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 unattractive-ness 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.