Page 4 of Her Viking Guardian

I moved my hand away. I made myself do it, as if I were putting down something fascinating that I had had no business picking up.

I resumed walking. The torch beam moved to the next section, which showed the homecoming. The Vikings brought their women ashore now, into Norse settlements, and the artists had shifted register slightly—the urgency of the raid scenes and the patience of the voyage replaced by something more domestic and therefore, I found, even more disturbing. Because the domesticity implied permanence. Bed thralls, I thought, my academic vocabulary clicking into place like a lock turning. The Norse institution of the bed thrall. I had read about this. I had read about it in the same careful, distant way I had read about everything I had never expected to encounter at close quarters.

Then the… the… device appeared in these homecoming scenes, and I stopped again.

I had never seen it before, or anything like it, which was notable, because I had looked at a great deal of Norse material culture in my academic career and I thought I had a reasonably complete mental catalogue. It was a frame of some kind—carved wood, by the look of the artistic rendering, with curved elements that suggested careful ergonomic design. The women were bound to it in a specific configuration, kneeling, their weight supported by padded elements at the hips and knees, their upper bodies angled forward, their wrists secured to a horizontal bar. It had the quality of purpose-built equipment. The kind of thing someone had thought about for a long time before making.

And in every scene involving this device, the Vikings were behind the women. They held their straps as if they had needed them to persuade, or to encourage, their captives.

Behind them.

Behind them with their massive warriors’ cocks inside the girls’ little bottoms.

My mouth had become utterly dry. My hand had gone between my legs again.

I hadn’t noticed. That was what frightened me most: I genuinely had not noticed until I felt the seam of my cargo pants pressing against me in a way that was not accidental, because my hips had moved, and I had let them move. I had done this in a cavern in Sicily while looking at nine-hundred-year-old pornography carved into limestone by people who might have been my ancestors. I was a doctoral candidate in archaeology, and…

I stepped back. I stepped back hard enough that my shoulder blades hit the gunwale of the longship. The cold of the wood came through my shirt, and I stood there with my torch pointed at the ceiling. My breathing had gotten audibly rough in the acoustics of the space, and I waited for my body to become mine again.

It took longer than I would have liked.

When I felt capable of something approaching rational thought, I pushed off from the wall and turned back toward the ship. The ship, I told myself. The longship. An extraordinary artifact of incalculable historical value. That was what I had come here for. That was the thing the inscription had led me to, and the carvings represented context—disturbing, inexplicable, personally catastrophic context, but context—and I was an archaeologist. I needed to think about what I was going to do next.

My grandmother’s pendant felt very warm at my throat.

I wrapped my fingers around it without thinking, the rune pressing into my palm the way it had done at intervals throughout my entire adult life, whenever I was frightened or excited or standing at the edge of something I couldn’t see the bottom of.

I looked at the ship. I looked at the inscription I hadn’t yet examined above the prow. I looked at the carved serpent head with its open mouth facing the sealed stone entrance.

And then, because I was apparently constitutionally incapable of leaving things alone, I looked back at the carvings.

The device. The frame. The women bound to it with their faces transformed by something I kept refusing to name.

At twenty-four years old I already had two journal publications and a dissertation in progress. I had a rune pendant that had sometimes gotten warm against my skin since my grandmother had willed it to me, when I was seventeen years old, and I had just discovered a secret Viking sanctuary hidden in a Sicilian cliff. I was standing there alone, and no one in the world knew where I was.

Maybe I should have found that last fact alarming, but in truth I found it exciting. Maybe that should have alarmed me even more, because the kind of excitement I felt didn’t come, as I told myself it did, from the thrill of archaeological discovery. I still had that, in the back of my mind, but the bodily discovery that had begun the moment I saw the carvings—that was what spurred me on now, though I refused to acknowledge it.

The inscription was on the far wall, past the prow, in a band of runes that ran at eye level, so as to be legible presumably to those who occupied the ship. I had noticed it because my torch beam caught the deep shadows of the carved letters at the exact angle required to make them legible, and I thought, of course. Of course there is more text. Of course I am going to read it.

I clambered as gracefully and carefully as I could over the gunwale and onto the ancient ship. It creaked a little beneath me, but I could feel how solid it still was after what must be at least a thousand years.

I walked toward the stern, where the steering oar’s handle rose from its mounting on the rail. I got close enough to read the runes I saw there, Younger Futhark like the ones in the vanished chapel.

Not spelling out Latin, though; I recognized Old Norse words immediately. My Old Norse was functional rather than fluent—sufficient for manuscript work and for the kind of careful philological parsing that doctoral research required. I stood very still while I worked through it, moving my lips slightly the way I did when the language required real effort.

Here in Sicily, the Sons of Odin, far from the cold seas of their people, find solace in taking daughters of the Romans to serve their cocks.

I read it three times. I read it in hope it would change on the next pass.

In this chamber, girls must undergo their first voyage with their masters, and learn to please them well.

The pendant at my throat seemed to pulse with warmth. I pressed my fingertips to the rune carved into its surface and felt the heat travel up through my hand and into my arm. I stood there for a moment with my eyes closed and my breathing very deliberate, and then I turned back toward the prow of the ship.

First voyage. Not a real voyage, though. But on a real ship?

I looked at the rowing benches, and I saw something I hadn’t noticed before. Iron rings, set into them in places that couldn’t have anything to do with navigation.

No, the carpenters had set these rings at a spacing perfect for restraining wrists and ankles, when a man laid a woman upon the bench with her face down and her backside up, and he wanted to make sure she stayed there.