Work Text:
The brushes and paints were the finest with which Athelstan had ever worked. The color simply flowed onto the page, as if it had been Divinely ordained to do so. Yet even with such quality tools, he still made mistakes, especially with weather like today's, when the damp winds blew through the cracks in the walls and windows, and made the damaged nerves and tendons in his hands swell and ache. After yet another smudge, he rested the brush, its tip dripping a vulgar scarlet, and began massaging the cramp away as best he could. Months of healing and prayer had been necessary for him to properly grip a brush once again, and he feared he would never be as steady as once he was. His touch was also not as fine, but that was the result of something else: calluses built from training with the shield and axe. He wondered, for a fleeting moment, whether he would ever miss that sort of work as much as he had the peaceful work before him now. He wondered whether he now bore wounds that would hinder him from battle as the ugly, pink divots in his hands hindered him from his illuminations. His mind and body were a tangled web of scars, he had come to realize, but some were so much deeper than others—deep enough that perhaps they would never heal.
The rope had been around his neck for only a matter of days—a week, at the most—before Ragnar had cut it off him. He remained bound in technicality for a long time, but the sores and chafing the rough fibers had left on his skin disappeared quickly once the rope was gone. Eventually, so did most of the other marks, both visible and non, of his capture and enslavement. Those wounds, initially sharp and searing, had faded, replaced as they were by the brighter lights of so many more shared joys and sorrows in his new life. The early horror of seeing his brothers dead at the axe or on the gibbet seemed now to be quaint echoes of the far-deeper grief he felt at losing Thyri and Gyda to the deadly fever that had swept through Kattegat. The joy of singing praises to God in the staid confines of the monastery seemed now mere childish prattle compared to the cacophonous miracles of birth, as each of Ragnar's new sons were brought forth. He had spent most of his young life in a house of service to God, yet he had never felt quite as homesick for it as he felt now for the rough-hewn walls of his Northern home. He missed teaching Ubbe to count. He missed singing Hvitserk to sleep. He missed the feasts, the mirth, and the abandon with which the people who had stolen him from his ancestral home enjoyed their lives. As comparatively peaceful as things were here, people seemed afraid to smile, as if the God who encouraged His people to make a joyful noise had been entirely replaced by the dour proclamations of St. Paul.
He missed these things even though he knew he had never been truly accepted by many of the Northerners. Lagertha and Bjorn had come to love him, and he missed them dearly. Aslaug mostly just tolerated him, but she never held any ill will toward him, and was grateful when he stood in for ailing or absent Siggy on occasional handmaid duties. Torstein always seemed to like him—he remembered a particularly raucous night when they'd lost track of how much ale they'd downed and ended up declaring their love for a stunningly handsome duck. Floki, however, charming and friendly as he was on the surface, seemed to grow more and more suspicious of him the closer Ragnar kept Athelstan in his company. Athelstan wondered at times whether losing Leif to the sacrifice that should have been his had somehow permanently turned Floki against him. Much as the Northerners saw these sacrifices as an honor, and believed they would all meet again someday, the pain of losing someone beloved in this life still surely had its stings. King Horik and his entourage as well always seemed to regard him as little more than a common slave, no matter how many times Ragnar reminded them otherwise.
Technically, Athelstan had been a slave, of course, but he'd never really felt like one. Early on, he felt more like a beloved pet, treated similarly to the tiny young goats Ragnar liked to cuddle, but it wasn't long before Ragnar had given him the freedom of his mind, if not legal freedom, and for the most part, that was enough. Not that Athelstan was unhappy to serve in any case. God had said slaves were to obey their masters; such a god could not be opposed to ownership of people in the first place, and as he had been given to the church as a child, a life in service was in his blood. Still, his full freedom was sweet, however brief the taste of it had been on his tongue. No sooner had he been allowed to stay in his homeland, to drink in the green and misty surroundings that stirred something infantile inside him, than that freedom was stolen from him; bled from his body through the wounds that marked him as a traitor, an apostate, one step away from Lucifer himself.
Ecbert freed him that day, or so he thought, yet now Athelstan knew better. He had not been truly liberated, merely transferred from one owner to another, to be kept in a gilded cage accompanied by treasures of antiquity, rather than in his small alcove room, accompanied at times by Ragnar's strong body. And though the things in his new enclosure were grand and wondrous, they were also dust: cold relics of a people and culture long dead. As much as his mind loved what surrounded him now, his body ached for something more alive—something with hot breath on the back of his neck, and a warm hand in places he had never before known could feel like that.
Ecbert liked to touch him, he had noticed. The touches had not yet been more than seemly—a gentle hand as he helped the healers bathe Athelstan's battered body once he was down from the cross was the furthest it had gone—but he sensed that the king wanted more from him. He also sensed that the king might someday take it, whether Athelstan wanted that or not. The Northmen were capable of such violations, of course—indeed, many seemed to think it their right to despoil any women captured in a raid, much to his disgust--but Ragnar himself, and those he kept closest? No. Ragnar had never been shy about asserting his desires, even when Athelstan first expressed shock that such things were possible, but he had never demanded them. He could have, Athelstan knew. Until he became a legally free man, he could have refused nothing of his master. Yet Ragnar never seemed to take that right—or even want to. Athelstan knew that his wishes would be respected. It had, after all, taken nearly a year for him to decide to try what Ragnar was asking for, and in all that time Ragnar had never pushed the issue. Oh, he had begged. He had pouted like a child. He had talked so thoroughly about how Athelstan would enjoy it that at times he began to sound like the exotic echo bird Athelstan had seen at Charlemagne's court. But he had never threatened nor made Athelstan believe that declining that offer would result in punishment or even anger. Athelstan wondered sometimes whether he eventually said yes only because in his heart, he was trying to please his master, rather than do something he himself wanted to do. Yet it never truly felt that way, he recalled. Even though the guilt over the sins he had committed sometimes dampened the headiness of the moments after, Ragnar's actions never bothered him. Ragnar took his pleasure with Athelstan, not from him, and somehow that made all the difference.
Ecbert, on the other hand. . . . Sometimes Athelstan considered it. He missed Ragnar's touch more every day that they were parted, enough now that he wondered whether Ecbert, too, could—would—do the same. For a time, he even believed it might happen, and was prepared to accede to any requests if they came. Eventually, however, it became clear that Ecbert was not an asking man; he was a taking man. That thought soured him on any idea that being touched by the king would at all give him pleasure the way being touched by Ragnar had. As they drew closer, his throat would close every time, and he dreaded the approach of the inevitable day when his acquiescence to the king's fancy would be demanded.
Until then, however, he at least had his dreams. As he flexed his hand, the scarred skin tightening, he was reminded somewhat of the tightening of skin in other places, and other ways. His body stirred and he closed his eyes, his mind drifting, as it so often did these days, back across the water to that rustic bed in the alcove, and Ragnar's war-toughened hands traveling his sweat-slick body. This vision, however, was suddenly different. As his spirit skimmed the waves, it was met by a longship, and above its prow, screeching noisily, was a glossy, black raven, much the same as the one that had come to his broken window the week before. That first visit was a fluke, he had told himself, but now, the vision in his mind was as clear as a cold, mountain stream, so real he could smell the salty crispness of the air and hear the sharp cracks of the sails as they filled with wind. At once, all the pain and stiffness drained from his scarred body and he felt a spark of light inside, growing brighter by the moment, filling him with such gladness as he hadn't felt since the joy of the Holy Spirit had left him so long ago. He sucked in a breath and his eyes flicked open.
"He is coming for me," Athelstan whispered so quietly even the mice could not hear. "He is coming to take me home."