by Joanna Bell
"Yes," I growled, curling my fingers between her slippery lips and dragging them up, and then doing it again and again, all without touching the most sensitive part of her, the part I knew she was aching for me to caress. "A lesson."
"Magnus."
My name spilled out of her lips in a whimper, and I knew I'd won. Heather reached for me, locking her arms around my neck, pulling me close, desperate. Nothing in the world was sweeter than her desperation, nothing so quick to make my balls ache than her need for me. I stood up from my chair and lifted her with me, and then I lay her down on our simple straw bed and watched as she opened her thighs.
"Magnus," she asked for me again, clutching at my shoulders. But I held back, even as I throbbed to be inside her.
"No," I said, pushing her back down. "No. I want to watch you do it to yourself. Now, girl. Show me."
She sighed and complained and reached for me again but when she saw I meant what I said, she could no longer wait to be touched and I found myself transfixed as she ran the tip of her finger over the glistening pink nub at the apex of her sex.
Her body arched up as it did when she was underneath me, and her nipples hardened into points and I had never seen anything so perfect before as that vision of everything that was feminine and lovely right in front of me. It was not long before I pulled my leathers off and wrapped my hand lightly – for anything more than lightly would surely have ended it right then and there – around myself. And when Heather saw what I was doing she begged for me to come inside her.
"Magnus," she whispered, reaching again for me with the hand that was not occupied. "Please – Magnus. Please, I –"
If I had been starved for a moon, and then the Gods had set a feast of roasted venison and buttered bread in front of me and told me not to eat, it would not have been as difficult to heed their command as it was to deny Heather when she begged for me.
"No," I told her again, setting my teeth against the urge to feel her softness enveloping me. "I want you to finish yourself for me. Right now, as I watch. And when you've done as I wish, I'll fill your belly my seed."
Her finger quickened in its secret place, and her head started to loll back on the straw. "Yes," I whispered, as a sharp hunger jolted through me, making it almost impossible to keep away from her. "Yes, girl. Yes, Heather. Show me, girl. Show me –"
Her finger stopped, then. Well, it didn't stop, but it looked almost as if it had. When I looked closely, though, I could see that the movements had just become very small and very, very fast. Heather's hips rolled and bucked under her own touch, her breasts trembling with the pleasure as it burned through her body and her helpless little cries filling our hut.
"Magnus!" She moaned my name even as she pleased herself. "Magnus... Magnus! I – please –"
Sensing that if I waited even a single moment it would be too late, I crawled between her sweat-sheened thighs and buried myself into her with a deep, heavy groan.
"Yes," she breathed, still shuddering and gasping. "Yes, Magnus. I want you to –"
But she didn't even have time to ask, because she was too warm, and too soft, and too perfectly slick and I was spurting into her already. It felt as it if would never end, the pleasure so thick and rich I almost drowned in it, the perfect relief of letting go, of filling her until every drop of tension had been drained out of me.
Afterwards we lay on the straw panting like pursued animals, and listening to each other's breath slowing as we came back to ourselves.
"What have you done to me, girl?" I asked, when I finally had the strength to roll over and look at her in the dim light from the fire's embers. "It's never been like that with anyone else. It's never – it's –"
"Same," she whispered, reaching up to caress my cheek. "I feel like I'm drunk. I think I am drunk – on you."
All the next day as I worked in the fields outside the estate wall, swinging my scythe back and forth through the golden wheat, I glowed with whatever it was that was happening between Heather and me.
"The Northman's in love," one of the other harvestmen commented when we took our mid-day meal at the edge of the field where there was some shade. "See how he gazes towards the horizon as if his eyes were blind? It's lovesickness, I've seen it a thousand times."
I got the feeling the Angles were trying to shame me, but I was not shamed. I simply shrugged when they looked at me for a response, and told the man who spoke that I thought he was right.
"And what will ye do with her?" Another – Eadwin, asked. "If ye cannot go back to the North and the winter comes – where will ye take her?"
I bit off another piece of the pale wheat bread that the Angles liked so much, and followed it with a lump of their delicious cheese. "Aye, you find what troubles me," I told him. "I had thought to go south and pay a trader with my labor to take me to the Frankish Kingdom and then eventually back to the North – although not to the part where anyone would know me. Or perhaps even further to the south, who knows? I am strong and young and trained in combat, I would not find it difficult to find someone to pay me for my skills. But now I have her and I tell you, I cannot leave her. It already causes me to wake from my sleep at night."
"You can take her with you, can ye not?" Another man asked.
"She's not fit for travel," offered someone else, whose name I thought was Bradwin. "To hear my Brona tell it the foreign woman is as useless as a blunted scythe. She's –"
"You speak with haste!" I said, cutting him off and sitting up a little straighter so the other harvestmen shrank back from me, just a little. "Useless she is not – inexperienced would be a better way to say it. But even since we have been with you, not even a half-moon, I have watched her learn certain skills so she is even better at it than some of your own women."
"Perhaps you can take her south, then?" Bradwin suggested. "If she learns quickly, you can teach her how to strip a deerskin and sew a heavy cape to keep the wind away?"
"Did you see the berries on the hawthorns?" I asked. "As heavy as I've ever seen them in the North – this winter will be hard. No matter how fast she learns, do you think I can teach her enough to see us through it? If the winds blow cold enough I doubt even if I could make it on my own – but with another? You see why I wake in the night, friends."
It did not feel strange to call the Angles who worked in the fields with me 'friends.' Or if it did, it was only because it didn't. It is impossible to work with people and not come to know them, to hear them speak of their worries and joys, to see them not simply as Angles but as fellow men. That is not to say they saw me the same way, or that anyone had forgotten that my homeland was the North. But as quick as they were to flinch away from any sign of anger in me, I could see they were coming to feel a kinship as well. The young men talked to me of their girls, and asked what the Northern women were like. The older ones spoke of their wives and their children and their worries about seeing them fed and warm through the winter.
That evening, when the sun had dipped low enough to make further harvesting impossible, I returned to the hut with hope in my heart, even as my cares for the winter remained.
"You look happy," Heather said when she first saw me. She was sitting on a large, flat rock I had found and placed next to the fire-pit, and stirring the pottage.
"Aye," I replied, setting the piece of bread I had saved for her from the mid-day meal into her hand. "Today I felt a little less lonely."
She looked up sharply when I said that, her expression curious. "Less lonely? But – Magnus, are you lonely? What about –"
I have seen men become irritated with women for such questions. I have seen them assume a certain forwardness in the woman who asks them, as if she could not countenance that any man might feel lonely with her in his life. But I saw the enquiry for what it was – that careful variety of feminine concern that worries at any dissatisfaction in those she loves. It warmed my heart even further to feel that I was the object of Heather's sweet care.
"I do not know what it wa
s like in your homeland," I said, sitting down beside her and urging her to eat the bread. "But in the North, we are very close to each other. In the village, we know everyone, we speak every day to those who live close to us, we involve ourselves very deeply in each other's lives. Even when a raiding party crosses the sea, I sail with men I have known since I was a baby, men whose families I know almost as my own. You see it is not like that here for us – it can't be, even as the Angles try to show us welcome, because we have no shared history. We did not grow up with these people, we do not know their ways. Do you not feel it, girl? Do you not miss your people?"
Heather surprised me by hesitating, almost as if she had an answer but did not want to give it.
"What is it?" I asked gently. "You do not have to agree with me. If you feel differently, say it."
"It's not that I feel differently," she began, stirring the pottage once again before handing me the spoon to eat what was left on it. "It's just – the way you describe the North, it's not like that where I come from."
"What is it like? Do you not live in a village, with other –"
"I live in a bigger village than anything you've ever seen before," she smiled. It was a smile I recognized by then, one she often gave me when she spoke of things she did not think I would understand. "But we are not as close with the other people as you say you are with your people. I definitely don't know them like my own family, anyway – not the way you describe."
"Do you not work together?" I asked. "Do you not help each other if someone's dwelling burns down, or a particular husband has bad luck hunting – would you not offer meat to his children if they were starving?"
Heather laughed. "People's houses don't burn down very often, and children don't starve. Some of them are hungry, but nobody starves to death. Not in the United States."
Once again I found myself exceedingly curious about the place where Heather had come from. "Is it so?" I asked. "No one? Ever?"
"Probably at some point people starved in America," she replied. "But not for a long time. Not since the olden days."
We fell quiet as she tended once again to the pottage and I poured some water from the jug for myself. Was she lying? She didn't seem to be – and what would the purpose of such a lie be? To lure me back to her own land? Once again, it did not seem to be something she had any interest in.
"So you don't feel lonely?" I asked, when I had taken my spot at her side again.
She opened her mouth to answer and then closed it again, reconsidering what it was she had been about to tell me. And when she did finally speak, her voice was quiet. "Yes, I feel lonely. It's just – Magnus, I guess I always feel lonely. I mean, not to make it sound like my life is hell or anything, but it's just – yeah, it's not, like, a new thing to me. To feel lonely."
I was shocked by Heather's words. At the anger and hurt that boiled up in my chest on her behalf. And at the same time, I understood that part of me had already known it. Why else would she be so uninterested in finding her way home? Why else did we speak only of traveling south, and then north again eventually, to my own homeland – and not to hers?
"Your people are lucky I do not know how to find them," I told her, feeling a familiar twitch in my right hand as I thought of wielding my sword.
"Why?" She asked, turning her face, which was dotted with sweet little freckles now after days working the sun.
"Do you joke?" I replied, surprised. "Do you not understand the place you have in my heart already, girl? Your people are lucky I do not run my sword through each and every one of them for allowing you to grow up lonely. Are your parents dead? They are not, are they? You speak of them as if they still live. Where were they? Why did they not –"
"You're really angry."
Her words were not accusatory. They sounded, if anything, surprised.
"Of course I'm angry! Would you not be angry if I told you the same? If I told you that I always felt lonely, that it was nothing new to me? Would you not wonder why my mother and father had let loneliness fester in their own child's heart, girl?"
But still, Heather wore that expression of bafflement on her face.
"Why do you look that way?" I asked heatedly. "As if you're surprised?"
"Because I am surprised," she replied slowly. "Because I – I never really thought about it like that before. I never thought to be angry. There are a lot of lonely people in the world, Magnus. Aren't there?"
"Not in the North," I replied. "There is the loneliness that comes with loss, of course – no one can avoid that. But even if a man's wife and children die, the people in the village make sure he is never alone. When a woman loses her baby, the other villagers do not allow her to hide away in her dwelling, not past the mourning period. If a Jarl sees that a parent overlooks a child, causing it harm, he speaks to the parents and shows them their child's sadness. And the child is included in the games with the other children, and loved by the other parents in the village. What happened that your parents were not able to keep your heart full of the things that children's hearts should be full of, girl?"
I had been so busy talking, and so high in emotion that I had not stopped to look at Heather. When I did, I saw that her eyes were shining with tears. It just made me even angrier at those who had let her suffer. And determined that she should not suffer like that anymore.
I was seized with the need to do something, to show that I would not let her feel the things the people before me had. To that end, I leapt up, unsure at first as to what I was actually going to do. And then it came to me.
"Where are you going?" She asked as I grabbed an empty sack from the table. "It's almost dark, Magnus – where are you –"
"Oysters!" I said, because at the time that seemed the thing to do. We had no meat or bones for our pottage that night, and I did not just want to tell Heather I cared – I wanted to show her. In later years the two of us would laugh at the way I suddenly decided, that night, that oysters for the pottage were somehow the solution. I was a young man, then, and eager to prove my heart.
"But the guards," she started, "they won't let you outside the –"
"Yes they will, if I promise to bring some fat oysters back for their own pots."
"Magnus, you can't just –"
"I'll be back before you need to add water to the pottage," I told her, taking her hand and kissing it. "It won't take long at all."
"But –"
"Soon!" I called over my shoulder. "I'll be back soon – and then you can go to sleep with something substantial in your belly."
As it was, my impulsive urge to act, my male need to do something, turned out to be an incredibly lucky thing. So lucky I believe it may have saved both our lives.
The sky was the deep blue of twilight when I came out of the woods and onto the beach where the oysters clung to the rocks, and there was only the thinnest band of brilliant orange painted along the horizon. I began to make my way down to the shore when I heard something on the wind. I stopped at once and turned towards it, to see if there was really something there or if the dark was already playing tricks on me.
And then I heard it again, more clearly that time. Voices. Male voices. Quick, gruff – and even if they were too far away to hear, something about the tone made me suspicious. It wasn't like the Angles to be out in the late evening, either – they were a superstitious people, convinced that all manner of demons and outlaws moved into the woods come nightfall. I crouched low and supposed I would need to make my way back into the forest if I was to get close enough to overhear what the men were saying without being seen. But I soon heard, before I could make my way back to the trees, that the voices were getting closer. I ducked behind one of the boulders, slick with seaweed where the high-tide washed over it, and searched the sand with my fingers for a rock, should I need to defend myself.
Soon enough, I could hear that it was only two men who approached, and that they were deep in conversation. I craned my head as far as I could without showing myself.
&nbs
p; "Why do we linger?" A voice came out of the darkness. "Does he think we do not know the true reason? Does he think we do not see his wounded pride? No good will come of this, I tell you, no good."
They were very close to me. So close if I had stood up with the rock in my hand, I probably would have been able to bash at least one of their brains out before he even realized he was under attack. But I stayed where I was, to listen further.
"But it is as he said," came the reply. "The Angles cower in their pig-huts."
A frisson ran the length of my spine – 'the Angles' – whoever was speaking was foreign. And I didn't know any foreigners who would be wandering close to the Haesting estate but my fellow Northmen. My heart began to pound as the conversation continued and in his next comment, one of the men confirmed who they were:
"What concern is it of mine what the Angles do?! They know we're here, Sig! The Jarl's pride drives him to put us all in danger – he cannot accept that Magnus has gone."
"What the Jarl cannot accept is that he chose the wrong son. And now he sends us on night raids when we should be sailing for home with our spoils!"
That was it. My father and brother had come for me. And I knew, because I was one of them, that the men of the North do not satisfy themselves with the taking – or killing – of a single man, even if he is the second son of a Jarl. Torches would be brought to the walls of the estate under the cover of darkness, and balls of dry grass coated with the resin of a fir tree would be lit and tossed into the estate. The gates would be easily broken down, and the Angles would be surprised – night raids were not the usual way of the Northmen.
I had to get back to the estate. I had to warn them. But the two men stayed where they were, talking to each other in the dark.
"What is the signal?" One asked, after a brief discussion of the merits of another warrior's younger sister's tits. "An owl hooting?"
"Voss, who saw fit to make you a warrior?" Came the reply. "It is the howl of a wolf – and Asger brings half the men to the estate from the west. We must –"
