Sandra Hill (11 page)

“My buttocks never go flat,” Esme said. “Standing, bending, sitting, lying down—’tis all the same. My bottom is too big.”

It was barely past dawn on the morning after her father’s visit. Ravenshire, the estate owned by Toste and Bolthor’s friend Eirik, lay a considerable distance away. It would take a full day and mayhap more of hard riding in this cart, with unknown dangers in between, most especially her father’s troops. They must needs start soon.

But first, Esme had to fit inside a barrel, which was proving impossible. A barrel had been laid on its side in the back of a market cart. It was the biggest mead barrel they had, and still Esme couldn’t fit her whole body inside. First, she’d tried to back in, feet first, but when she’d gotten as far as her hips and buttocks, she’d had to crawl back out. Now, she was headfirst in the barrel, with her buttocks sticking out, and Sister Margaret and Mother Wilfreda shoving, to no avail.

“I do not think your arse is too big,” she heard Toste say.

Esme went stiff with embarrassment and stopped trying to squirm herself into the barrel.
Oh, for the love of Mary, the Viking is here and he’s looking at my bottom
.

“I agree,” Bolthor said. “A wench cannot have too big
an arse, to my way of thinking. Gives a man something to hold on to.”

Sister Mary Rose giggled and Mother Wilfreda said in a droll tone of voice, “Nice disguises!”

“Methinks it would make a good poem,” Bolthor continued. “Viking Men and Their Love of Ample Arses.”

“Don’t you dare,” Esme said as shrilly as she could, still half in and half out of the barrel. “And someone get me out of here.”

Toste grabbed her by the waist and pulled her hard so that the back of her shoulders hit his chest, and the two of them almost fell to the ground. Fortunately, his greater weight held them upright, with her legs dangling off the ground. Unfortunately, once they were upright, she found herself still wrapped in his embrace from behind, and the rogue wasn’t letting go. In fact, the very bottom she had been bemoaning minutes ago was pressed against a part of him that was rather big, too.

That was when she looked up at Bolthor, who was making a throat-clearing noise as he prepared to recite his newest saga. He wore a huge brown nun’s robe with a wimple and veil covering his head. His black eye patch was gone and his dead eye stared straight ahead in a most unsettling fashion. A crucifix hung from a thick chain onto his massive chest, and wooden prayer beads dangled from his rope belt. He’d shaved his face closely and displayed not one single whisker. He was the biggest, homeliest nun Esme had ever seen. And that’s not all. His face and hands were covered with “sores,” thanks no doubt to some creative use of dough and dyes.

“Did you fall in a patch of poison berries?” she asked.

“Leprosy,” Toste answered for his friend. He spoke from behind her, against her ear. “’Tis a convenient
thing that we travel to Jorvik to deliver a batch of Margaret’s Mead. We can deliver yon leper nun to the boat traveling from there to Lepros Island. Two jobs, one trip.”

Before she could express her surprise at the lackwit scheme, Bolthor started, “This is the saga ‘Viking Men and Their Love of Ample Arses.’”

“Uh, Sister Bolthora, I don’t think we have time for this,” Toste said, against Esme’s ear once again. His hands were still at her waist.

She felt his breath on the inner whorls of her ear. Who knew mere breath could feel so stimulating there! It was only an ear, after all. But ’twas best to confine her surprise to safer topics. “Sister Bolthora?”

“We call her Sister Thora for short,” Toste said with a chuckle…a chuckle that tickled her ear some more. Actually, tickle was too tame a word for what was happening. There appeared to be some connection between her ear and her breasts and that private place between her thighs.

Bolthor ignored them all and started reciting, with a forefinger pressed to his chin thoughtfully.

Mother Wilfreda and Sister Mary Rose actually laughed, and Father Alaric, too. He must have come up behind them.

Toste chuckled. “Well said, Bolthor! You have surpassed yourself. Truly, that is the best saga you have ever created. Will you repeat it for us at Ravenshire?”

Esme shoved herself out of Toste’s embrace, about to berate him for suggesting such a thing. But the words never got past her tongue, so astounded was she by the sight she beheld when she turned around.

Toste was dressed as a nun, too. And what a nun!

Like Bolthor, he wore the traditional nun’s garb—brown robe and matching veil over white wimple, crucifix on chain, prayer beads hanging from rope belt—and he’d shaved closely. But that was where the similarity ended. Not a single blond hair was exposed on his head, and he’d darkened his eyebrows, with charred wood, no doubt. Although he was tall and had wider shoulders than the average woman, Toste’s face was beautiful. Really beautiful. He had nicely sculpted cheek and jaw bones, smoky blue eyes, and full lips. And not a sign of leprosy, either.

“What think you of Sister Tostina?” Bolthor asked, slapping his thigh with mirth.

Esme arched her eyebrows. “Sister
Tostina
?”

“Yea, but you may call me Tina,” Toste said, a smile tugging at his lips.

“This is never going to work.” Esme groaned with dismay. “First, I can’t fit into a barrel. And now, you two look like…like…I do not know what.”

“I have noticed that many nuns display masculine traits, if that is what bothers you, m’lady.” Bolthor patted her arm with comfort. “No offense intended,” he added for the benefit of Mother Wilfreda and Sister Margaret.

“No insult taken,” her aunt said with a laugh. “In truth, many clerics have feminine traits, as well.”

Father Alaric puffed out his chest as if to show he was not one of
those
.

“Enough about all that. We must get started on our journey,” Toste told Esme.

“But I can’t fit,” she said, practically in tears.

“Never mind, we’ll find another way. Sister Margaret is going with us. It won’t be convincing otherwise, that three nuns, two of them unfamiliar ones, are transporting her brew into the city.”

Esme tilted her head, confused. “And where will I be in this religious troop?”

“On the floor of the wagon, under our feet, covered by a large lap robe.”

“Whaaaat?”

“Come see. It could work.” He walked her over to the large open wagon. The bench seat had been lowered so that Toste and Bolthor’s height would not be so apparent, and a cloth sack of oats sat in the middle—Sister Margaret’s perch, Esme presumed.

Esme peered into the seating area and shook her head doubtfully. “I don’t see how I could fit under the bench,
or how I could stay in that position for an extensive length of time.”

“We’ll stop often, and, besides, you won’t be on the floor precisely.” He grinned mischievously as he spoke.

“Enough foolishness, Toste. My father means to kill you and me and possibly all of us. I will do anything to make this work.”

“Good. Do not stand in a place of danger and wait for miracles, that is my philosophy,” he said, slapping her on the back with far too much enthusiasm. And she soon learned why.

As they drove out of the abbey courtyard, Esme knelt on the floor of the wagon, facing Toste, between his spread legs under his robe, with her face resting on his lap. It was the most humiliating day of her life.

But worse was yet to come.

Beware of women with plans…

It was probably the worst plan Helga had ever concocted.

Or the most clever.

Either way, Helga would have to scrap every inhibition she’d ever held, scrap her morals, scrap her pride and probably scrap her intelligence, or what she had left of it. But it would be worth it, wouldn’t it, if the end result was a child…a precious little being to satisfy her father’s dream of a grandchild?

Oh, she wasn’t in any way contemplating marriage, as her father kept insisting and Vagn kept pretending he might accept. Hah! As if she would ever wed under the best of circumstances, giving up her hard-earned independence, and certainly never to a man who
might
be talked into accepting her. She was better than that.

All she needed was a man to bed her once and plant
his seed in her, then ride off into the horizon. It sounded simple to her. Wasn’t that what every man wanted anyway? Swive a woman to his heart’s content, with no obligations?

And what better man than Vagn, who, truth to tell, knew how to kiss a woman boneless. If he could turn her breathless with his mouth parts—lips, tongue, teeth—what might he be able to do with his
other
part? Helga knew instinctively that making love with that rogue would not be a hardship.

But in order to accomplish her plan, Helga suspected that she would have to make the first move…be the seductress. Mother of Thor! How was she going to seduce a born seducer, without being too apparent? Of course she could wait for him to continue making advances toward her, at his convenience, but then he would feel guilty when she became pregnant, and he would feel obligated to marry her, or else her father would force him to wed her with a sword at his neck…none of which she wanted. It was essential that she be the instigator, the one to control the outcome.

First steps first. She needed help in becoming an enticing siren.
Helga the Homely becomes Helga the Temptress? Yeech! The thought boggles even my mind
. And what better person to give her advice than Rona the Nimble-Fingered, so-called because of her embroidery skills, but she was also known as Rona Roundheels, for obvious reasons.

Helga approached Rona in the downstairs solar where all the weaving and embroidering took place now that the weaving shed had become too cold. There were a dozen women and girls working, but luckily Rona sat off to the
side under a wide bladder window which let in some light.

“Rona, I need your advice,” Helga said right off.

“Oh?” Rona arched her brows in question, even as she continued working on the varicolored threads which embodied the peacock-feather border of a jade-green man’s cloak. Her work was excellent—the best of all Helga’s seamstresses. “About that new cloth you brought back from the Norse lands? I already told you it is not the usual quality…too coarsely woven. The sheep that produced that wool must have been starvelings.”

Helga shook her head. “Nay, ’tis not cloth I need advice on. ’Tis a personal matter.”

Rona stilled her needle and gazed at Helga directly, no doubt noticing her flushed cheeks and the way she twisted the end of her chain-link belt back and forth between her nervous fingers.

“I need advice on how to seduce a man to my bed furs.” No hemming and hawing for Helga. Get right to the point.

Rona smiled. “’Tis my experience that all a woman has to do is blink at a man and he is ready and willing.”

“Mayhap for you. That hasn’t been my experience.” Perchance it was Helga’s standoffish demeanor, or her Helga the Homely name-fame, or a mere unattractiveness to the opposite sex, but in all her twenty-eight years she couldn’t recall any man actively pursuing her…except Vagn, and he just teased her. Rona, on the other hand, at twenty and two, had been attracting men like bees to a flower for the past ten years, and all she’d had to do was look pretty or wag her petals a bit. But it wasn’t just her dark exotic beauty—Rona came from the Eastlands, born of an Arab father and an Irish slave mother.
Rona carried an aura of sensuality about her, like an erotic cloud.

“Is there one man in particular you want to attract?” Rona asked. “Never mind. ’Tis the blond god from the battlefield, is it not?”

Helga nodded reluctantly.

“But there is no need to seduce him, mistress. The man’s eyes follow you where’er you go. He wants you. For the love of Frigg, his staff is at half-mast already, I would wager.”

“Nay, you do not understand. I want to be in control. I want to seduce him. I want to be the one to begin…and end…this affair.”

“A woman after my own heart,” Rona said with a tinkling laugh.

“Can you help me?”

“For a certainty. There are some tricks to this game of bedsport which I have learned over the years. Five, to be precise.”

“Five? There are five specific actual tricks?”

“Five in general. Then under each of those there are many, many variations to the tricks.”

“Are you serious?” Helga asked.

Rona nodded. “Are
you
serious?”

Helga hesitated, but then nodded back.

“You should listen to Rona,” Bera the Buxom interjected. “Rona helped me woo Bolli the Blacksmith, and he was already pledged to another.”

Woo? I am going to woo Vagn? Oh, sweet Valkyries!

“My husband Ragnor has been walking about with a silly grin on his face ever since Rona told me about the flexing of the woman-muscle,” Sigrud added, rolling her eyes mischievously.

Woman-muscle? What woman-muscle? Do I have a woman-muscle?

“I still don’t have the nerve to try sex on horseback with my man, as you suggested, Rona. But I will. I promise.” It was Eve speaking now…a young maid newly come to Briarstead, who was wed to Sleipnir the Stable Master. If anyone could ride double on a horse, it was Sleipnir.

I can barely stay on a horse in the best of circumstances. I cannot imagine being astride a man who is astride a horse. All that bouncing…and…and stuff
.

The three women gazed at her then in silence, waiting for her response to their butting in to what was obviously a private, but very interesting, conversation.

“Go on, Rona, tell us of these amazing five rules of seduction,” Helga said, half teasing. “But remember, all of you, this is a private talk, not to be spoken of outside this circle.”

They all nodded, pulling their stools and chairs closer, all the while continuing their embroidery work.

“First is the Madonna/Harlot Principle,” Rona proclaimed.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Men like a woman who appears all prim and chaste in public, but wild as a seasoned concubine in the bed furs…just for him.”

“Ragnor especially likes for me to wear a gunna with a full-length, open-sided over-apron, with my hair braided into a coronet atop my head,” Sigrud confided with pink cheeks, “but no undergarments at all underneath.”

Talk about more than I wanted to know!

The others hooted with laughter.

“Makes for easy coupling in the halls, or the scullery, or behind the cow byre,” Bera offered, also blushing, “especially if your man is wearing no undergarments, either.”

Definitely too much information!

“Or under the trestle tables in the great hall,” Eve added timidly.

I can’t believe what I am hearing. Do women really do all those things? Just to please a man?
“Oh, good gods!”

“If you have trouble with that one, the easiest of them all, then you might as well give up right now.” Rona pursed her lips and wagged a finger in Helga’s face.

Helga stiffened her body with determination. “Nay. I can handle it.”
Or die of humiliation trying
. “What’s next?”

“Next you must cultivate and refine your own individual sexual personality.”

“I don’t have a sexual personality. In fact, I don’t know what a sexual personality is.”

“A woman doesn’t have to be comely to have men lust after her. That is what Rona is trying to say.” It was Bera the Buxom speaking now. “Look at me. I am a perfect example. Oh, my breasts are an asset, but other than that, I am a little too fat. My buttocks even jiggle when I walk.”

“But jiggling is good,” Sigrud told Bera.

Bera shrugged. “Let’s face it. I am not a comely lass, and no longer in the first blush of youth, either. Still, I ne’er had trouble attracting men, and I got my Bolli, didn’t I?”

“It’s all in a woman’s own image of herself,” Rona said.

“Huh?” Helga said.

“To be provocative, a woman must feel provocative,” Rona explained.

“Huh?” Helga said again.

“Listen, there are things you can do to make yourself physically more attractive. Plump up those breasts with a little sheep fleece, add a few curves to your hips and buttocks—your waist is already tiny enough. And you can sway when you walk—or slither, as I like to describe it. Thrust your pelvis forward a bit when you walk. Like this.”

Oh, my God! She looks like a ship’s masthead entering a room. Do men really like that?
“I have been flat-chested all my life, and I have no intention of fluffing up my bosom at this late date. Everyone would know they were false.”

“Those were just suggestions, mistress. Mostly it’s what’s going on inside your head,” Rona proclaimed, tapping her own noggin for emphasis. “Try this afore you come down to dinner this evening. Picture a fantasy scene. Very detailed. Two naked bodies. Hot kisses. Wicked touches. Your nipples getting harder and harder. Aching. And your woman folds weeping with arousal.”

Not in a million years could I picture that! And if my woman folds ever wept, I did not know it
. “And this will accomplish what?”

“It will change the way you present yourself. Your body will move differently. Your lips will part. Your eyes will glaze over.”

“He will think I’m having a fit.”

“Not if you do it right.”

“I’m going to try it,” Eve announced of a sudden. “In truth, I am feeling a bit tingly all over, even at the thought of it.”

All right, admit it, Helga. You feel a little tingle. Mayhap you are not entirely hopeless
.

“Me, too,” Bera and Sigrud said.

“Let’s all try it,” Eve suggested.

Hell and Valhalla! We are all going to look like a bunch of moony-eyed maids, tipsy from ale or a blow to the head. Barmy as barn bats
. Helga threw her arms in the air. “I don’t think I can do this.”

Rona shrugged. “Methinks you are not ready to be a temptress, m’lady. Best you sit back and wait for things to happen. Let the man…Vagn…control this loveplay.”

“Never!” Helga exclaimed. She was a fighter and stubborn as a horny bull…that’s what everyone said of her. How else had she managed to succeed as a merchant in a man’s world? She could not give up so easily. She just couldn’t. “What next?” she asked Rona.

“The actual steps to sexual expertise. There are probably hundreds, but I will mention just a few of the tamer ones.”

Yea, tame would be good for me
. “Like?”

“Learn to caress yourself.”

Oh, oh, oh! I don’t believe she just said that. And if that is tame, I am in way over my head
. “By myself or in company with a man?” she asked, afraid to hear the answer.

Everyone laughed.

“Both ways. If you learn your own body, you will know how to use it.”

“I remember the time you told me to lock my bedchamber door, take off all my garments and sit on the floor with my legs spread and a polished brass facing my woman-place,” Eve said. “Whoo! The things I learned about myself that day.”

Never, never, never had Helga looked at herself
there
. And she was not about to start now. Talk about wicked! Next they will call me Helga the Sinner.

“Caressing oneself in private is fine,” Rona went on,
“but it is even better in front of your man. Men love to watch a naked woman bring herself to fulfillment.”

Fulfillment?
Helga wasn’t even going to ask what Rona meant by that.

“And whilst we’re on the subject of self-fondling, let me suggest that you practice flexing your sex muscles.”

“That’s the trick I told you about earlier,” Sigrud said.

Helga’s eyes almost bugged out. “What in bloody hell are sex muscles?”

“Those are the muscles inside your female parts.” Rona pointed to the area between her legs. “Try putting a candle in there, just as you have a finger, and keep gripping and ungripping, over and over, the way you will eventually grip the man’s staff.”

“Firstly, I have never inserted a finger there.”

“Really? You do not know what you are missing, lass,” Bera said, with Sigrud, Eve and Rona nodding their agreement.

Helga’s eyes probably bugged out again. “Secondly, I am not putting a candle
there
.” She thought a second, then asked, “Do women really do that?”

“They do,” all four women chirped.

“Lit or unlit?” Helga asked.

Four jaws dropped open.

“Just teasing,” Helga said.

When Helga had first approached Rona for advice, she had never expected to receive such precise, intimate suggestions. She would die if Vagn heard about the candle bit, or self-caressing, or any of it, for that matter. “Need I remind all of you to keep this to yourselves?” she demanded, staring at each of them in turn.

They made motions across their closed lips, indicating their pledges of silence.

“The best part of sex is that period before actual tupping,” Rona continued.

There’s more? By thunder, I thought she was done. This is way too complicated for me. Who knew?

“I like to call it foresport…the period leading up to bedsport. ’Tis that time when the man and woman tease each other mercilessly…touching, kissing, nipping, tickling, whispering lewd words, licking. By the time the swiving actually begins, you should have your man as wild as a caged animal, hot with desire for you. And likewise, the woman wild for the man.”

“That’s enough for me!” Helga said, standing. “Methinks too much information could be a passion killer.”

“Tsk tsk tsk!” the four women said at her disdain for the sex principles.