The Raven's Table

by Christine Morgan

  She herself, the Goat-Girl, tune-whistled as she walked. Her broad hips swayed with every step. Her legs were long and strong and bare; likewise were her arms. A simple kirtle of spun wool, dyed butternut and brown, hung halfway down her thighs. Brooches made from bronze and polished goat-horn pinned the garment closed over her full, heavy breasts. On her feet were low, laced leather slippers. On her head, a knotted kerchief bound her hair.

  Goat-Girl, they called her, and had since she was in fact a girl, a mere tot of a child, chasing bow-legged and tousle-headed after her father and brothers. Those times were, of course, by now long gone. So too were the father and the brothers… all but one.

  Only Hafrvid remained, and only he alone sometimes called her still by her birth-given name. Heidrun, the herdsman and his wife had named their only daughter, born with a cap of soft yellow curls. Heidrun, for the golden she-goat of the gods.

  “She stands atop Odin’s feasting-hall, shield-shingled Valhalla,” the Goat-Girl’s mother had often told her. “She eats of the tree Leradr’s leaves, ever-fresh and eternal. Her udders swell with honey-mead, which drips copiously from her teats to fill a vat. And, though each night the Valkyries and their chosen slain drink as much as they can hold, the vat will never be depleted.”

  Their own goats gave milk, not mead. Milk and wool, horn and hide. They roved the mossy meadow, grazing at the grass. Most of the she-goats sported pregnant, bulging bellies. Yearlings frisked and frolicked. Young bucks head-butted in mock battles, practice for autumn’s mating contests.

  The largest, strongest and oldest buck braced his cloven hooves against a slab of stone. His wool was greyish, coarse and dark. A bearded tuft wagged from his chin. His horns curved thick and majestic. He flicked an alert ear, long-pupiled amber eyes watching over the rest of the herd.

  When a particularly foolish brown buck whose ambitions were too big for his horns attempted a prancing charge, the older male butted him so hard that the challenger was flipped onto his back with all four legs sticking up. He lay there with a stunned look as the grey buck sauntered over and drenched him with a stream of odoriferous piss. Duly chastened, shamed in the sights of the does, the would-be contender then staggered to regain his footing, and trotted off to the other side of the meadow.

  As the Goat-Girl moved among the herd, she ceaselessly gathered up the shed wisps and clumps of wool. These, she tucked into a bag hung at her belt. The other women of the farm-stead—her brother’s wife and daughters, his mother-in-law, their female slaves—would see to the brushing and carding of it, the spinning, the weaving. They would also see to the milking, the making of butter and cheese, and other such tasks from which the Goat-Girl was exempted.

  Hers were other duties.

  “Ia Sib-Njurath,” she said, turning her face into the breeze that blew up from the dark-timbered woods.

  It wafted cool but pungent, its scent overripe, fruity and meaty, redolent of loam and rich soil, of sweat and of musk, a rut-scent, a fuck-scent, both sickening and arousing. Lust kindled a slippery heat in the Goat-Girl’s loins even as her stomach seemed to roil and churn.

  “Ia Sib-Njurath,” she said again. “Praise and fear the great Goat-Mother! From whose fecund, fertile womb sprung Heidrun, my name-sake! From whose wet and bloodied cleft burst forth Tanngnjostr and Tanngrisnir, the tooth-grinder and tooth-barer, war-goats of Asgard!”

  The sky was clear, fair-blue, cloudless above her. Yet nonetheless it seemed that she heard the far-distant crack and rumble of thunder, as if Thor’s chariot-pullers acknowledged her words.

  She carried also a sturdy stave, gnarled and twisted but worn smooth, using this to nudge the goats along or disrupt the inevitable squabbles that broke out among them. At its upper end was knobbed black bark whorled with wood of white, in rounded bumps and knots and contours. This, the Goat-Girl rubbed with one hand, while with the other she fondled the fullness of her breasts through the kirtle’s wool. Her nipples throbbed stiff against the cloth, seeping slow trickles of moisture to match that dampening between her thighs.

  Around her, the she-goats bleated. The large buck snorted, tossing his horns. Cloven hooves pawed at the sod. The breeze blew stronger, warmer. Some of the young bucks and yearlings left off their playful frolics and mock-battles, imitating clumsy efforts at mating, attempting to mount one another, hairy haunches humping.

  The Goat-Girl unpinned her brooches, lowering the top of her kirtle to bare her breasts and touch them, hefting their weight, rolling her large berry-red nubbed nipples with forefinger and thumb. Sinking onto the lush green grass, she pulled the kirtle’s hem to her waist. Her hands roved her body like those of any lover. She delved to stroke the fleecy mound at her loins, parted her flesh-folds, probed the slick cleft revealed.

  “We honor the Goat-Mother,” she said in a husky murmur as she dipped slow fingers into the ready channel of her sex. Her hips and buttocks squirmed. Her breath caught. Her tongue slid wetly over her lips. She gazed with eyes half-lidded at the melting-butter sunlight on the trees.

  Sweet fluid seeped from her breasts; she smeared the honey-milk nectar over the end of her goat-herd’s stave until the knobbed wood glistened. Then she slid it down her belly and guided it to her cleft, the knots and bulges rubbing in lewd, enticing ways. She did not sink its bulbous wooden girth into herself, but teased at the outer lips and massaged her bud of pleasure with it until the delicious seizures overwhelmed her writhing, gasping body.

  The gravid she-goats looked on approvingly. The large buck snorted again, his own arousal evident. The younger goats continued capering in their antics until he charged into their midst, butting aside several to single out a plump yearling doe. He nudged his nose under her tail, sniffing and huffing, nuzzling with exploratory licks. The young doe squealed, hind legs braced wide as he roughly mounted her.

  Watching their urgent coupling, the Goat-Girl clasped her thighs tight around the stave so that its smooth shaft rested snug along her furrow. She flexed her loins against it in a rhythmic, quickening motion. With one hand she squeezed more of the sweet and milky nectar from her breasts; with the other she tugged at her lower fleece-curls as the sensations again approached their peak.

  “Ia Sib-Njurath!” she cried aloud, this time working the stave’s knobbed end into her sex, pushing it deep and drawing it out in purposeful strokes. She rotated it slowly, twisting it within her this way and that, so that the contours found hidden sensitive spots and elicited surge after pulsing surge of ecstasy.

  After, spent and sated, she lay sprawled a while in the meadow sunshine, thinking of the dusk and musk of the dark forest grove. Of what awaited there, what awakened there. Of what stirred, what summoned, rousing the rich earth, fertile and potent.

  Soon. It would be soon, very soon.

  Once she felt her legs might again hold her, she rose to her feet. She adjusted her kirtle, re-pinned her brooches, and gathered the herd. This brought as it always did much blatting and goatish indignation, but she led them back to the farm-stead nonetheless.

  At the goat-byre, she gave the goats over for milking. Ulfhilde supervised, her brother’s wife, red-haired, with hips like ale-barrels and a healthy babe a few months old cradled in a woven sling on her back.

  A glance at the Goat-Girl, and another at the she-goats, was enough to inform Ulfhilde that the time was at hand.

  “Tomorrow?” she asked.

  “Tomorrow,” the Goat-Girl replied.

  “Have you told Sigride?”

  “Not yet. I will do so after I speak with Hafrvid.”

  Ulfhilde nodded. Whispers passed among the other women, many of whom also had given birth during the long cold winter. Some rushed to share the news with the men in the fields and work-sheds. Word quickly spread throughout the farm-stead.

  The Goat-Girl paused at the log-walled and thatch-roofed hall to empty her wool-bag into the large basket in the weaving-room. Even the littlest girls helped their sisters with the sorting, under the guidance of spindle-
aunts and grandmothers. The smaller boys ground grain at stone querns, tended the hearth-fires, and watched attentively as white-bearded Geitr scraped a stretched goat-hide.

  She next sought out Hafrvid, her brother and their chieftain, up by the smoke-houses. Or, rather, behind the smoke-houses as it happened… she followed the sounds of raised voices and saw Hafrvid standing in arguing confrontation with Brusir, while a group of other young men and boys looked on.

  “—instead of treating me like a child!”

  Brusir was one of their nephews, the grown son of Haurgrim, their dead elder brother. Although Brusir had his father’s bushy blond hair, blue eyes and pugnacious manner, he as of yet lacked Haurgrim’s full stature or strength. This did not stop him from resenting what he felt was his unfair lot, and this was by no means the first time he and Hafrvid had disputed.

  It was, however, the first time—in the Goat-Girl’s knowledge, at least—that Brusir so lost his temper as to swing a fist. The blow caught Hafrvid on the jaw, and it was hard to say which of them, or the onlookers, was the more surprised.

  Surprised, Hafrvid might have been, but not for long. His big hands shot out, seizing the youth’s upper arms and jerking him forward. He slammed his forehead into Brusir’s face, that solid curve of bone head-butting him as well as any he-goat might have done. There was a hard crunch, blood bursting from Brusir’s nose.

  Brusir yelped with pain, then staggered and fell sprawling when Hafrvid shoved him square in the chest. The other young men and boys flinched back a step or two, grimacing.

  “You are still a child,” Hafrvid said. “And I am still chieftain here. You would do well, nephew, to keep that in mind.”

  Then he unlaced his breeches, hauled out his prick, and hammered home the lesson with a hot yellow stream. It soaked Brusir’s tunic, splashing his skin and his sparse-growing beard.

  The Goat-Girl knocked her stave’s knotted upper end against the nearest smoke-house’s plank wall. They all glanced around at her, Brusir with sullen humiliation, the others with varying levels of apprehension and lust. Hafrvid raised his eyebrows as he tucked his prick away.

  “Make ready your goat-skins,” she said. “Those of you who are of age.”

  Eager grins greeted these words. So did a few disappointed grumbles, these from the boys who would have to wait yet another year.

  “Go,” Hafrvid told them, dismissing them with a gesture. “The rest of you, see that the axe-blades and knives are well-sharpened. We will have much work in the morning, at the slaughter-yard.”

  They went at a run, laughing and capering, whooping war-cries to one another. Brusir got up, wincing as he wiped blood from his nose, wincing again as he wrung Hafrvid’s piss from his clothes. He cast one last surly look at his uncle over his shoulder as he left.

  “What was that about?” asked the Goat-Girl.

  Hafrvid snorted. “What wasn’t it about? Insolent dung-clot. He might make a fine chieftain some day, if sufficient respect ever gets drummed into that thick skull of his.”

  “As our own father said of you.”

  “It was just as true then.” He stretched. “So. She calls again from the dark-timbered woods.”

  “She does.”

  “Sigride?”

  “Unless you object.”

  “No.” Hafrvid placed a large hand over each of the Goat-Girl’s breasts, her nipples poking stiff against his palms, their dampness seeping through the wool of her kirtle. “Ia Sib-Njurath.”

  “Ia Sib-Njurath,” she said, firmly cupping the bulge of his groin.

  Then she went to find Sigride, the eldest of Hafrvid’s and Ulfhilde’s daughters. Flaxen-haired Sigride, beautiful, and of a ripe age. The girl was at the bread-ovens, turning the loaves so that they would bake evenly, when the Goat-Girl approached.

  “Is it… is it time?” asked Sigride, not without some trepidation.

  “Tomorrow at dusk,” said the Goat-Girl. “The first new moon of spring. You are ready? You know what is expected?”

  She gulped, and smiled nervously. “Yes. I think so.”

  “It is a great honor.”

  “I know.”

  “Your parents will be very proud.”

  “Will it hurt?”

  “Only for a moment, if even that.” The Goat-Girl embraced her with affection, brushed a smudge of flour from Sigride’s nose, then kissed her fair brow.

  Sigride clung to her for a bit longer, glancing up through lowered lashes with a manner of shyness and slyness together in her blue eyes. “Could I…?”

  The words went unfinished, but their question continued in the tentative brush of her fingertips along the heavy undercurve of one of the Goat-Girl’s breasts.

  The Goat-Girl kissed her again, on the mouth, their lips sealing moist and soft. “But be quick,” she said, once more unpinning her brooches. “You mustn’t let the bread burn.”

  “I won’t,” promised Sigride, with an admiring sigh as the top of the Goat-Girl’s kirtle fell away.

  Her touch, unhindered by cloth, grew more bold. She caressed the smooth skin, thumbed the distended nipples, gently squeezed them until they issued forth their honeyed, milky nectar.

  “Taste of it,” murmured the Goat-Girl, guiding Sigride’s head to her bosom.

  Not that Sigride needed any further encouragement. She flicked her tongue at first one nipple and then the other, licking at the trickling flow, darting back and forth like a bee unable to choose between equally succulent blooms.

  With a whimper, she latched onto one, sucking, suckling, drawing the sweet fluid as greedily as any hungry babe. But, unlike a babe, she moved the lower half of her body so that their loins rubbed together. Continuing to whimper, breathlessly, low in her throat, Sigride rocked up and down, side to side.

  The Goat-Girl cupped and gripped tight with both hands Sigride’s firm young buttocks. Though her cleft still tingled from what she’d enjoyed in the meadow, arousal swiftly warmed her anew. “Harder,” she said. “Suck harder, yes, good, ah, good.”

  Moaning around a mouthful of breast-flesh, Sigride did so. She fumbled her skirt to her waist, wedged one of the Goat-Girl’s thighs between her own, and began riding against it, twitching her hips with increasing urgency. The Goat-Girl wetted her fingers and pushed them down to Sigride’s loins, sliding in circular pressure over the firm little nub tucked into the dewy folds.

  Sigride quaked in a sudden rush of release, voicing muffled cries that trailed off into tremulous gasps. She half-collapsed into the Goat-Girl’s arms, head cradled in the valley of the breasts she’d been lavishing with her tongue.

  The Goat-Girl held her like that until Sigride regained her breath, then set her on her feet.

  “Mustn’t let the bread burn,” the Goat-Girl reminded her, smiling.

  With that, she kissed her brow again and left her to tend the loaves in the oven.

  Soon, the day’s labors were over, the chores done, the livestock tended, the hall’s door shut and barred against the coming darkness. A mood of excitement and anticipation hung over the folk of Hafrvid’s farm-stead as they sat around the long tables for their evening meal.

  It was no feast, of course. The following evening, they knew, they would enjoy a great feast of meats both roasted and boiled, with hearty stews and cakes served with berries in sweetened cream.

  But there was bread fresh-baked, with butter fresh-churned. There was a soup of lentils and vegetables seasoned with herbs. There were dried fruits and hard cheeses, and to drink there was barley-beer.

  As they ate, white-bearded Geitr’s mother, Gerte Half-Sighted—who had been the Goat-Girl herself, in years now far lost and distant—took a place on a comfortable chair by the fire to tell stories and sagas kept treasured in her ancient memory. Including that one which was a great favorite on such occasions as this, for it was the story of how their family came to be.

  Once it was that Thor and Loki set out traveling from Asgard

  In the thunder-chariot drawn by T
anngnjostr and Tanngrisnir,

  Thor’s strong and mighty war-goats, brothers of golden Heidrun

  Who stands atop Valhalla, udders dripping the sweet honey-mead;

  These three firstborn of Sib-Njurath, Mother of a Thousand Young.

  The gods sought their night’s lodging with a poor peasant and his wife

  Thor slew his goats, skinned and slaughtered them for the cook-pot.

  Immortal, they would spring up whole again by the next morning.

  But the peasant’s son cracked a thigh-bone to reach the rich marrow,

  So that one of the goats healed lame-legged, and Thor was in a rage.

  The peasants, cowering in terror, offered compensation for the insult.

  Thor agreed to take their son and daughter to be his servants;

  Thjalfi was the boy’s name, and Roskva his pretty sister.

  The gods made frequent lusty use of her, Thor and Loki alike,

  Parting her plump thighs and thrilling her loins with pleasure.

  When the rut-mood came over Tanngnjostr and Tanngrisnir,

  Thor bade Roskva service them as well, but she hesitated.

  Frightened of the fierce war-goats, she prayed to Sib-Njurath

  Who transformed her to a she-goat, that she might flip her tail,

  Able, and soon eager, to be mounted by them both in turn.

  This went on for some time in their travels, thoroughly and often,

  Roskva gloriously god-fucked and goat-fucked night after night

  Until it was no wonder she should find her womb over-filled.

  Some of her sons and daughters no different from any other babe

  But some born with horns and hooves, or goatish hindquarters.

  And of that lineage, of course, their own line had through many generations descended. Favored by the Great Goat-Mother, who was older by eons than the gods of Asgard, who would be eternal long after Ragnarok’s final battle… Ia Sib-Njurath.