Colum and Viggo: The Whole Story

By Brad Vance

ALL FOUR COLUM AND VIGGO STORIES! 

Colum's Viking Captivity 
The monastery at Iona is destroyed, its inhabitants slaughtered by ruthless Vikings…all but Colum and his friend Niall, taken into bondage by warriors who will use them for pleasure. But Colum’s new master Viggo is more than just a bandit prince. Will Colum open himself to Viggo, and not only accept but embrace his strange new fate? 

Colum's Viking Captivity II: Riding the Dragon 
In Part 1, Colum the monk was taken from the smoldering ruins of Iona by Viggo, his new Viking master. Now in the trading town of Birka, Colum will learn to serve – and to fight, for the Viking’s seeress has foretold his future as a great warrior, fighting by Viggo’s side as his brother, his lover… But first Colum must beg Viggo for his freedom, so he can fight the wicked trader who’s going to use and abuse his friend Niall. What price must he pay Viggo for the chance to serve out justice for his friend? 

Colum's Viking Captivity III: The Warrior Slave 
Colum has earned his freedom, by proving his worth in battle! But if the end of his slavery means the end of Viggo’s sweetly cruel tutelage, is it worth it? And Colum is a slave owner himself now – will he do what he must to protect his friend Niall, and show the other Vikings that Niall is his property by using him like the lowly thrall that he is? And when a man from Viggo’s past calls them to do battle with the Franks, is Colum ready to fight by his lover’s side as an equal? 

Colum's Viking Captivity IV: Trial by Combat 
Colum and Viggo have taken their place at the court of King Godfrid, in advance of the Vikings’ great battle against Charlemagne and the Franks. And while they wait, the strange, dark sexual games he and Viggo play together are now skirting the edges of mortal danger… But there’s another danger, too – treachery is afoot, and Colum falls into the hands of his enemies! Could Niall, his friend-turned-slave, really be his betrayer? When reason and logic are no match for the forces marshaled against Colum, there’s only one way he can regain his freedom – TRIAL BY COMBAT!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Orland Outland
• Release date: Aug 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781536551822

Brad Vance

Brad Vance writes gay romance, erotica and paranormal stories and novels, including the breakout hits "A Little Too Broken" and "Given the Circumstances." Keep up with Brad at BradVanceAuthor.com, email him at [e-mail], and friend him on Facebook at facebook.com/brad.vance.10.

Book preview

COLUM’S VIKING CAPTIVITY – PART ONE

THE ISLAND OF IONA – 806 A.D.

What little light there had been today was fading. The normally gray skies were black now as a storm moved onto the coast. The cold drafts that crept through the cracks in the wood and stone kept attacking the candles, and the flickering light strained Colum’s eyes as he tried to focus on the page.

Brother Fedelmid would be here soon to check on him. Again. His gaze lingered on the pages he’d been assigned to scrub clean, committing the words to memory first so he could recreate them later. There was no time, no time. Brother Fedelmid would expect a huge pile of clean parchment, stripped of pagan thoughts and ready for the word of God. Fedelmid, Colum thought ruefully, had a very light tread for such a well-fed man, and had surprised him more than once.

Suddenly Fedelmid was behind him, but his heavy breathing had given him away. Colum had already started scrubbing the pages with milk and oat bran, forever removing the wrongheaded thoughts of the damned from human eyes.

It’s time, Brother Colum, Fedelmid panted, his heavy breathing attributable to more than just exertion, Colum knew.

Colum followed him to the chapel, and took off his robe. Fedelmid’s breathing got even faster at the sight of Colum’s smooth, firm body, hardened and muscled from a childhood of farm labor, then made leaner and tauter at his last monastery. The admirable results of the combat training that had been a part of the routine at Clonmacnoise had not yet faded, even here in his more sedentary life.

Column assumed the submissive, penitent position on the floor – on his knees, head down, hands clasped.

Do you know why we are here at Iona? Brother Fedelmid asked, as he asked every morning.

To preserve learning, Colum said defiantly, his kneecaps already throbbing and aching from the cold, damp stone floor. It was the answer that would get him yet another day on the floor of the chapel, another day of corporal punishment, but he didn’t care. It was worth it if he could save one more page from oblivion.

WHAP! went the leather strap across his bare shoulders. Colum squeezed his eyes shut but willed himself not to show any more reaction than that. The pain was a price to be paid. Marcus Aurelius kept him company on the floor, his words burned in Colum’s mind. Pain that lasts a long time is tolerable; the mind stays tranquil by retiring into itself. Let those parts which are harmed by pain give their opinion of it if they can.

NO. We are here to praise the word of God. What is your job?

To preserve learning! Colum wanted to shout. But he was learning how things were done here. So different from Clonmacnoise…

To praise the word of God. There was only so far he could push Fedelmid. This was a game, a preposterous game, but he had to play it.

And in what role have you been most blessedly assigned in our duty to praise the word of God?

Whatever God wills I do each day. Whatever you will, you fat bastard, Colum thought. He had been sent here by the new abbot of Clonmacnoise, a monk who had always hated him, and who had taken Abbot Ioseph’s death as his opportunity to send Colum away. Sent here, hell, banished here – and Brother Fedelmid knew it. When Abbot Ioseph had died, so had all Colum’s hopes and dreams.

Fedelmid’s breathing was hot and heavy. Colum couldn’t help but shiver, not only at the cold to which his near-naked body was exposed, but at the knowledge of what was going through Fedelmid’s head. Colum knew what he wanted, knew his eyes were on Colum’s rear end, tight and meaty from better days, happy days…no corpulent monks like Fedelmid at Clonmacnoise.

WHAP! The strap landed on his lower back, pushing his loincloth down over his tailbone. So you want to see my firm young ass, Colum smirked. Colum twitched and let it fall a little further to reveal his ass crack. Come and see the Valley of Temptation! I dare you to touch it, he thought, full of most unkind and uncharitable thoughts. You won’t, you daren’t, your fear of Hell is greater even than your lust. Other monks desired these things, too, but at least they whipped themselves for it and not others. But no, Fedelmid would punish Colum for his strength, his beauty, his defiance…

Theophrastus believed that offences committed through desire are worse than those committed through anger. The offence which is committed with pleasure is worse than that committed with pain. Oh yes, great Emperor, you are right, and with what pleasure did Fedelmid commit his offenses…

Fedelmid would hit his back, his legs, his rump…never his hands, though. Or his face, for fear of injuring his eyes. They were too valuable to Iona.

Colum knew his punishment couldn’t last many more days. His hand was too steady, too precise, and the abbey made too much money on its marvelous illuminated manuscripts, to keep him away from the paper and the pen for long.

Now the strap landed lower, a searing line of pain across his rump. But even so, as Fedelmid wheezed with excitement at the rapidly reddening welts, Colum smiled. They had punished him by leaving him alone with a pile of abominations, left him to scrub and scrape the words off the paper so it could be reused for learned theological disquisitions. And in doing so, they’d given him more to read than he’d ever had, and more time to read it. Normally he only stripped his own parchments, before copying the sun-baked ramblings of some fanatic hermit. That had meant he could only commit one or two precious pages to memory each day. Now he felt as if his mind was stuffed to bursting with knowledge.

He smiled. The physical pain was a small price to pay for a few more days of punishment alone with the old books. Every slap of Fedelmid’s strap meant more works saved, rescued, transcribed in his marvelous memory until the day they could be reborn on paper.

But some of the works he had literally saved, squirreling them away in secret hiding places – he couldn’t memorize everything that needed rescue. He was a scholar, certainly, and a librarian, but a librarian who needed the judgment of Solomon to decide which pagans would live and which would die. He gave a tender thought to poor Emperor Claudius, whose Art of Playing Dice had been flensed from the page, sacrificed to save Julius Caesar’s love poems.

One of those flashed through his mind, unbidden. How shocked the others would have been to read Great Caesar’s ode to a Greek youth’s ass. Colum had been shocked himself at the loving detail which had been given to every curve, the golden shine of the upturned flesh in the lamplight, the sweet-honeyed tightness, written in such a way you could think he meant the physical condition of the large muscles, or the tightness of the…place. Your buttocks like two harvest moons, the double vision of a drunken man, looking at the sky from the ground, for so have you intoxicated me, so have I been struck down.

Why did I save that one? Colum asked himself as his own milk-white ass went red with Fedelmid’s increasing frenzy. You can’t look down at an ass and up at the moon at the same time – it was a silly poem when you thought about it. Surely Cstebius’ On Pneumatics was more worthy of rescue…

Oh! Ohhhh! Fedelmid cried, the agony of his ecstasy overwhelming him. One hand was on the strap, which he brought down again and again now, but Colum knew where the other hand was as he gritted his teeth and took the final assault. For days Fedelmid been building up to this. Now he’d get what he wanted and that would be the end of it.

He clenched his buttocks tighter, defensively, as Fedelmid aimed the strap at Colum’s asshole, as if trying to beat back whatever devil was peeking out there, luring him in. But he couldn’t defend it completely, as the blows landed closer and closer, the agony ever greater. Colum bit his lower lip to keep from crying out, from giving Fedelmid the satisfaction. When in pain remember that it brings no dishonor, does not weaken the governing intelligence. Pain is neither everlasting nor intolerable...

Finally the old lecher erupted under his robe, barely bothering to conceal what he’d done. Finally the beating was done. A few more gasps, a few weak cries, the strap flapping now like a wet hen’s wings against Colum’s body. Then it was over.

I hope you’ve learned something important today, Fedelmid said, gathering himself.

I have indeed, Colum said darkly, pulling his loincloth back up. Fedelmid was silent with horror and shame, the tone of Colum’s voice striking fear into his heart.

We won’t speak of this, Fedelmid muttered. Go back to the scriptorium. Be back on your pen tomorrow. And he was gone.

Colum did not go back to work. Fedelmid wouldn’t dare punish him for what he was about to do, not after…that.

He walked through the scriptorium, the monks shivering as they worked by the broad open windows onto the cloister walk. The windows gave them what light was to be had this stormy day, but took the warmth from their bones.

Colum’s own talents had bought him a solitary chamber. He wished it hadn’t; the days were long and lonely in there by himself. Well, at least it was warm in there, or not as cold, anyway. His hands were less chapped and cramped and red than those of the others, his nose less runny, his feet not as numb.

He walked past Niall, cocking his head slightly towards the door. Niall was dark-haired and dark-eyed like Colum, but slimmer, fairer-skinned, like a younger brother to Colum, the same but different. Niall knew Fedelmid wasn’t nearby, but a year of well-instilled fear made him look anyway towards the big desk by the door. You didn’t know real silence, Colum smiled, until you heard the sound of two dozen monks’ pens stop scratching. Shocked at the violation of the rules, they could only stare open-mouthed as Niall left his desk and followed Colum out the door.

Colum was learning how to survive here. He could do as he pleased, within reason, as long as he accepted the punishment, the penances. He could have been expelled had the abbot known of his many transgressions, but of course it pleased Fedelmid to keep them to himself. Who knew what Fedelmid would expect next…but he willed himself not to think of that.

They left the grounds, heading for a field on the other side of the hill. The wind and the first trickles of rain were invigorating to both young men, and they began to run as they got further away from the walls of their home, sometimes more like a prison than a home. The storm picked up and they whooped with joy, watching the lightning play over the water.

An old carter rode past, hell bent for leather. Take shelter, young fools! The devil’s afoot!

They laughed at him and he shook his head, riding on. They rambled out into the field.

Come on then, Niall said, ready to wrestle and taking the defensive stance Colum had taught him. Let’s see what you’ve got left after Fedelmid’s done with you.

You’ll see, all right, Colum said, and jumped. They fell to the ground, grappling, bodies rolling in the mud. Niall was a good student, a fast learner. He might even beat Colum some day, but not today.

Niall had him on his back, his surprisingly strong legs wrapped around Colum’s, his hands working furiously to pin the other man’s, but he had scholar’s hands, thin and bony – not like Colum’s, thick and meaty from farm labor and combat training. Colum wriggled free and used Niall’s robe to throw him.

Niall responded by pulling his robe off over his head and tossing it away. There! he cried triumphantly. Niall’s body was hard and strong now from their practice sessions, Colum thought. When they’d met, his friend’s wiry frame had gone soft from sitting at a desk all day. Niall was proud of his body now, proud in a way that would have mortified the abbot.

Clonmacnoise! How Colum missed it. How he missed the raucous, violent town and the battles between the monasteries. Wrestling, stave fighting, punching…those had been as much a part of a monk’s day there as writing and praying and farming and gardening. Abbot Ioseph had known how to handle young men – you didn’t stick them in a cubbyhole and make them sit there all day! You made them study, indeed, but then you took them out and wore them out so they slept the sleep of the dead, and then they were ready the next day to work, knowing all that pent-up energy would be released in the yard again.

But here, Abbot Cellach disdained the active life. Have not a care for the body! he lectured them with a quaking hand and an accusing finger. In the life to come you will have no need of it! Begin to think of that life and let not the material world and its desires drag you down! How many of the monks had flushed red at that speech, Colum thought, their own material desires all too apparent when they looked at him and Niall and the other young bucks. And for a man who had not a care for the body, Colum thought, Abbot Cellach certainly had a healthy appetite at dinner time.

Colum threw off his own robe, relishing the cold storm as its power increased. Niall gasped. Your back! The red welts were growing angrier now, only aggravated by his scratchy robe.

You should see my ass, Colum laughed, and attacked again. Now their grasps were slick with rain and mud and sweat. Colum was on his back in the mud now, and he let Niall pin him to give him the practice…and froze in shock.

Niall’s erection pressed up against his own crotch, like a log, Colum thought. So big! Niall’s body suddenly felt different to him, their grasp on each other no longer the struggle of opponents. Niall looked him in the eyes from above him, a question, a fear, a… Colum wanted to reach out, embrace him, pull him in closer, deeper. It was such a lonely life…

No, Colum thought. It’s only the excitement. Young men’s humours raging. He thrust himself up and threw Niall off. Then he had the other man pinned beneath him, pretending Niall’s hard stave wasn’t there. He laughed. You’re not the master yet.

Niall smiled. Someday, Colum.

Colum willed himself not to think of that day.

When they headed back, Colum