The Barbarian's Booty (F)

After setting your filled inkwell by your quills, brushes and paints, you slide a tome under the lectern to raise the book of incantations to the proper angle. With a fresh sheet of parchment on your scrivener's stand, you draw the curtain against the blinding sunlight slanting in through the scriptorium's windows. Satisfied all is in order, you sit, back straight, chin up, letting the words of the ancient text flow over you. Just as you dip your quill in the inkwell, the stained-glass window depicting Saint Scripta, patron saint of scholars, is shattered by a muscular woman in the leathers of a barbarian tribesman leaping into the room. Before you can object, she has scooped you over her shoulder and leapt outside. The barbarian woman takes no note of your flailing, kicking and screeching as she throws you onto her horse and vaults into the saddle behind you, clasping you in her thick arms as she spurs her steed to a gallop. "Why are you doing this?" you shout as her horse carries you into the forest. "Please, let me go! I don't have much money, but I have some priceless volumes of poetry you could sell to a collector!" The barbarian woman slows the horse to a trot. "You're welcome," she says laconically. "Why should I be thanking you?" you ask. "You just broke my window, ruined my study and kidnapped me!" "Kidnapped you?" the barbarian woman says, mystified. "I saved you! I watched you for a while, and you lived an awful life, cooped up in that gloomy room with those dusty, old tomes, hunched over your desk scribbling. I thought you must be under a curse of some kind." "Well, you thought wrong!" you grumble. "I'm a scholar, and that's what we do: sit around reading and writing and looking miserable!" The barbarian woman loosens her grip on you, bringing the horse to a halt in a shaded glen where a brook babbles over smooth stones, emptying into a pond from a small waterfall. "I don't understand," she says, puzzled. "The elders sent me on a quest to win your heart, but how can I win your love if you don't need saving?" "Win my love?" you cry, becoming even more aware of the heat her body. "You're off to a fine start so far!" you exclaim, sarcastically. "Anyhow, you're not my type!" The barbarian woman sets you down gently next to the pond. "Your type?" she repeats, hopping down after you. "I'm more of an intellectual," you explain. "What could a musclebound lunk like you with a big club and a skimpy leathers possibly have to offer me?" you ask, haughtily. The barbarian woman scratches her wild mane. "Well, what do you like, then?" You pace by the pond. "Why, scholarly things. You wouldn't understand," you say with a dismissive wave. "Try me," she says, frowning. "Well, history, for example," you say. The barbarian woman shrugs her massive shoulders. "Have you not heard of Brutalina the Bold? Entire kingdoms have fallen to my axe and monarchs died out of desperation for my love lost. I too write history, but not with a pen: with my blade -- and with my body," she says, grandiosely, subtly flexing her muscles. "Be that as it may," you shrug, looking away from the barbarian's muscles, "I read poetry, songs of the great--" "Songs are nothing without deeds to sing of," scoffs Brutalina. "It sounds to me, scholar, that you merely need to put down your books and live life first hand to fall in love with it -- and me," she concludes, sweeping you up onto her horse