Love as a Form of Binding Ch. 20

But at the same time, they'd pointed out that they'd always taught him their ways, the ways of the slayer scouts, who were to live on their own and far from their comrades if that's where the duty took them. As he'd grown, he'd learned the fighting well and it had built him into a large male, though not quite as large as the main corps fighters. That hadn't been the plan anyway.

With a little careful conversation and a lot of luck, the lord's general Brinack, Ulfr's aunt, had made a place for him among the slayer scouts the previous year and he'd taken to that like a duck to water. By his nature alone, Ulfr was extremely self-reliant and was well-suited for the role.

To his young mind, though, he felt himself to be ready for anything – and he likely was – even in his legate's view, but he was too new and each situation naturally caused him a slight few seconds of hesitation. He always chose correctly in the event, but there would be no time for any hesitation once the main clash began, if it indeed came to that.

As he stood before the Appolyon himself, very nervous now, and listened to things as they were laid out for him, well, Ulfr didn't like it.

Brinack smiled at him, trying to avoid having to say it as a direct command, mindful of the feelings of a young slayer who had to be feeling the weight of his lineage.

"I will not call you nephew here, "she said, "This is not the time for it. But what I have for you is a task, Ulfr, and that task, like any other which a slayer undertakes, has value and is of importance. While you might stand before me and silently curse your luck to be pulled out of the main force, consider that you have been chosen to do the things that a slayer scout does and seek to know if an old enemy is there or comes. You are not to even try to deal with him alone for it would likely be your death, and a wasteful one. You are to summon me if that happens. I will allow you into that fight by our side and be glad of your help, but not alone, Ulfr."

She outlined what he was to do, where he was to go and why. "If you wish, lay that the human asleep and keep her there if it makes things easier. Just keep her safe if you can so that you can return her there later."

Ulfr bowed and then straightened, prepared now to hear the details and memorize them. He still didn't like it, but it was to be his task, and a task which one can grasp is better than being held back from the fight in reserve like the other young ones.

It almost made him smile.

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Pamela Dougherty looked away from her display to pick up her phone. The little LED indicated that it was from Robert, one of her sector controllers. "Yes, Robert," she sighed as she pressed her fingers against her forehead, cursing whatever factors had conspired to make her vulnerable to migraines.

They weren't the sort which caused most sufferers to seek a dark and deathly still place in which to suffer. She could function through most of hers. She thought that made it a little worse in her case, like having to chase after sheep in a field of thistles.

"There's something here that I think you ought to have a look at," her subordinate rasped.

They'd both been here together for years on end, neither one liking the other much from the first day, but all of the other adversaries had drifted off to collect their pensions now and the younger crowd just didn't know much about being able to quietly and legitimately piss each other off like she and Robert did.

It had been a long and strange road for them. When her second marriage had hit the skids, she took it harder than the first time, yet surprisingly, Robert had been there for her like none of her friends had. It was as though her friends had all figured that if your marriage tanks when you're in your forties and for the second time, then you ought to be able to manage things better. Only Robert knew how shattered she'd been then.

When his wife had gotten ill and passed on, it was Pamela then who has sat with him for hours, listening to him cry. One night, they'd just ended up in bed together and had just gone on quietly with it ever since.

But they could still annoy each other like nobody's business.

"Lovely," she smiled sarcastically as she got up. "I get to step away from the mountain of paper for a minute."

He pointed to a side display, "I saw these a while ago and ran the usual queries, which got me nothing. Policy dictates that I have to bring it to my supervisor's attention. Sorry, Pam."

"Oh, it's ok, Robert," she sighed, rubbing her nose under her glasses, "I remember when they told us that computers as business tools would cause the paper to disappear. If I'd known then what a crock that was, I'd have likely quit on the spot. So what are these tracks?"

He pointed at the screen. "Something moving in loops over Staffa at a high rate of speed. Two somethings actually and too low to be legal. I checked with RAF and even USAF, but they've got nothing up for fast-movers there today. I can't even point to the Russians here because they originated from out of the south and then went right back there into the clutter and I lost them. There are no small aircraft there, other than a commercial helicopter who is about to leave. They've been trying to get an archeology student off that rock for about a half an hour, but I think they'll scrub it due to the fog soon enough.

So what I'm left with are high speed anomalies," he said, "There have been reports of faint sonic booms from the mainland coast. I made calls on all of the designated frequencies, warning about the overspeed below ten thousand. I heard nothing."

"What about a Speedbird flight?" she asked, looking over at him.

Robert smiled, his mouth doing its damndest not to smirk as he remembered that now-retired call sign.

"I think you've just dated yourself. Pam. There hasn't been a Speedbird flight through here in years. There hasn't been a Concorde in the sky anywhere for a long time. They're all retired. And anyway," he pointed. "they never flew in patterns like that."

Pam rubbed her forehead again, "Is it still going on"

He shook his head, "Nothing for the past forty minutes."

"Put it down as a glitch then, or a transitory return. Christ, call it a flock of birds. I'm not going to ask RAF to send something to check out what's no longer there. I'll call for a dish recalibration. It's coming due anyway."

She walked off and Robert cleaned his glasses, muttering quietly to himself. He moved the cursor to one section of one track and saw the velocity value.

1.82 Mach at 382 feet above sea level.

Some birds, he thought.

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Nothing happened that day, though there was a little probing done by both sides.

On the remote island of Staffa, a young woman struggled a little with dragging her supplies off to the place where she had her tents, though this was the last trip. The water containers were the biggest bitches in it, but thankfully, they were cylindrical plastic jugs and she could always roll them. All the same, the grass was a little long and their size meant that she couldn't roll them comfortably. It caused her to have to stop now and then to straighten up for a few seconds. While she did, she thought about her project partner Steven.

Thinking about him at all in the past four months had been something that hadn't come to her willingly. Julia Linklater had always been a bookworm and an excellent student. Her love of archeology often gave her a little fuel, and the historical romance novels that she liked to read for a bit of recreation gave her a lot. There was something of a symbiotic relationship there between them in her mind.

Being a young woman and a lover of history, she supposed that sort of pre-disposed her to have a rather healthy sex drive in an old fashioned 'I'll take that Viking over there - no, the big one,' sort of way, not that she'd ever experienced anything like that to much of any degree. There had been the occasional thing during her teens, and though she'd found the experiences pleasant, there had been nobody that she wanted to go long-term with. And Julia recognized that she wanted that to a large degree, otherwise she was left with little more than more of the same sessions with unimaginative louts – each one interchangeable with any other and a girl can't just go and fuck everybody in her search for Mr. Right, can she?

Well she could, Julia supposed, but the logistics alone, ...

But Steven was off the menu. She had an allergy to idiots. Her sex life these days normally consisted of her books and a little private play with a toy. The past four months had been worse than a nun's sex life, she supposed. At least with him gone now, ...

The result was that Julia, a young Orcadian woman was like many women, she supposed, a bit of a hopeless romantic.

"Alright," she admitted to the grass around her, "I'm a lot of one. I love the idea of love," she said to herself and whoever might be listening among the mice of the place.

"And I want to have my own love, and most of all, ... "

She looked around, and wondered why. There was nobody here; no other humans for miles. She didn't know why it suddenly seemed so important to her to say it out loud, but dammit, she wanted to say it now.

She smirked as she even went so far as to check her radio to make certain that she wasn't just about to blurt something stupid over the open channel by keying the microphone while it was in her pocket. That was something that Steven had done- mutter to himself while the radio faithfully transmitted his vapid thoughts to anyone listening. She smiled and turned it off for just a moment, and then she looked around again.

"And I want to be fucked – really well and very often, in about any way that it's even possible to, by a really nice man, a kind of warrior, not that I'd ever find one, but still, ...."

She surveyed the fog around her, "I'd like to be in love with him, whoever he might be, but I'd take what I can get. As long as it isn't Steven, or a smarmy pimpled puke like that."

She listened to her words in the cotton of the fog around her and thought that she detected an echo, so she went with it.

"I WANT TO GET FUUUUUUUCKED!!!" she called out at the top of her lungs. She listened to the echo of her voice before it was gone and she chuckled as she turned the radio back on and resumed her task of rolling the water containers along in a little herd of three.

"There," she smiled, "That feels better."

Julia was twenty-one and she wasn't the usual nubile sort of young university goddess. She'd have liked to be, but she guessed that her DNA had sealed her fate in how she looked long before she could have had the thought to make her wishes known. As a child, she'd been a little rounder than a lot of her friends, though not much, she supposed. When puberty began to take hold in her some years ago, she'd been dismayed to find herself even, um, rounder and she'd almost despaired, not liking it. But her mother had told her – along with her aunt – that all was not necessarily lost and to beat herself up over what she'd been dealt wouldn't make it any better.

"No matter what your feelings might tell you, there's little comfort in food, other than to keep you alive. I'm telling you, Yulya, "she said, using the more correct pronunciation," just give it time. A little exercise hurts nobody and you know how you love to be outside. Find something that keeps you going – and wanting to, and you'll soon see. You take what you get because you have to, but you also enjoy what you were given." This from her aunt, the lively and cheery amazon of her family, who Julia had always looked up to. From her, Julia learned that not all goddesses had to be slim little nymphs.

Well, it hadn't been soon; not soon enough for Julia, but they'd been right. Somehow, her interest in hiking, history, the learning of it, archeology, and even the slightly naughty novels that she loved to read had conspired to compel her, and this was the result – what she was doing now. It hadn't happened that the pounds had melted off her. They wouldn't have anyway. Some did though; she'd gotten a bit taller as well, and somehow, everything had gotten distributed a lot better. Julia saw it as a minor miracle.

She wasn't sure if there was a tie-in to history, but during her time at school and even now in university, she'd excelled at the javelin. She was just good at it and she saw it as a sport which was too often overlooked and overshadowed. Not surprisingly, her very favorite movie scene contained a handsome actor playing a part in a film about the Trojan War. That one long spear throw was the best one that she'd ever seen in a film. She liked the actor, but not all that much. It was the way that he'd portrayed the Greek legend and mostly for that one scene. As far as her heart went, she always felt a bit of a throb for the champion killed by Achilles at the beginning.

Oh yeah, Julia thought, just lead her to a man like Boagrius. That had been a legend and long before the time of the Vikings.

But Julia wasn't one to quibble.

She'd never be the nubile goddess in the typical slim and nymph-like interpretation, but she was nubile in the exact meaning of the word. She liked her body a whole lot more these days and she took care of herself. She was still just a little round and she supposed that next to one of those goddesses, she might even look a little heavy, but to her, she was heavy in a nice way now and it got her all manner of attention.

But by then, Julia was already into her studies deeply and it left little time for much. She hardly dated and had no time for a boyfriend.

Which was stupid; the way that she often thought of her situation. Here she was, likely at her peak and there was no time and no one to enjoy it with. But she told herself that if she ever met her 'Viking' and they hit it off, well she knew what she wanted, and best to leave it at that.

She'd figured out her quiet desire for a large man just from things about herself. She liked the way that she looked these days, but at 5-10, she knew that she wasn't for a lot of men – and they weren't for her. She thought that for a girl such as she was, her best bet was to go large and hope that he was a little large too. She already had to buy the 'extra large' pads. She was just big there.

So far sadly, there hadn't been one who could ah, measure up on her Viking scale.

She didn't think much about other men. A thought which she sometimes had without wanting it was that she was only doing the archeological field assistant thing to help her stave off the inevitable. One day, she'd have to settle for a big round guy and have their kids and that was it – whether he was large or, um, not.

On top of it all, there was the 'other thing', as she thought of it. Julia even knew what it was; If you spend a fair bit of your formative years in a body that you like (because it's yours ), but you don't like the way that you see it, well even if it changes for the better quite markedly, that doesn't mean that you accept the accolades at face value – even if pimply Steven leaves a comment on your Facebook wall categorizing you as being built like a 'brick shithouse' in his American way.

He might have gotten somewhere with her were it not for that little bon mot.

But he was gone now and Julia was on a roll. If she got the chance of it, she'd still try to dissuade Professor Guildstone from pulling her out, but even so, she already had his word that she'd be his first choice for next year on this same island. She just hoped that the next partner was a little more, ... interesting.

She stopped and stood up once more to stretch a little. She was almost there. Fog or not, she knew where her camp was.

As she bent down again to roll the water jugs some more, she saw only them and the barest outlines of her camp and its two tents.

Just about home.

She didn't see what passed by almost silently behind her only about thirty feet off the deck from one side to the other. If she had been looking that way, she might have stared for the second in which the apparition would be visible to her before being swallowed by the mist again.

Julia was a modern day Orcadian, and as such, she didn't place a lot of stock in the old legends of the sorts of beasties which were supposed to inhabit pretty much all of these islands in ancient times. Those were the legends and beliefs of the Norsemen who had settled there long ago.

But she was familiar with the legends themselves. It was a part of the island culture, after all. She was from the one of the Orkney Island chain, a fair bit away off the northern coast. Staffa was a deserted rock off the east coast.

None of the legends said anything about demons. Of any sort. And there wasn't a single word in any text about slayer demons.

Such as the one who had just passed within fifty feet behind her.

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Ulfr wheeled away to open the space. He was wondering about this. His original plan had been to just fly by, lay the human out asleep, and then land. Once he's satisfied himself that she hadn't hurt herself in any way over the fall, he'd planned to just wrap her up in the blanket that he'd brought for the purpose, and they'd be away.

But he'd heard what she'd said to herself; most of it anyway, and it puzzled him. Remembering the sounds in his memory, he searched for their meaning. The slayer scouts had been given some instructions of how to transfer the words of a few human languages over, English being one, since there were some common thoughts to a demonic tongue, little used anymore, but it was hoped that it would serve as a start.

The trouble was that after a few moments, he understood what she'd said – most especially what she'd shouted – and now he wondered why. He had a little time, he thought, so he decided to try to observe a little more. He knew what humans were; he'd just never really seen one up close before and though he couldn't understand why she'd want to cover herself in clothing as much as he'd seen, the hint that he'd gotten of her shape had been a pleasant surprise.

And she had reddish blonde hair. He'd never seen that either.

Ulfr smiled.

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Julia reached her camp and got things squared away in only a minute or so. She'd been given instructions to do that the day before in preparation and though her heart wasn't in it, she'd complied so there wasn't much to do. She stood around for a moment with her hands on her hips and thought a little. The fog was here because the ground was warm and the damp ocean air was cool. But not cold.

There was a thing about Julia and to her, she considered it only just layers to her onion, but her name had caused her trouble as a child. Like anything else, she'd learned to deal with it. To her cohorts and friends at university, she was Julia, but back home, it was Yulya; the same name, just a different style.

She was all alone out here – well, unless there was a fishing trawler rather close to shore now. She'd seen them before, though always a long way out, and it was foggy. She couldn't see the coast or the water from here.

And she was alone.

And in a mood, she chuckled to herself.

And she only had about one day to do something that she'd wanted to do for months. It hadn't been possible before with Steven here.

Her clothes were off in seconds, and then her hiking boots went back on.

This was more like it, Julia grinned.

Julia couldn't see Ulfr as he stood and watched her through the fog which didn't do as much to affect his vision as it did hers. He was careful to keep his distance as he observed her. Her hair was already wet from the moisture in the air, but as far as he could tell, she was having a grand time.