by James, Elle
“Give her back to the sea that took her then,” another man said.
“Iver!” Jari pleaded “Pull us up!”
Iver frowned darkly. “Throw down a rope,” he said. “We’ll tow them to shore.”
Jari grabbed the rough rope and wound it around one wrist as the men set to rowing. By the time they got to shore, he was numb from his toes to the tips of his hair. The men pulled the faering up onto the sand while Jari dragged the woman out of the water.
“Don’t come near me with that pestilent creature,” someone said.
“It’s just a girl!” Jari said, pushing hair from his eyes. The girl was grey and cold. Jari had seen fishermen pull unlucky friends from the sea several times. Sometimes they died, but sometimes…
He pressed his hand hard on her ribs, once, twice, three times. Then he lowered his lips and blew into her mouth.
“Gods, Jari,” someone said with a cruel laugh. “Are you that hard up for female company that you must kiss a drowned girl? And a poxy one at that?”
“Go fuck a sheep!” Jari shouted. The girl still wasn’t breathing, and he couldn’t hear her heartbeat over the crashing of the incoming tide. He pressed her breast again, hard, and this time a torrent of brackish water streamed out. Jari turned her on her side and squeezed her.
After vomiting more water, she began to cough.
Jari looked up to see that all the men had left but Iver, who glowered down on him.
“If she has the fever, you are a dead man,” he said. “I don’t think the gods will…”
“Shut up about the gods!” Jari said. The girl was stirring, her coughing subsided, she whimpered. Jari helped her sit up.
“Take her to the fishing shed on the headland. Provisions are there. If neither of you are infected, you can come back to the long house, Wodensday, after the new moon. If you are infected… well, we’ll burn down the shed with you both inside.”
Iver turned and left, striding up the beach without looking back.
“I love you, too, brother,” Jari yelled after him as he disappeared in the scrub.
Jari looked down to the girl, whose color was returning, though she was shivering, and trying to cover her pale shapely legs with her sodden dress. He gave her a sip from his wineskin, which added some rose to her cheeks.
Now she was alive and with her eyes open. Jari could see that she was a young woman, maybe a bit older than him, with a soft feminine shape, golden hair and bright grey eyes. Miraculously, she didn’t seem to be burned, not even her hair. Perhaps the gods looked on him with favor today, after all. The Skræling gods or his gods, he cared not if they delivered a pretty woman into his care.
Unless she had the fever, of course. Then he was fucked. But it was too late to change that now.
“Come,” Jari said, “We should get you warm.” He helped her stand, but when she stumbled, he picked her up and carried her along the beach toward the headland. Jari found having a pretty girl wrapped in his arms made him feel like a Norseman carrying off the virgin daughter of a pillaged hamlet. His cock stirred for the second time that day, despite being half frozen.
Jari couldn’t actually picture himself ever carrying off an unwilling virgin daughter. The screams of women made his heart ache. Iver said he was too soft, but a priestess of Freya once told him he was wise to revere women. That one day Freya would bless him for it. Maybe this was that day.
“Do you speak my tongue?” he asked the girl, who had cuddled into his chest.
“Yes,” she said. “I’m a Norsewoman.”
“And your name?”
“Gull. Gull Grímsdóttir.”
“I’m Jari Sturlason. Do you know where you are?”
Gull looked doubtfully at the bleak landscape of rocks, scrub, and grey ocean. “The end of the world?”
“Near to it,” Jari said, with a laugh. “We call it Vinland. But for no good reason. There are neither grapes nor wine of any sort. Only rocks and ice and wild men throwing axes at your head.”
“Sounds like my father’s house,” the girl said.
Jari laughed so hard he nearly dropped her.
They were both warmer when they arrived at the small fishing hut, and Jari soon had a lantern lit and a fire underway.
“You’re not burned?” he said. “You seemed on fire when you leapt from the boat.”
“It was just my cloak. Moth-eaten thing. Good riddance.” She pulled off a boot and emptied water onto the floor. “Can I tell you a secret?” she said, as she unlaced her jerkin.
Jari tried to look away from the shapeliness of her bosom in her clinging wet tunic, but failed.
Gull smiled up at him. “Like what you see?”
“No! Uh, I mean yes. That’s a very nice tunic. Finely made.” Jari made much of tending the fire. “What is this secret?”
Gull slipped off her wet skirt and threw it over the back of a chair. “There is no fever,” she said. “No pestilence. Those men died from bad drink.”
Jari stopped poking the fire and stared. “Truly? What kind of bad drink?”
“Something they bought from honorless monks in Wessex. To do trade with men and sell them poison! I hope their god makes their cocks fall off.”
“You took none of this drink?”
“A lone shieldmaiden on a boat of men?” She snorted. “Hardly. I needed to keep my wits about me. And so I kept my life, and they did not.”
Jari thought the girl didn’t seem very upset about losing her fellow sailors. As she sat cross legged on a straw mat in nothing but a soggy tunic, he thought he could just see the outline of her pubic hair, which seemed to be as rich and golden as the thick tumble of damp curls on her head.
“We should go back to the longhouse, I suppose,” Jari said, his nerves lighting up. “If there’s no danger, there’s no need to stay here.”
Gull nudged his knee with her pale slender foot. “Isn’t there?” she asked. She moved her foot up his thigh and pressed gently on the hard bulge in his breeches. “We should get you out of these wet clothes.” Gull stood and wrapped her arms around Jari’s waist. She squeezed him, laying her head on his chest with a sigh. “Thank you for saving my life.”
Jari caught his breath. He couldn’t remember the last time anyone had expressed gratitude for anything he’d done. Maybe the act had never happened. His brother and the other men of their settlement mostly treated him like a burden, though he worked as hard as any of them. The three women in the settlement – his brother’s wife, the chieftain’s wife, and her elderly thrall mostly ignored him, unless something heavy needed to be moved. And then they never thanked him, certainly not with a warm cuddle.
Jari felt he would be content to stand there with her head resting on his chest until Wodensday after the full moon came, and they were allowed back in the long house.
But Gull began to unlace his knife belt, and it soon clattered to the floor.
Jari watched her as she tugged his tunic out of his pants, and he lifted his arms obediently as she slid it off him.
“Oh my,” Gull said, brushing her hands over Jari’s hard stomach.
He was mostly hairless, another thing the men teased him for, but Gull didn’t seem to mind.
She leaned down and bit one of his nipples rather hard.
“Ow,” Jari squeaked. “You vixen, that hurt.”
Gull just shook her head and slipped off her own tunic.
Jari thought his cock might spend right there and then. Gull stood in front of him, naked but for a rune stone and a small pouch on a thin leather strap around her neck. Her breasts were everything he imagined—full and fair with dark red nipples like berries ripe for picking. He slid his rough hands up to cup one in each, feeling the weight and warmth of them, the intoxicating woman of them. He felt light-headed, longing to spread her legs and plunge between them with his cock, mouth, fingers, everything he had. His brush with death had ignited him like a Solstice bonfire, and he needed to be doused. To blazes with being content with a cuddle.
&nbs
p; He picked her up and sat back on the chair with her in his lap. She wriggled and pressed down on his manhood, sending jolts of pleasure coursing through him. Nothing was between his cock and her cunt but the fabric of his breeches as Jari laced his hands into her tangled hair and pulled her forward for a kiss.
She tasted of salt and wine, and oh sweet gods, he had never been kissed like this. Gull kissed with her whole self: her lips, her teeth and, Freya’s cats, her tongue. It darted in and out and wrapped around Jari’s until he could no longer think.
“Let me fuck you,” he said, tearing at his breeches, trying to pull them off. “I beg you.”
Gull leaned back, a little smile on her face. “Begging is not necessary,” she said. “But you will have to do it my way.”
“Gods, anything,” Jari said.
Gull slipped the leather rope from her neck, removed the rune and the pouch, and set them on a bench. Then she slid her hands down Jari’s arms and lifted them above and behind his head.
“What are…”
She pressed her lips on his, quieting him. “Don’t speak unless I tell you to. Nod if you understand.”
Jari nodded. He was breathing so quickly his lungs burned.
Gull wound the strap of leather around Jari’s wrists and tied them tightly to the back of the chair.
When she stood, the beauty of her naked body made Jari’s cock throb; when she knelt before him, he thought he might expire from the sudden rush of blood from his skull to his manhood.
Gull slid her fingers around the top of Jari’s breeches and gave a little tug. Jari lifted his behind to help her until his garment was around his ankles. His cock sprang free and bounced on his stomach eagerly.
Gull bent over and removed Jari’s boots before slipping his breeches completely off. Then he was as naked as she, the little fire warming away the last vestiges of the cold of their unscheduled swim. With his boot laces, Gull tied his ankles to the chair.
“Mouth or cunny?” she asked, standing.
Jari tried to say something but nothing came out.
“I asked you a question, boy,” Gull said, a stern expression on her face. “Mouth or cunny?”
“Mouth,” Jari bit out. He desperately wanted to shove his cock so deep in this girl that it bent with the force, but he’d never had a mouth on him before, not even from a whore, and he wanted to know how it felt. If it was anything like kissing her, he’d be shooting his seed down her throat in seconds.
Gull dipped her head, taking a deep inhale of breath, running the tip of her nose, and then, gods, her tongue along the line of hair beneath Jari’s navel. She kept going, her tongue traveling through his pubic hair to the base of his cock and along its length to the swollen tip. Gull glanced up at him, a wicked look in her eye as she wrapped her lips around the head and swallowed him, inch by blissful inch until he was half inside her mouth, and more. He could feel the back of her throat just rubbing against the tip of his cock.
“Sweet Freya,” Jari said.
Gull let his cock slip out and pinched him so hard on his nipple that he yelped.
“No talking!” she said, before wrapping him in her warm lips again.
Jari pressed his own lips tightly closed as Gull moved up and down, sometimes scraping her teeth along his length, which was a paradise of sensation, and sometimes twirling her tongue towards the base. As she moved, her breasts stroked across his knees, the hard pert nipples tickling through his fine blond body hair. Jari felt he might lose his mind. He was desperate to touch her, desperate to say something, above all desperate to come. He could feel it building, every muscle in his body tensing with anticipation.
It was as though she knew. Cupping his aching stones in her cool hand, Gull slid back and focused her magical lips on the engorged head of Jari’s cock, sucking and swirling her tongue, until he couldn’t hold back a whimper.
“I…I…” he bit out. But it was too late. His seed surged into her mouth in hot bursts, while his entire body rocked with wave after wave of tingling ecstasy. When the stars faded from his vision, and he was finally fully spent, Gull was sitting back, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand.
“You may speak,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” Jari said.
“For what?”
“For coming in your mouth. I…couldn’t help it.”
Gull stood, bent down and kissed him on the lips, letting her tongue find his and swirl with it together.
She tasted different now, less wine and more salt, but it was no less intoxicating. Jari felt his cock harden completely again, though he had only emptied it seconds before.
“Do you taste bad?” Gull asked.
Jari shook his head. If that was his taste, the rich saltiness, it wasn’t bad, not at all. He would come in her mouth and kiss her clean every night for the rest of his life if she’d let him.
Gull looked at him with a little smile.
Jari had the awful sensation that she’d read his thoughts and knew what soft and sentimental things he was thinking. He should probably bend her over the bench and take her from behind just to reestablish his position as a man and a Norseman, but as he was currently tied to a chair and completely at her whim, it was impossible. Jari was grateful Iver wasn’t around to witness this. The very idea made him laugh.
“Is something funny?” Gull asked, stepping forward, straddling his legs and dropping down to sit on him, her wet sex pressed against his throbbing erection.
“No…”
“No, Mistress,” Gull said.
Jari thought he had misheard. Thralls called his mother “mistress”. He was no thrall, and this girl was not his mother. Thank the gods for that.
She reached down, sliding the head of his cock into her warm opening, lingering there, not moving.
Jari tried to rise up to fully penetrate her but she moved with him, always just keeping the tip of his cock inside, but nothing else. He wanted to impale her, slam into her and fuck her until she screamed the name of every god she knew, and some new ones. “Please…” he said.
“Please, Mistress.”
“Please, Mistress. Fuck me, Mistress, please.” Jari felt natural saying it, and the sensation of her pushing downwards until he was enveloped, balls-deep in her warm wet cunt, only helped. If she was to be his mistress, so be it. A thrall could do worse.
She moved languidly, trailing her fingers all over his scorching flesh, over his chest, down his hard abdomen, back up to tickle the hair under his arms. And just when he thought he’d have to beg again, she wrapped her arms around his head, gripping his hair in her fingers and kissed him, her hot tongue darting in and out.
Jari pulled at his bindings; he wanted to hold her, to touch her, pull her hair, grab a handful of her magnificent ass, and slide his thumb over that glistening pink slit that opened and closed teasingly with every thrust. He knew of the button of nerves there that if stroked with a deft finger or thumb would send a woman into paroxysms of ecstasy. He wanted to give her that. The chair rattled beneath them as Jari tugged at the leather strap.
Gull scowled at him. “Are you trying to escape?”
“No.”
She moved up and down, her cunny squeezing his cock.
Jari felt his eyes rolling back in his head.
“No, what?”
“No, mistress.”
“That was a lie, boy,” Gull said, “What happens to boys who lie?”
She reached over, pulling something from the small pouch she had removed from her neck. A sewing needle. “Why aren’t you adorned, boy?” she asked, fingering his earlobe. As he was still being fucked, frustratingly slowly, the slightest touch made him shiver. So she was going to pierce his ear. That seemed a small price to pay for the privilege of filling her with his come. And he wasn’t about to tell her that his lack of adornment was because of his youth. He turned his head willingly.
Gull reached over and held the needle in the flame of the lamp for a few seconds. Then she tugged down his earlo
be and jammed the needle through it.
“Odin’s arsehole!” Jari said at the sudden pain.
Gull continued to move her hips as she pulled a tiny gold ring from the pouch and held it over the flame before looping it through the stinging hole.
“Did you just curse one of the gods?” she asked. “That’s very naughty.” Her hand slid down over Jari’s right nipple, circling it with her fingertips. She rose up and down on his cock.
Jari’s reason was leaving him. As the tingle subsided from his ear, he found himself craving it, craving more. The pain combined with the pleasure of her hot sex was tearing him apart. He snapped his hips upwards, trying to get deeper into her, trying to regain some control, but she just rose, almost to the point of him slipping out, and lingered there.
“Hold still,” she said, and pressed the burning needle through his nipple.
“Mother of … Christ,” Jari said, in Latin, a curse he’d once heard a Northumbrian monk say.
Gull calmly looped another gold ring through the hole in his nipple, wiping away the drip of blood with her finger, which she popped in her mouth and licked clean. “Have you abandoned our gods?” she asked, as she stood and let him slip out painfully.
His dripping cock bounced back and slapped his glistening sweaty belly, sending a jolt through him as the tiny wound in his nipple seared. Pleasure. Pain. One or the other. He could no longer tell the difference.
Her finger swirled around his other nipple. “Are you a Christian now?”
“Gods, no…Gull, mistress…” He said the first thing that came to him. “Let me taste you. Let me lick you and suck you until you scream for mercy.”
“Your sweet temptations won’t save you. I like you, Jari Sturlason, but you’re still not adorned enough for me.”
She slid her hand down his chest, over his navel and down the path of hair to his straining swollen manhood. She grabbed him tightly and pulled upwards, clenching until she had a finger full of his foreskin pinched up above the tip. The needle re-appeared.
“Gods, no!” Jari cried.
Gull paused, needle raised, a wicked grin on her face.
“No, mistress,” Jari tried to free himself, pulling at his bindings.
