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)
Attended to. These young women are having themselves attended to.
A Viking with one hand wrapped in a woman’s hair, bending her backward over what was clearly a village table, his other hand working between her thighs while her expression transformed, in the artist’s sequential rendering of a single moment, from something that had started as resistance into something else that to my distress I recognized.
I refused to consider what I recognized in that expression.
The village scenes ran in a continuous narrative band. A coastal settlement. Longships drawn up on the shore. And then the Vikings were inside, and the women of the village were… some of them were running, but the ones who had been caught were being attended to, as I kept thinking of it, in a variety of configurations that the artists had clearly considered important to document comprehensively.
One woman knelt before a seated Viking of spectacular physical dimensions, her hands bound behind her, her head guided forward with a patience that the carving somehow conveyed through the angle of the man’s wrist. Her mouth could barely accommodate the massive shaft atop which the warrior held her face, but somehow the long-dead artist had conveyed that she performed the degrading service willingly.
Another girl bent across another table, like the one I had just been looking at. A Viking stood behind her with his hands on her hips and his rigid phallus thrusting deep into her vagina. Her face—I brought the torch close and then immediately regretted it—wore an expression that was not suffering, or perhaps not only suffering… suffering along with something else that the suffering brought with it, unwelcome but nevertheless a kind of consolation.
Another scene showed a woman between two men, on her hands and knees. The warriors, too, had knelt, so that they could get their enormous manhoods into her, fore and aft. Their handsome faces looked down at where they had entered her mouth and her pussy, grave looks of satisfaction on their faces. I moved the torch away from that one faster than I had moved it away from anything else, which was how I noticed that my hand was trembling again.
Not the scholarly trembling. The other kind.
I pressed my free hand flat against my thigh and kept walking.
The longship scenes came next, and I told myself that the change in setting would help. It did not help. The rowing benches had been rendered in careful detail, and on those benches the women lay or knelt or were positioned by unhurried hands, while the ships moved across a carved sea.
The Vikings took their time enjoying their captives with their huge cocks as they sailed home. I felt certain that was what the artists had above all insisted on showing, in scene after scene: the men did not seem the slightest bit rushed. They had long straps in their hands that they obviously used to ensure their new thralls’ obedience.
The women’s faces in these scenes, as they accepted their new masters over and over in their mouths and pussies, had moved past the ambiguous expressions of the village. They showed something more settled. More undone.
I realized that my free hand was no longer flat against my thigh.
I stopped walking.
I stood in the torchlight with my hand pressed between my legs through the canvas of my cargo pants. I made myself completely still, feeling absolute horror at myself.
I moved my hand away. I made myself do it, as if I were putting down something fascinating that I had had no business picking up.
I resumed walking. The torch beam moved to the next section, which showed the homecoming. The Vikings brought their women ashore now, into Norse settlements, and the artists had shifted register slightly—the urgency of the raid scenes and the patience of the voyage replaced by something more domestic and therefore, I found, even more disturbing. Because the domesticity implied permanence. Bed thralls, I thought, my academic vocabulary clicking into place like a lock turning. The Norse institution of the bed thrall. I had read about this. I had read about it in the same careful, distant way I had read about everything I had never expected to encounter at close quarters.
Then the… the… device appeared in these homecoming scenes, and I stopped again.
I had never seen it before, or anything like it, which was notable, because I had looked at a great deal of Norse material culture in my academic career and I thought I had a reasonably complete mental catalogue. It was a frame of some kind—carved wood, by the look of the artistic rendering, with curved elements that suggested careful ergonomic design. The women were bound to it in a specific configuration, kneeling, their weight supported by padded elements at the hips and knees, their upper bodies angled forward, their wrists secured to a horizontal bar. It had the quality of purpose-built equipment. The kind of thing someone had thought about for a long time before making.