Total pages in book: 106
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 96271 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 481(@200wpm)___ 385(@250wpm)___ 321(@300wpm)
Then that chest opened.
The cavern was enormous. That was the first thing. The limestone had opened into a space that had no business existing inside a coastal cliff, a vault thirty meters high at least, the ceiling lost in shadow, the floor descending in a series of natural terraces toward a still inner pool that caught the last of the exterior light through some crack or channel I couldn’t locate. The air was cool and felt completely dry. The acoustics were extraordinary. I could hear my own breathing echoing the way it might in a cathedral.
And in the center of the lowest terrace, resting on a cradle of ancient timber that had been reinforced, I could see now, with more recent work—that newer wood looked old, but not nine centuries old, some of it merely decades—was a ship.
A longship. A dragon ship.
I turned my torch on and walked toward it with a specific quality of attention that it seemed I was learning to bring to things that couldn’t possibly be real.
The hull looked intact. That was the second impossible thing. Clinker-built, the overlapping strakes fastened with iron rivets that had oxidized to a dark red-brown, the whole surface treated with something that had preserved the wood against the salt air with a thoroughness that no natural process could account for. Someone had maintained this at some point in the last hundred years, if perhaps not recently. Someone had come here and cared for this ship over the centuries.
The prow had the head of a serpentine creature whose open mouth faced toward the sealed cave entrance, toward the sea it had not tasted in God knew how many years—if ever. With a frown at the unlikeliness of it all, I realized that the thing must have been assembled, or reassembled, inside this cavern, since it could never have passed through the narrow opening I had just entered by.
I ran my torch along the hull and then up and across to the cavern walls, and that was when I stopped walking.
The walls were covered in images.
Floor to ceiling, from the tideline on the lower terrace to the point where the limestone curved inward toward the vault, the walls of the cavern had been carved in deep relief, with the patient and authoritative skill of people who had considered this work important enough to do properly.
I approached the nearest section and held my torch close.
The figures were large. Men and women, some of them dressed in Viking clothing. Most of them, though…
Heat surged into my cheeks as I started to make out the subject of the vast majority of the carvings.
Most of the figures were naked. Much worse, in most of the scenes…
Oh, God, I thought, my mind exaggerating only a little bit, they’re all fucking, aren’t they?
CHAPTER 2
Ilsa
I was a virgin. Mostly because relationships, I had thought all my adult life, were bullshit. Also because I’d been raised pretty conservatively, and thus when I looked at those walls covered with those frankly pornographic carvings, my face burned like the surface of the sun.
To my horror, though, my face wasn’t the only part of me that had begun to burn.
I made myself look at the carvings the way I would look at any artifact. Methodically. Starting at the left-hand edge of the nearest wall and moving right. That was the scholarly approach. That was what I did.
The men were enormous. That was the first thing the artists had established, with an anatomical frankness that left absolutely nothing to interpretation. The Vikings in these carvings were rendered with the kind of reverent attention to masculine proportion that I associated with the most unambiguous fertility cult imagery I had ever encountered in my coursework—and I had encountered quite a lot of it, in a purely academic capacity, without any of the physical consequences I was now experiencing.
Their bodies stood very tall, and their phalluses hung down almost to their knees when flaccid, in a scene of several warriors bathing. When erect, confronting a young woman upon her knees—as happened over and over in the carvings—the rigid Viking penises seemed to rival the members of donkeys or horses.
Cocks, a voice whispered in my head. Don’t be a prude, Ilsa. You know what to call them. These Vikings are using their huge cocks to fuck their new bed thralls.
I swallowed hard. I tried to silence that whisper.
Phalluses. Fertility imagery.
I looked at the carvings of the women, trying somehow to focus my mind in a different direction from my perception. The artists had taken extraordinary pains to make their beauty clear: high cheekbones, strong jaws, long hair flying loose or pulled by large fists. They were shown in the initial scenes struggling—arms reaching back, mouths open—but the struggle was being attended to.
That phrase, attended to, kept presenting itself to my mind as I moved the torch slowly across the carved limestone.