by James, Elle
The current eddies around him, and Ásgeirr stops resisting it, allows it to carry him out to the wide open sea. Now that the fight is over, the battle-rush gone, the pain of his injuries hits him. His body goes limp. The sting of the salt water penetrates his torn flesh. It would not hurt so much if I were dead, he reasons. So, it seems I am alive, after all.
From her vantage point atop the cliff, on the peak of Éire’s southernmost inhabited island, Ashling can see for miles. To her right, the Atlantic Ocean shimmers. To her left gleams the Celtic Sea. And behind her, some way down the path to the harbor, stands the small stone cottage where she lives, alone.
Ashling knows each inch of the coastline, each rugged cliff-face, each inlet. Which is why she notices—sooner than others might—the body bobbing in the waves below, clinging to some debris. She may be blessed with a falcon’s sharp eyesight, but even Ashling cannot make out whether the figure being swept into the harbor is male or female, alive or dead.
It is low tide. The harbor will be deserted. There will be no one to see this lost soul; no one to render aid.
Ashling scrambles down the path, crushing wildflowers in her wake. By the time she reaches the bottom, the man has washed up on the pebbled shore. When she sees the markings on the shield he clings to, the weapon tied to him, she is suddenly very glad no others are around.
The Vikings have not yet come this far south, but in the winter just past, they had set up camps as close as Cork. Summer is coming—raiding season—and the island folk are fearful. They would kill this man on sight. Ashling is a healer, though, and will turn away none in need. “Good day,” she calls out.
The man stirs but does not rise.
“Oh gods,” she gasps, seeing his condition. “I must get him home.”
But as strong as she is, she cannot carry him up the hill. And she cannot call on anyone to assist them. Not now she knows what he is. There is nothing else for it. She must wake him.
She ventures closer, eyeing his sword. What if he startles when she rouses him, and he swings? Perhaps she should stand on the blade. That might slow him long enough to realize she is no threat.
She is about to tap him on the shoulder when the sun emerges from behind the clouds.
The stranger’s eyes snap open, and he pulls the sword from beneath her boots with no effort at all.
Ashling stumbles backwards, stifling a scream.
But he stills his hand. A beat later, he lowers his sword.
He means her no violence. In fact, he seems to be…he is…kneeling before her, head bowed. As if she were a great lady. As if she were a goddess.
“Freyja,” he says with more fervor than he should possess having been wounded.
She shakes her head, points at herself, and says, “Ashling.”
“Nei,” he corrects, insistent. “Freyja!” With great ceremony, he offers her his shield.
Ashling has the good sense to play along. She accepts his offering and nods in thanks. Then, regally, she extends her hand and beckons, slender fingers curling inward toward her palm.
The Northman lifts his head to look upon her.
Her breath catches in her throat. He is young. Likely the same age as she. And his countenance is striking: the sharp planes of his cheekbones, the proudly aquiline nose, those eyes. Slate-gray and flecked with blue, glassy-calm on the surface, but turbulent beneath, as if they held the very sea itself. His wet clothing clings to his muscled form. A silver ring pierces his left nostril. It glints in the sun.
So beautiful, Ashling thinks, so savage.
To her great relief, he accompanies her without question. She chooses one of the lesser-known paths. A slightly longer route, but it is hidden from view, and just as well. Their progress is slow. They stop frequently so she can press her flask on him. The water is the only aid the Viking accepts. He refuses to lean on her for support, even though he stumbles often and is ashen with pain. Finally, just before twilight, they reach Ashling’s cottage.
The Northman seems struck by the great tree flanking the entrance.
“Yggdrasil,” he says and pushes up his sleeve. On his right wrist is a tattoo of a giant green ash. It is the world tree, the tree of life at the center of the universe.
Ashling recognizes it from her mother’s stories. She would like to touch the tattoo, but she knows it would not be wise. She has taken enough of a risk already. All have heard about the fury of the Northmen. She ushers the stranger in ahead of her. The dagger she carries hidden on her person is still there, a reassuring presence against her thigh. Ashling will use it if she has to, as she has in the past.
When she turns to shut the door, there is a muffled thump. She pivots to defend herself, but the Northman poses no danger. At least, not at present, for he is passed out on her bed, resting uneasily on his side, long legs dangling awkwardly over the pallet. The small room fills with the sound of his labored breathing. Ashling collects the shield and the sword, hides them in a safe place, and then lights a fire and gets to work.
*
It is a blessing, the dark stranger’s lapse into unconsciousness. It makes her task so much easier. That, and the opiate she trickles down his throat. To get to his wounds, she has to cut him out of his tunic and cloak. It is a shame to mar such good garments, but Ashling is as handy with a sewing needle as she is with a doctoring needle. She will mend them both. For now, she hangs the fragments of his clothing over the chair near the fire.
Ashling has heard that the víkingr decorate their bodies. Here before her is living proof. The stranger bears tattoos not only on his wrists, but all over. She recognizes some of the images. She will ask him about the others when he wakes.
In the meantime, she places pillows on either side of him, to support him while she extracts the arrows. Only one has gone through to the other side. It will be the least painful to remove. She selects a pair of cutters, shears off the protruding arrowhead then tugs on the fletched shaft. It comes out as easily as she’d hoped. The other two are tricky, lodged in bone. Those she has to remove with the aid of a special instrument that can grasp the metal barb.
The stranger’s wounds were clean—all that seawater—but Ashling cleans them again. First with vinegar then with whiskey. She stitches up the hole in his side, quickly cauterizes those on his back and chest, and applies a healing salve.
Only now, after her delicate task is done, do her hands begin to shake. She considers the bottle of whiskey. Finds herself a glass and pours one dram, then a second, but not a third. There is more to be done. She must finish undressing him.
Ashling has seen naked men before. But when she tugs the Northman’s breeches from him, and then his underclothes, an unfamiliar fire blazes through her veins.
’Tis wrong to stare at him lustfully, she tells herself, when he may be dying.
But when will she again have the chance?
The island folk think all Northmen are fair-haired, but this one’s hair is dark. Closely cropped at the sides and back, longer on top and at the front, it falls at a rakish angle over his forehead. His dark beard, the hair curling over his chest and his forearms, all emphasize the natural paleness of his skin. Ashling cocks her head to the side, taking in the long lines of his back then letting her gaze travel lower. Over the dip at the base of his spine. Over the mounds of his arse. Over his powerful thighs, the back of his legs, his ankles, his long feet.
Ashling’s heart thuds as she circles to view him from the front, scandalized at the brazenness, the thoroughness, with which she examines him.
A line of hair bisects the sharply-defined muscles of his abdomen. The fine trail starts just above his umbilicus and leads all the way down to his member, which lies like a sleeping dragon along his thigh.
No, thinks Ashling. Not a dragon.
For etched into the sensitive skin just below his navel is another tattoo. A serpent, biting its tail. She drops to her knees beside the bed to get a better look and a shock pulses sharply, sensually, through her. Down, down,
down the serpent writhes. Its scaled body coils intimately around its master’s cock, and then rears up again, tapering gradually to the fine point of a tail held between two sharp fangs.
Nothing can prevent Ashling from touching the Northman now, from tracing with her fingertips the tattoo’s serpentine progress. She undresses quickly, casting off her overdress and her léine, and lies down beside him.
His skin burns against hers. The fever that threatened earlier has taken hold. For a moment, she feels a pang of guilt. But then the voice of temptation speaks. He will not remember, it says. Or he will think it only a dream.
She reaches for the stranger’s prick, touches it tentatively at first, watching with fascination as she gently works back the foreskin and the plum-like head emerges, a clear fluid leaking from the tip. With the pad of her thumb, she smears it around the crown. Even through the drugged fog, the Northman’s body responds, his hips canting forward. He grows harder as she uses his foreskin to pleasure him, sliding it up and down over his shaft.
Ashling whimpers and thrusts her other hand between her legs. She is wet already, so wet there is barely any friction at all. Her fingers slide clumsily over her little jewel, and she knows she will not find the tension she needs to climax. So she crosses her legs tight, and pushes her hips back and forth, increasing the pressure against her bead. The rocking motion presses her closer to the Northman, so close that the head of his cock butts insistently against her.
She kisses him then. Kisses his hard mouth and his broad chest, tugs at his nipples with her teeth, sucks the corded muscles in his neck. Her breasts rub against his battle-hardened body, and she gasps as sensation builds inside, builds like a storm does, far out at sea. Ashling holds it back, anxious to prolong this stolen intimacy as long as possible.
She crawls down the stranger’s body until her mouth is level with his cock. Ashling has never done this before. The very newness of the act is intoxicating. She drags her tongue around and across the smooth-polished head, occasionally flicking her tongue into the narrow slit on top, the eye that wept when she first touched him.
He tastes like the ocean, Ashling thinks. Like tears and the ocean.
Then she notices the indentation on the underside of the crown. Its very shape seems to beg for a kiss. So she presses her mouth to it and obliges, pausing every so often to dart her tongue out and lick his shaft, or to rub her face against its fleshy smoothness. She moves further down the bed to play with his heavy ballocks, to draw them deep into her mouth.
From this angle, she can see clearly that what she thought was one spiral of the serpent’s tail is in fact three, each inked on top of the other.
He must have stretched his skin taut while they did this, she thinks. Or else his prick was stiff.
The very thought of such a scene—the Northman’s body on display for others—makes Ashling hot with desire. She takes his root into her mouth again, all the way into her mouth, moaning around his shaft, laving the tattooed serpent’s rings with the tip of her fluttering tongue.
I could taste him for hours, Ashling thinks.
But she can no longer delay her release. Her fingers move frantically between her thighs, flicking at her pearl, slipping between her slick folds. She can barely breathe with the stranger’s prick so deep in her throat and is beginning to feel light-headed. But the sensation adds an edge to her bliss, and she wails like a banshee when she comes, crying out around the Northman’s cock. The vibrations provoke a violent response in him and his whole body begins to tremble.
Ashling wants to watch what happens as he goes over, so she lets him slip from her mouth and takes him in her hand. His prick is still wet from her tongue. The moisture eases the way, allows her to swivel her palm over the head, as well as glide it up and down the thick shaft. He feels hot, so hot, and Ashling knows it is not the fever. She looks on, enthralled, as the Northman’s cock—now an angry red—seems to grow even longer and begins to pulse.
For one heart-stopping instant, just before his seed spurts all over her hand, she is certain the Northman is watching her from beneath half-closed eyes.
Just a trick of the light, Ashling convinces herself. And to be sure, the moon is high now, its silver beams stealing through the windows, battling with the firelight to illuminate one minute, to obscure the next.
As the after-shocks of orgasm flicker through her like retreating lightning, Ashling raises her hand to her mouth and licks the Northman’s seed from her fingers. She falls back on the bed, sated, but tired. Bone-tired. She pulls the bed-clothes over herself and her dark stranger, and, just for a minute, rests her eyes.
*
Ásgeirr dreams of fire and blood. Of drifting delirious on the open sea, surrounded by the slap of the waves, no land in sight and no ship to bear him home. Sometimes, he dreams of home. Or at least, what feels like home. A small cottage with fresh rushes on the floor. Clean air. A fire that warms him without filling the house with smoke. A soft bed and softer furs. And a woman, slender and beautiful, with honey-brown hair and eyes the color of amber. Her gentle touch, cool against his brow. The pleasure she brings him with her hands—oh gods, with her mouth. The comfort of her body pressed against his.
But such golden visions are all too brief, and soon he is back on the longboat. Only this time, Ásgeirr is ready. He senses Torvík nearby and grabs the bastard by the neck, rising to his full height, lifting his enemy off the boards. The traitor kicks his feet uselessly, scrabbles to loosen the choke-hold. Ásgeirr just squeezes harder. His fingers completely enclose his enemy’s neck.
But something is wrong.
I should not be able to do this, he realizes. Torvík’s neck is much too thick. And I could never have lifted him with one hand.
Ásgeirr’s grip slackens. The scrabbling stops, replaced by a percussive beating against his chest. And then by the point of a dagger, just below his sternum.
At the cold touch of steel, the fog in his head retreats.
The cottage from my dreams, he thinks, as his vision clears. And the woman, too. “You saved me,” he says, wonderingly.
But wonder turns to horror when he realizes how he has repaid her kindness. “Helvíti,” he curses, then releases her immediately.
The woman collapses in a naked heap, sucking in long shuddering lungfuls of air. She still clutches her dagger.
Ásgeirr does not blame her.
“Touch me again, Northman, and die,” she says, when she is able to speak.
“My name is Ásgeirr,” he says. He takes a moment to register her strange accent. “Where am I?”
“Éire. On an island south-west of Cork.”
“Who are you?”
“I found you, cast up on the shore, stuck with arrows.”
Her voice is husky, either naturally so, or from the injury he has done her.
“I brought you to my home to heal you.” She rolls to her side, and then into a crouch. “But if I’d known you were going to strangle me during a nightmare, I’d have left you for dead.”
He tries not to stare at her body, tries to ignore the rise and fall of her large breasts, the golden glint of hair between her thighs.
Too late, he thinks, with a groan. His cock rises, no matter that he wills it down.
When she sees his erection, her eyes widen, and in a second, she is on her feet, wielding her knife in front of her as if it was a sword.
“I’ll not hurt you,” Ásgeirr says, stepping back. “Here.” He tosses her a fur with which to cover herself. Then he steps into his breeches, waiting for him on the bed. They do nothing to conceal his excitement. His cockstand tents the fabric in front of him.
Suddenly, his belly growls. A rumbling sound that seems to go on forever, echoing off the walls. All the hungers of his body have come to life at once. A lesser warrior might be embarrassed.
But the sound breaks the tension at least. The woman laughs, and the tightness in his chest eases. Having been speared once in the past week, Ásgeirr is not keen to r
epeat the experience.
“Come,” his rescuer says, “if you are done trying to kill me, we will eat.”
It is a simple repast—bread and cheese, stew and some berries—but to Ásgeirr, the food is ambrosia. He has not eaten in days.
“Slowly,” the woman cautions.
Ashling. He remembers her name now. She told him at the shore, when she found him.
They eat in silence. He spends most of the meal observing her. She will not meet his gaze. Once or twice he catches her looking at him, and she blushes.
She has changed into a woolen shift and overdress. I liked the fur better, Ásgeirr thinks.
“Takk,” he says, when they are finished and are seated in front of the fire. “I thank you. For the meal. And for healing me. For giving me back the chance to die a warrior’s death.”
“Better I had given you the chance to live,” she replies softly, staring into the flames.
They are waiting for water to heat so he can bathe. He looks longingly at the large tub, positioned close by the hearth. His skin is tight from three days in the salt sea, and his wounds are itching.
When Ashling rises to put on gloves, to lift one of the heavy cauldrons, Ásgeirr grabs her hand and says, “No, let me.”
He rubs his thumb back and forth in the centre of her palm. “Such soft hands,” he says. “I would feel them on me.”
Ashling clears her throat, but her voice comes out in a whisper. “The water.”
Her hair is tousled, her cheeks flushed, her lips parted.
She looks ready to be fucked, Ásgeirr thinks. Ready to be fucked, and I’ve barely even touched her.
But she also looks nervous, and Ásgeirr likes his women willing. So he lets her go, and says “Yes, the water,” and picks up the cauldrons, one in each hand, and empties them into the bathtub. He is about to undress when Ashling hurries over with a long sheet of linen.
Next to the bath, hanging low from the ceiling, are two hooks used for drying herbs. Ashling winds the linen around the hooks, and then steps back.