inscription had said this chamber as though there were others.

I found the narrow passage at the back of the cavern. It had a carving above its lintel; the same interlocking knotwork I had seen in the mosaic and then, in much greater profusion, around the obscene images on the cavern wall next to the longship.

I went through the doorway.

The passage beyond was not natural limestone. Someone had worked it, extended it, lined the walls with the same deep-relief carving that covered the main cavern, though here the scenes were different: processional rather than narrative, figures moving in sequence toward something at the far end. The torch threw long shadows that made the carved figures seem to walk beside me.

Chambers opened on either side. Alcoves, really, each with a heavy timber door that stood open, and each containing…

I stopped at the third one, once my mind had processed the structure that occupied a prominent position at the center of each chamber.

I had been looking at its shape on the cavern walls for the last hour: the curved wood, the padding, the horizontal bar for a girl to hold onto as her Viking master enjoyed her. The ergonomic design that I had understood intellectually and now began to understand in a different register entirely, because here it was not a carving.

Here was the object—the device—itself. Here it was a real thing made of real wood, real leather, and real iron fittings, standing in the illumination of my torch with the same remarkable preservation as the ship, waiting patiently for an occupant, through long centuries of absence.

A… a bride saddle, something in my mind supplied, from some obscure corner of my Norse material culture reading. I must have read a description, at some point. My cheeks filled with heat. I had read a description in a questionable work of nineteenth-century scholarship, and then I had promptly repressed the knowledge. That was what I had been looking at in the homecoming scenes, the women bound to it with their bottoms thrust backward past the edge of the saddle to receive their masters in their…

Røvhul. The Danish word I wished I didn’t know, but the word I couldn’t keep myself from imagining these Norman warriors—Danish in ancestry—using as they approached the ‘brides’ they’d won with their iron-tipped spears and meant to enjoy with their fleshly ones.

I saw it, in my mind’s eye: the huge, naked man towering over the naked young woman, commanding her to mount the strange, frightening device.

“You’ll ride my saddle and take me in your røvhul now, girl.”

She mounted, trembling with fear. His broad hands helped her, fondled her, roused her.

“That’s it,” he growled, his manhood hardening as he touched and watched. “Ride now… move your hips and rub your little fisse back and forth on the leather… get yourself ready to take the tool in that sweet hole…”

I stepped back from the doorway. My shoulder hit the passage wall.

Then, as if drawn by an enchantment, my feet moved the other way, into the chamber, toward the bride saddle.

CHAPTER 4

Ilsa

The chamber felt small, but not confining. It felt… cozy. I stood over the terrible thing… the horrid bride saddle. I needed to know.

For research.

I needed to understand the artifact from the inside, so to speak—the arrangement of the thing, the practical reality of its design, the way a medieval craftsman had thought about the female body when he built it. That was the academic justification I assembled in my mind with the speed of long practice, even as my hands had already moved to the hem of my tee shirt.

I folded it after I had drawn it over my head. I folded my tee shirt with the same methodical neatness I brought to the sorting of potsherds, and I set it on the floor. Then my cargo shorts, unbuttoned with fingers that I refused to acknowledge were trembling. Then my bra. Then—and here I stared at the wall for a moment and breathed and kept going—my panties.