Divine Bodies

The sun was just beginning to rise when Esben woke up, shifting under the blankets on his bed pallet, and he pressed his face more solidly into the back of Kottr's scruff, pressing his nose into the wiry grey of his fur, wrapping his arm around the hound's belly.

Kottr yawned, making a squeaking noise in the back of his throat as he stretched out his legs as far as he could, and then leaned back into Esben's body, shoving his hard skull up into Esben's chin.

The fireplace was still crackling away quietly, almost down to the end of its fuel, and Esben lifted one hand away from Kottr's thick fur, flicking two fingers toward the pile of logs in the trough beside the door. One of them lifted up immediately, levitating smoothly on the air, and slid into the fire, sending a satisfying puff of new sparks up around the spit.

Most of the light in the room came from the fire itself, a little more light coming in from the chimney's gap, that light paler and not as warm. Esben was underneath a layer of four blankets, although Kottr, owing to the thickness of his fur, had elected to burrow under only the uppermost one, laying on top of the others.

Esben didn't want to rise just yet, and as he shifted his hand, pulling at the flow of magic on the air, he set a pouch of water to pour into the kettle, a few nettle leaves and berries inside, and then the kettle floated merrily through the cool morning hair, settling itself neatly on its hook over the flame.

Kottr yawned again, silently this time, and Esben scratched his chest, pressing his fingers into the thickness of his fur. He had gotten Kottr as a young dog, given to him when he'd healed the daughter of a woman some days' rowing upriver — he'd been six months old, the last of their dog's litter, and the first time he'd seen Esben use magic, he'd been very frightened indeed, had barked and howled at the floating cloak.

He hadn't, Esben didn't believe, realised that the cloak was under Esben's control: he had posed himself immediately between his new master and this frightening cloth attacker, and ripped the bottom hem quite to shreds.

Esben hadn't blamed him, of course — and once Esben had repaired it, it seemed like the different colour cloth at the hem was on purpose. He'd received a few compliments on it.

"The full moon has waned, Kottr," said Esben, scratching Kottr's ear, and Kottr looked at him with interest, brown eyes shining in the dismal gloom. "I shall make my pilgrimage to Freyr's shrine today, and lay my offering there."

Kottr rolled onto his back, and pawed at Esben's shoulder.

"Is that some statement of understanding, or do you want a piss?" asked Esben.

Kottr rolled off of the pallet and, tail wagging, pawed at the door.

Esben laughed and stood from his bed, pulling on a pair of loose leggings and an undershirt. It was spring, and the air was beginning to warm, the snow starting to thaw away from the land outside and leaving a grey-white slurry behind in the grass, but the air was still cold, and there was a bitterness in it.

Nonetheless, he did not wear his heaviest tunic — he would only grow too hot in it later.

He loosely wrapped his belt around his middle, checking that his knife was sheathed where it ought be, and then he slipped on his boots, his cloak.

"Are you staying in bed, Hundr?" asked Esben, and Hundr stirred in his favourite bed, which wasn't actually a bed at all — it was a fish trap Esben hadn't been able to repair, the wicker too damaged after an elk had trodden on it, but Hundr had liked it very much even before Esben had lined it with a ruined shirt, and now it was his favourite place to sleep. Hundr opened both eyes reluctantly, chirruping from the back of his throat and purring when Esben slid his palm over the top of his wide head, marked over as it was with battle scars and scabs.

Hundr refused to move, and Esben left him in his place — he would stir by the time Esben had broken his fast and drunk some morning tea, and would no doubt begin his patrol of the nearby farmsteads, sowing his wild oats.

As Kottr walked down to the end of Esben's plot, nestled between two more defined farms, Esben followed after him. Troels and Estrid and all of Troels' brothers were on the western side, and Svend and his family on the other. They had offered him more land than he had, when first he had been walking through with his goats and Hundr on his shoulder — he had requested only the portion of land they'd given him when he'd first offered his services as healer, but they had heard of him already.

They'd been a little frightened of him, truth be told, and he hadn't been intimidating at all those years ago, a young man with no hair on his face, his every feature still seeming so much more youthful, his voice still high, but they hadn't treated him as the boy he had appeared as — and certainly hadn't treated him as a woman.

He hadn't wanted to take advantage of their desire to please, and he did think that was for the best, so many years on — they respected him now without fearing him for no reason. Fear didn't always serve a man.

As Kottr took his morning piss against the fencepost, Esben let free his goats from their little barn, and his little brood of hens, too, that they could move about more freely. He would ask Revna, one of Svend's youngest, to check on them before he made his journey, in case he was gone a few days.

He unparcelled the last of the boar he hadn't put up to cure, and that got Hundr to jump up from his basket, coming to settle beside him at the fire. Kottr took half of the parcel raw, but Hundr, a far more demanding and sophisticated eater, waited for Esben to cook the meat over the fire before he ate any.

"The full moon has waned, Hundr," said Esben as they shared a piece of pork meat, and Hundr looked up at him with wise eyes and frazzled whiskers. "I might be gone a few days."

Hundr put one paw on his knee, and began to knead into the fabric there, looking up at him lovingly, until Esben dipped his head and butted their heads together.

It was not that he disliked his house, nor the animals with whom he lived, nor the modesty with which he lived. Esben had never wanted for luxury, and even before he had ever met a great, tall beast of a man-not-man with gold shining in his hair and his beard, he had been confident in his command of magic, had been born with skill enough to improve on.

The pact he had made was not one that made great demands of him, he did not think, particularly given the great extent of the rewards it garnered, and yet part of him, at times, wondered what it would be like, to live with someone in his house — another man, perhaps, a shield brother who might touch him, be touched, a man with a good cock to play with.

The thought made his own cock stir between his legs, and he pressed the heel of his hand down against it, humming lowly as he rubbed his heel back and forth over the jut of the nub through his clothes, feeling heat flood downward —

But no.

Why bother, when he could have so much more by the day's end?

He left the door on the latch, painting a handful of symbols on the air before the entrance. It wasn't as though he had to — Kottr would dissuade anyone who came close to the house bar young Revna, and if anyone came seeking his services, they would leave their message with either Svend's wife, Gertha, or with Estrid.

He only hoped they didn't, because a few months back, someone had come urgently about a sickness in a village some ways north whilst he was making his journey and upon returning home, he had had to waddle home and then commission the services of one of Svend's horses to ride, which had been uncomfortable indeed. No one had commented on the state he had arrived in, too frightened to say any word against him when they needed his magic so desperately, but they had all noticed, had all looked, and that they said nothing almost made it worse.

Hundr clambered up onto Esben's shoulder and Kottr walked on his other side as Esben walked out of his own yard an hour or so later, a pail of milk in his arm and a sack of eggs in his hand.

"Good morning," he said as he stepped into the main part of Svend's yard, and immediately one of their sons rushed to relieve him of his burden, taking the pail and the eggs both.

"Good morning," said Svend, standing from where he was sitting on the bench with his wife and some of his daughters. When Kottr walked up to him, he bent to scratch the hound's ears. "Your pilgrimage is at hand, priest?"

"That it is," said Esben. "Might I trouble your Revna to check in on my goats tomorrow and the next day, if I do not return before tomorrow's eve?"

"Revna," called Svend, and Revna rushed out from the house, beaming when she saw Esben and nodding eagerly. Esben liked Revna very much — a young girl of nine, she did not speak at all, having badly bitten her tongue as a toddler, so that a good bit of it was missing.

Esben's goats liked her best, and Hundr and Kottr loved her to pieces.

"And we'll feed Kottr, of course," added Svend. "And Hundr, if he deigns to grace us with his presence."

"Who can predict the movements of our mighty jarl?" asked Esben dryly, spreading his fingers in a sweeping gesture, and Svend laughed. Hundr, apparently sensing that he was being mocked, hopped down and went up to Revna, letting the little girl scoop him up in her arms, although he was so big and so heavy with feline muscle that he looked quite ridiculous, near as big as the girl was.

Esben heard the slight nervousness, the eagerness to please, in Svend's voice; equally, he felt the gazes of Svend's eldest sons on his body, looking at him.

They saw his beard, short and neat as it was, and the hardness of his jaw, his cheekbones, but they had seen other parts of him too — some of them watched him swim when he did so in the moonlight, creeping in the woods to watch him undressed, and Esben knew without ever having checked that they touched themselves to thoughts of the priest next door, imagined the pinkness of his cunt around their cocks, fantasied about pinning him beneath them.

Esben made eye contact with one of the eldest, Olf, a tall and strapping young man with a wolf carved into the handle of his knife, and Olf retreated like a wilting flower, ducking his head down and not meeting Esben's eye.

How he expected to fuck anybody with an attitude like that, let alone a priest his own father was afeared of, Esben had not the slightest idea.

Esben wondered what any of them would do, if they knew their spying on him was not so secret as they thought, if they knew Esben had heard them from time to time, speaking of Esben's rosebud tits and his little cock, every one of them aching to touch him, aching for Esben to lower his standards and touch them.

Troels' sons, two of them, were a little more confident, but that was embarrassing in itself, how they fought for Esben's attention, each of them shouldering the other to lean into Esben's gaze — and really, they were each of them too young, and far too stupid to housetrain. Troels' brothers were somewhat more appealing, each of them huge and fat and rippling with muscle, but they knew precisely how attractive they were, and that sort of thing was inconvenient.

There was only one man Esben really wanted in his house, and none of these young things, as pleasant as he expected their cocks were if you liked that sort of thing, really measured up.

Esben didn't know what he'd do if he let a young man into his house and found himself treated as a wife — kill them, probably, although that wasn't proper at all. None of Svend's boys, nor Troels', could really be taken as a husband, although Esben did sometimes fantasise about letting them follow him down to the lake to bathe.

In those fantasies, when he realised they were watching him, he went to lie upon the beach, still quite naked, and feigned to fall asleep — one of Troels' brothers was ordinarily there in the fantasy, usually Bjorn, and he would lead the way down to the lake's shore, gesturing for the other boys to follow him.

It would always be a group of them, five or six of them, and they would look curiously at his naked body, at the thick hair that grew on his chest, between and around his tits, down his belly, the thicker thatch of hair on his thighs and over his mound. They would some of them touch his hair, nervously, delicately, frightened of waking him, and then another of them would become a little more confident and take a handful of one of his tits, cupping it in his palm or gently squeezing, pulling at, a nipple.

In his "sleep", Esben would sigh, and convinced that he was well and truly unconscious, Bjorn would impatiently shove his thighs apart to get a good look at his cunt.

"This is big," he'd say, taking Esben's cock between thumb and forefinger and rolling it between them, and Esben would moan low in his throat whilst forcing his eyes to remain closed. Bjorn would laugh then, and shove two fingers lower, pushing his outer lips apart to better examine where he was pink and wet.

"Maybe in comparison to you," would say one of the others, and they'd laugh very quietly, trying to stifle the noise.

"Bigger than a woman's," would say Bjorn, and sigh. "Fat cunt that this is, seems a shame to let it go unploughed."

This would be too far for what Esben had wanted, against his agreements — he wanted only for them to touch him, play with him, admire him, not actually fuck him, but in the fantasy he would find that he could no longer open his eyes or open his mouth to protest. His limbs would not obey his instructions, and when Bjorn lifted his hips, he could do nothing to struggle free, to demand they release him: Bjorn's cock, when it pierced him, would be so large as to make him whine as it was shoved inside him to the root.

"Fuck," Bjorn would hiss. "He's tight, wet, too. Fucking treat. Never been pregnant, I bet — we'll sort that out."

"Bjorn!" the others would protest. "You can't just — you can't just fuck him as he sleeps, he's a priest — "

"Don't be a milksop," Bjorn would tell one of the youngest. "Freyr doesn't give his priests pretty holes like this with the want that they should go unplundered. One of you fuck his arse."

They would pass him between them, then, an unconscious fucktoy free for them to play with as they wished: Bjorn and one of the others would flood his cunt and his arse both with hot come, leave it dripping out of him until other cocks slid into his holes, and meanwhile the others would play with and suckle at his tits, at his cock. One of them would shove his cock into his throat, and he'd cough and choke, but remain "asleep" still powerless, until the sun was dawning and they decided to leave him there.

Come would be leaking out of him, dribbling down his chin, out of his cunt, his arse, and they'd rub it into his skin, into his own cock, into his tits.

Only when they were gone would he be able to "wake", and see the golden shimmer of his god standing over him, a dangerous glint in his eyes.

For no reason at all that Esben could bother to name, he picked one of Svend's boys — Olf — and dropped the fantasy, minus the divine appearance at the end, into his head. Olf was twenty-something, and Esben watched the expression on his face as he digested what he thought had come to his own mind from nowhere at all, watched his hand go down to shield the abrupt stiffening of his cock under his tunic.

He was blushing furiously as he rushed off to wank himself off like a young man half his age, still surprised whenever his cock abruptly came to life and demanded his attention, and Esben felt himself smile.

"Thank you as ever for your help, Svend," said Esben.

"Thank you for the milk and eggs," said Svend, and Esben gave a neat bow of his head as he turned on his heel to go.

The village was not a large one, a nameless collection of a half-dozen farmsteads with Esben's plot of land in the middle of them, and Esben liked living here, liked that everyone knew his name and either feared him or desired him — ordinarily, a mix of both.

People watched him as he passed by, his cloak around his shoulders and his satchel resting on one hip, Kottr padding along at his side. He walked proudly when he accompanied Esben somewhere, even when Esben walked to another village — Esben had never had need of his protection, but Kottr liked to give it, and sometimes growled at strangers who passed too close to Esben on any one pathway, and raised his hackles at them.

Esben liked how it looked, anyway, when he came into a new settlement with Kottr by his side — Esben wasn't intimidating from a distance, not until someone realised who he was, but Kottr was a bestial thing, his big bear's head a little higher than Esben's hip, and people were cautious about him from the get-go.

Kottr walked by his side out of the village, walking over the stone bridge over the river. He became somewhat cautious, when Esben turned off the main path through the great forest and took a pathway mostly trodden by deer and boar, and not by man.

Kottr walked with him for a mile before he realised where Esben was going, and turned back.

Esben had grown up in woods like this one — he'd been born in a little house in the midst of a forest glade, and while there had been other people within the wood's boundaries, they'd each of them been some walk away, closer to the edges of the trees. He was happiest underneath wide tree canopies like this one, the undergrowth thick under his feet, and thick it was — snow was still gathered at the bases of some trees as he walked down the path, mostly melted away where the sun dappled in through the trees.

Esben had an even, deliberate gate — he walked neither fast nor especially slow, but kept a constant rhythm, picking his way through the thickness of the plant growth beneath him. Despite the snow, a few flowers were beginning to blend in with the grass, blooming up from where the ground had been hard and cold.

It wouldn't be for too much longer.

As he had walked this far, Esben had glimpsed other animals in the woods — he had seen deer move by in the distance, or seen the signs of elk having passed through in their grooves marked on one tree trunk or other; he saw birds flying overhead or saw squirrels and rabbits pass by.

As the trees around him grew taller, gathered together more densely on his either side, as the sun was blocked out more and more by the heavy canopy above him, Esben walked through darkening woods, and saw almost no sign of life at all.

Kottr never accompanied him once he walked down this path for any measure of distance. It unnerved him, set his teeth on edge and made the fur on the back of his neck rise up, so that he growled and snapped at the very air. It was no path meant for dogs — nor, indeed, a path meant for most men.

Esben remembered well the first time he had become lost in the woods, running after he had been caught spying on one of the lumbermen, a freeman Celt who rippled with muscle and had sworn at him in a language he couldn't understand when he'd caught Esben spying on him.

He had gone down the path waiting for it to shoot off in one direction or another, but it had done no such thing, and he had run further and further down it, too afraid to turn back. He'd run until his lungs felt like they were bleeding, run until his thighs ached and his calves quivered, run, in short, until he couldn't any longer.

On each side of him, the trees were growing taller, and Esben could see that their trunks were so wide around as to be impossible, their great trunks reaching higher and higher into the sky above. The air was thick and humid, hot in a way the air never was even at the height of summer, and there was a sweet and sultry scent in it, a dangerous perfume.