Dave's Anatomy #100: Revenge and the Pleasure Principle: "The Priestess and the Sorcerer"

“The Priestess and the Sorcerer” appeared in Erotique, one of those amphibious stories part sword and sorcery and part erotica. As is usual with an erotic story, it starts out with a steamy sex scene. A man and a woman are getting it on. The descriptions are explicit. The man is said to be a Norman—one of the French who invaded England in 1066 and took control of the nation. The woman, named Hegla—a non-French and more Scandinavian/Anglo-Saxon name—is servicing him. After he finished, though, the second part of the hybrid story kicks in. The Norman suddenly begins to weaken. In panic, he feels the life ebb out of him, feels his frame convulse and cave in. In a moment, he is dead, his body a shrunken, shriveled leftover of what it was before—all due to his intercourse with the woman he thought to be a prostitute.

But Helga is just standing in for a genuine working girl, a friend from childhood, named Kirsi. When she sees what has happened to Helga’s customers, she is terrified and kneels down, muttering the name of the holy goddess. Helga replies, It is her work you see, and she will bless you as greatly as she has cursed this man because you helped me as you did. We begin to understand that this is a planned-out hit—vengeance—and that it involves magic. Helga leaves for the next phase of her plan. Kirsi gives her a yellow scarf and tells her to stand by a stone on the road if she wants to snag her next customer.

As Helga goes to the rendezvous place, the reader is given backstory. Helga was a priestess of the Goddess Freya, a temple maiden who had begun training and age six and was under a twenty-year vow of virginity and service. One morning, three men ride in, pull a sack over her head, sexually assault her, and abduct the acolyte she is training to be a future priestess.

She returns to her family to recover. No longer qualified to be a priestess, she slowly heals from the trauma of her experience. She learns that the men deliberately assaulted her to show the weakness of her religion. They hope to spread Christianity, the faith of the new wife of the King has taken. The King himself has not embraced the new religion. The Queen's minions seem to think that brutality is a good way to coerce people into converting.

Helga eventually finds healing with her family. She ventures out and connects with old friends. She even takes lovers, wanting to normalize her experience of sex. After a year, she goes away to meet with a sorcerer. She is willing to give anything to him, including her soul, to enact vengeance.

The Sorcerer, named Scealu, helps her, and does indeed want her soul. She willingly gives it. He has her cut herself just belong her collar bone and smear the blood from the cut on the stone inscribed with runes. The stone absorbs the blood. The wound on upper body is gone, leaving a white scar.

Helga returns. She has already killed a second man in her disguise as a whore. The third man, who is with him, sees what has happened to his comrade, and flees. Helga’s father and brother catch him and tie him to a bed. Helga stimulates him, climbs on top of him, and pleasures him. The last of the trio of her assailants is dead. But she is not finished. The men had taken her acolyte, Gwendolyn, and left her a group of nuns who had established a convent by the sea. The Normans apparently warned them. They have abandoned Gwendolyn and are in a boat; the helmsman is threading their way through a place of treacherous currents amid small, rocky islets.

Helga, who learned to hunt as a girl, takes up her old bow, lets fly an arrow, and kills the helmsman. The boat careens out of control, smashes against the rocks, and the nuns fall in the water and drown. She has exacted her revenge. She delivers Gwendolyn to the new priestess of Freya, says good-bye to her family, and returns to Scealu, who owns her soul.

Once there, he asks if she has anything to give in exchange for her soul. She is offended by the idea of offering her body to him (she did so in exchange for the magic that enabled her to kill the three Normans). She also grows angry at the thought of exchanging her dress and standing naked for him. The text continues:

Then she noticed the leather covering designed to protect the soft flesh of her wrist from the recoil of the bowstring when she let an arrow fly. She had forgotten to take it off. She untied the thong, frowned angrily, and threw it at him. He caught it and smiled.

“You are a spirited woman,” he said. “This is a very well-made arm guard. I return your soul to you in exchange for it.”

Her courage and desire for justice has impressed him. The white scar vanishes. Helga relaxes. Scealu tells her she is free of the spell and can go; the men who embrace her from now on will not be affected as the Normans were. He also tells the new religion will replace the old. This will be so in her lifetime, he says, so she will need to act wisely. He invites her to spend the night with him, and she agrees. She will make a new life back home. Whatever changes come, she will weather them with courage.

The story appeared in the journal Erotique Volume 3.  Get a copy here. If you like erotica and sword and sorcery fantasy, you get the best of both worlds in this story.

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