9th Century
Things change for me after that night with the Jarl. I sleep with him now, every night. I no longer work, there is no more grinding of grain or washing of pots or mucking out of the pig sties. I eat better, too, two full meals a day – one when I wake up and the second in the evening. In between there is dried fruit and apples and cheese to snack on, and no one to slap my hand away when I reach for them.
Eirik is busy during the days, ensconced in the longhouse with his higher ranking men discussing things he does not discuss with me or hunting for deer outside the camp walls and returning sometimes with a buck. On those evenings when the hunt is successful there is a communal feast, Viking women and children included. The Jarl always brings the loin to the table himself, rare and bloody, and cuts off the choicest piece for me before anyone else eats. I sit during these times, humming with the joy of being cared for, and accept his offering with great respect and affection. He is a good hunter, a good warrior – a good man.
And yet I am not free to go.
Two things happen, as my days in the Viking camp turn to weeks, and then to a month, two months, and so on. The first thing is my certainty that I must leave. I'll be missing now, at home. The police will be involved. My father and my friends will be sick with worry. These are not small things to me. They are the biggest things in my life. And there is nothing to be done but to get back to them. To do otherwise would be to condemn them to lives of loss and worry. I cannot do that.
The second thing is the nights. I spend them with the Jarl, in his arms, and I come to know him in a way I did not think it was possible to know another human being. Sometimes I think I know him better than I know myself. I begin to know what the smallest, most fleeting expression on his face means. I begin to divine his moods in the angle of his shoulders, the sound he makes as he sits down in the roundhouse with me after a long day.
"I feel sometimes as if I'm getting a degree in you," I say sleepily one night after he has satisfied me three separate times and I feel as if I will spend the rest of my life limp on Eirik's fur-laden bed.
"Mmm?" He asks. "A what? A dekree?"
A shiver runs through me – I'm usually more careful than this. It's become automatic now, the simple exclusion of certain parts of my life from all conversation. I would no more discuss a car engine with Eirik as I would my time-traveling with a casual acquaintance in the 21st century.
"Oh," I reply, "nothing, I'm tired, I don't know what I'm saying. I just meant that it feels as if I know you better than anyone else knows you. Almost as if I'm not a fully separate person from you, sometimes."
The Jarl pulls me to my hands and knees, then, and enters me, bending his body down over mine, clasping his hand around the back of my neck. That's how it is for us now. There is no real line between us, he takes my body as if he owns it and no part of me would have it any other way. In the mornings, I wake him up with my mouth or my hand, or simply by pressing my naked body back against him until his own arousal pulls him from slumber. And when he leaves the roundhouse, stopping at the door to pull me close and cover me with kisses before heading off to meet his men with the bouncing lope of a man who has just been completely satisfied, I am content in a way I have never been before.
As fall turns to winter, the nights become frosty. Sometimes a light snow falls, and the morning sun glistens and sparkles in the ice crystals that form on every surface. The Jarl returns late one night, hours after the sun has gone down, and finds me braiding pieces of straw into a rope, the way Anja and Gudry have taught me.
"They say when I have enough I can link them together for a hat," I say, keeping back the part where I think this hat might be useful on a long journey down the coast if it's during a hot or sunny time. I look up and see instantly from Eirik's face that he is not concerned about my hat.
"What is it, babe?" I ask, using a term of affection he has only ever heard from me, but one he has decided he likes. "What's wrong?"
The Jarl sits down at the wooden table and beckons for me, pulling me onto his lap, undoing the knot at the back of my neck that holds up my tunic and burying his face in my breasts. He looks up a minute later as I run my fingers through his hair and kiss his dirt-smudged cheeks.
"It's going to be a long winter, Paige."
"Is it?" I ask. "Are you worried there won't be enough food?"
"No, we have enough grain and pigs to last us three winters. But this is our first winter staying here. Usually, my people raid the land of the Angles when it's warm, and return to the our land when the frost comes. Soon there will be more of us here, more coming, but until then I worry we're vulnerable in exactly the same way the Angles have been vulnerable to us – sitting out here in the open, not moving, with a barely-dug ditch to keep out the King's men."
"There's more than a ditch – those palisades are pretty sturdy," I say, taking what I remember of my reading on the Viking invasions of Britain and trying to apply it specifically to our current situation. "Does the King even have enough men? We're in the Kingdom of the East Angles now, aren't we? They have enough to worry about with the Mercians on their doorstep to care about such a small group of Northmen, I think."
Eirik looks at me sharply. "How in Freja's name do you think you know so much about the military concerns of the King?"
"I don't," I reply. "I'm just guessing."
"No you're not. I know it because what you say is correct."
"Then why are you worried?"
"Because it's my lot to worry. There's no one above me, girl. If the people starve, if they're killed by the enemy, it's on my head isn't it? It's my duty to think of these things. The women don't weave precious stones into my leathers for nothing, you know. I don't eat the best meat for no reason. I am given those things because I earn them. Because keeping me strong means the people keep themselves strong. And you still haven't told me how it is you're advising me on the strength of King of the East Angles!"
"I'm not," I say hurriedly. "It was just a guess!"
Eirik harrumphs. "You're full of guesses, girl. And it's a mighty coincidence that so many of them turn out to be truths. You're right about the King. But he's never had an encampment of Northmen sitting on his coast, has he? It doesn't take a wise man to see we make a tempting target."
"Set the men to digging the ditch deeper," I say, thinking that if the ditch around the camp is deep enough, and the ramparts outside it tall and wide enough, those things alone, combined with the palisade, would keep out even a large force of men – even on horseback. "And set more of the women to making arrows – I don't know why Hildy needs so many to help her with the washing."
The Jarl laughs suddenly, a sound I love. "She doesn't – but the washing is her task, and so she pretends she needs a small army of girls to get it done."
"Well tell her to stop! Double the number of arrows in camp if you worry about invaders. Which will be more useful – cleaner cooking pots or arrows?"
I wrap my arms around Eirik's strong neck as he stands up and he whirls me around in a circle. "Tell Hildy to stop, you say?" He grins. "Are you trying to get me killed, girl? I should send Hildy out to meet the King of the East Angles, shouldn't I? One harsh word, one switch with her little willow branch and he'll be running off into the hills, never to be seen again. And now you, too! Perhaps you can accompany her, and advise the King on how to do his job?"
He's in good humor, I can see that, but when he sits back down and gets to running his hands over the curve of my waist and then around, sliding them down over my buttocks and pulling me in closer to him, I'm afraid I've gone too far.
"I don't mean to tell you what to do," I say, because now he's unwrapping his own leathers and that look is in his eye and I know there is not much time left for talking. "I don't intend to –"
"Of course there are more arrows being made," Eirik says, freeing himself from his leathers and cockily enjoying my reaction. "I don't need you to tell me that. You're a smart one, though, Paige. It's almost a shame you're a woman, I could use someone like you on my side when Veigar is trying to convince everyone that we should attack the King's men in the middle of winter."
He's gazing up at me as I stand between his legs, waiting for a reaction – waiting to pull me down onto that thing I can't take my eyes off. "It's a shame I'm a woman?" I whisper playfully, pushing Eirik's dark hair off his face because I want to see that expression he always makes when he first feels me around him. "Are you sure about – ohhhh..."
He maneuvers me onto him before I can finish speaking, pulling me all the way down, impaling me on his cock until the rest of my words disappear into a moan. I lean my head back, closing my eyes and letting Eirik take control.
It doesn't take long. I'm still gripping his shoulders hard, the sweet little tightenings still running through me, when the Jarl lifts his hips up off the chair and holds himself there, panting and staring into my eyes as he empties himself, all his tension, all his pleasure, into me.