Complicity

Chapter One

Chapter One

The Vikings

From his command position in the stern of the vessel, Magnar divided his time and attention among three things: Lonad, his navigator with his mysterious sliver of metal that pivoted and swung on its sharpened pin, always pointing towards the frigid regions; Balmuth, the steerer, nearly always at the rudder; and Sandra, his latest English captive, bound, gagged and chained by her long, elegant neck to a deck ring at his feet.

Sandra was a fine trophy to bring home, but Magnar's crew was still restive from the quick and easy, one-sided battle on the island coast and he caught some men casting jealous glances his way, staring at this dark-haired, full-breasted prize with the chain around her neck and the leather thongs cutting into the fine, pale skin of her wrists and ankles. She twisted and tossed about on the hard wooden deck of the single-masted long ship, making strange sounds from behind her rawhide gag that cruelly split her red mouth. She knew what this man from the distant shores of icy Northland was going to do to her and she felt a mixture of fear and longing. She feared the coming life as his slave in a foreign place and she longed for what she hoped would be continuous bondage, always chained or tied, always offered as a s****l gift to strangers, always available to a man with a whip or a cane.

She knew the stories handed down by the village elders and imagined the combination of pain and excitement she would soon feel with her bound arms embracing the harsh, weathered thickness of the old ceremonial mast erected on the outskirts of the small Viking village. They would gag her with the tattered remnants of her own remaining underwear and tie her cruelly to the old mast: arms and legs roped and pulled around the rough, hard surface with its deep carvings and old, discolored paintings. It would be an unpleasant position to endure. She fantasized that it would be as though she was engaging in s*x with the painted cravings on the pole. Throughout the sea voyage, she experienced, with increasing anxiety the daily training sessions inflicted upon her by this long-haired, bearded giant. She endured the multiple cuts and bruises that rose swollen from her fair skin as the brutal lash criss-crossed her soft back and buttocks. She only tacitly resisted, thrashing about while the ship's crew took their turns at teasing her and she secretly longed for more of the rigorous beatings inflicted while she was bound with her hands high over her head and toes a few feet off the deck, her ankles tied to keep her from kicking. Accepting more than resisting her fate, she writhed and struggled hopelessly against the bindings that now held her, her naked breasts and belly pressed to the rough and splintered surface of the deck at Magnar's booted feet. She knew that a worse fate awaited her once she was carried ashore and chained to the slave pole, high on a fjord cliff, above the swirling mists and icy waters.

Few slaves ever escaped from the Vikings, but Sandra knew by heart the thrilling tales of one woman who, it was said, had been a captured slave and then was mysteriously released by the Norseman Prince after several months of bondage, endless s*x and servitude in his village. It had been something of a trade, the town myth went, with the dark and bearded royal from the North landing near the settlement, bringing his slave up the beach and tying her to a leafless tree, then raiding the town and taking away three of the youngest women. As they were led back to the ship, their eyes covered with long strips of cloth torn from their garments, mouths stuffed with the small fabric bags full of salty sand, and their wrists and arms tightly bound behind them, they passed the returned slave. They could not see her, but they heard her moans and whimperings as they passed. She was tied naked, suspended by her hands from the branch high overhead, swinging in the strong north wind. She made only small, pitiful sounds, but the many new and old stripes on her legs, breasts, back and belly provided ample evidence of the trials she had suffered. It was said that she had pleasured her Viking Master so well that he had eventually agreed to return her to her home. And so, the involuntary, one-sided trade was made and three village virgins were substituted for her.

That was a year or more ago and now it was Sandra who was the new captive and it was she who was headed, she knew, towards a fate that she dreaded, but also, in her mind, had sought ever since she saw the bound woman in the tree.

"Perhaps that might be me," she thought. "Perhaps he'll tie me and ravage me and whip me when he feels like it. Perhaps, I can serve as his slave and he as my master." Sandra had dared to dream of this future. Now it was the present.

The digital alarm clock on the table next to the bed went off with an endless electronic bleating and Sandy opened her eyes and slowly climbed out of the vivid and so realistic dream. Unconsciously, she rubbed her rope-bruised wrists and wondered if it was, in fact, only a dream.