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)
When this man had begun to speak, I had told myself that the Northern accent and the Nordic words that slipped through represented simply an accident of origin—the Guard was global, Giovanna had told me.
But the way he had noted the Roman origin of the mastix… He had said it as if making a comparison. He had said it the way a person says it who has a different tradition entirely, who stands outside the system looking in with the eye of a peer rather than a member.
And the way he had said the other thing… the Viking punishment strap. Those words had borne a tone that told of his familiarity with the thing he referred to… more, a preference for it, as a part of his own culture.
My throat tightened. The cavern. The ship. The carvings in the limestone, the broad-shouldered warriors with their leather straps, their kneeling women, their bride saddles, and their rowing benches with iron rings. The inscription in Younger Futhark in a Roman mosaic: an inscription that had never made sense to me as a product of a single tradition, that had always seemed like a meeting point, a seam between two different worlds.
It suddenly seemed clear to me that this master did not come from the Pretorian Guard, despite everything Giovanna had made me expect.
“The cavern,” I said. The words came out before I could stop them, and I heard my own voice with the same horror I always felt when my mouth produced something my brain hadn’t properly authorized. “At Capo Zafferano. The ship. You… who are you?”
His left arm came around my waist.
I had perhaps a half second of understanding what was about to happen before it happened. He positioned my bottom with that arm, a single efficient adjustment that tilted my hips, drew my cheeks slightly apart, and presented the fullness of my bottom at exactly the angle he apparently required. Then his right hand came down.
The crack of the first spank echoed off the curved stone walls of the cell like a thunderclap. The pain was intense and immediate. It felt very different from the mastix: broader and more total, a blaze of heat across my whole bottom that seemed to radiate inward.
I cried out.
The second spank landed before the sound had finished leaving my throat.
The third followed so quickly that my cry for the second became the cry for the third, merged into one ragged, broken sound that I did not recognize as mine until it had already escaped.
I hung from the iron posts and sobbed. The pain spread through my bottom in waves that matched my heartbeat, humiliating and to my abject dismay not entirely unlike the warmth from the bride saddle, from the pendant, from the deep roots of the tree.
“How may I please you, Master?” The words came out broken and wet with tears. I meant every one of them in a way that would have horrified me this morning at the café. They came from the same place the warmth came from. From somewhere far below the part of me that had three years of graduate school, two journal publications, and a firm opinion about the methodology problems in Bronze Age Scandinavian scholarship.
He released my waist. For a moment there was only the sound of my crying and the torchlight through the barred window and the pain in my bottom.
“I may be from elsewhere, but I endorse your mistress’s idea that for a columba like you, questions are useless,” he said, and his voice had changed—softer now, something in it that I couldn’t name, some quality of patience that felt different from Giovanna’s instruction. “You will be told what you need to know, lille en. I promise you that.” A pause. “In good time, when I decide you are ready.”
I heard him move. His footsteps went around me, unhurried, and I tracked the sound with every nerve I had, my wet face turning instinctively even though the posts allowed me almost no movement.
He came to stand before me.
I had thought I understood what I feared, coming into this cell. I had catalogued my anxiety with the systematic thoroughness of a researcher: the unknown organization, the leash, the restraints, the punishment, the master Giovanna had promised me. I had thought I had prepared myself for the sight of a man.
I had not prepared myself for this man.
He was naked but for an iron bracelet on his left wrist, dark metal engraved with runes I recognized with a lurch of my scholarly heart as Elder Futhark, like the wunjo on my pendant: older than the inscription in the mosaic, older than the cavern’s carvings, the original alphabet of a world that had been ancient when the Normans had come to Sicily. The bracelet sat on his wrist with the ease of something worn so long it had become part of the body. I couldn’t read the runes, but I felt certain they carried some heavy meaning.