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A FREE Post By The Naked Viking

The ship had not moved in three days.

The oars lay shipped, the sail hung limp as a dead man’s arm, and the Serpent’s Eye sat motionless on a sea that had turned to pale green glass. In the far north, summer did strange things to a man. The sun refused to set. It circled low along the horizon like a wolf that would not commit to the kill, filling the world with a gold that never cooled, a warmth that pressed against the skin even at the hour when a man ought to have been dreaming.

Björn Ironhand stood at the prow and watched the horizon. He had navigated seventeen crossings without a single man lost, and he had done it by knowing water the way other men knew their wives: its moods, its silences, its deceptions. This silence was different. This was not the calm before a squall. This was the sea simply, deliberately, waiting.

Behind him, he heard boots on the deck planks.

“Still nothing.”

The voice belonged to Sigurd Halftoe, the ship’s helmsman, and the only man alive Björn had ever found it difficult to look at directly. Not because Sigurd frightened him. Because looking at Sigurd for too long produced a sensation in his chest that he had no useful name for, and had therefore spent eight years carefully not examining.

Sigurd came to stand beside him, close enough that Björn could feel the heat rising off his skin. In this windless warmth, they had all stripped to their linen trousers hours ago. Sigurd’s chest was broad and dark with hair, sheened with sweat. His arms were roped with muscle from a decade at the steering oar. He was not a beautiful man in the way of the carved wooden gods in the temple at Trondheim; he was a beautiful man in the way of something made entirely for purpose, nothing wasted, nothing superfluous, every part of him doing precisely what it was built to do.

“Three days,” Björn said. “The men are restless.”

“The men are fine.” Sigurd’s voice was steady as harbour stone. “You are restless.”

Björn said nothing. It was, unfortunately, true.

The rest of the crew slept, or tried to. The heat made sleep a negotiation. Men lay sprawled on their sea-chests or stretched along the rowing benches, bare skin sheened, too warm to move and too restless to fully surrender. A few played dice with the grinding inertia of men who had run out of better things to do.

Björn and Sigurd remained at the prow. Neither of them suggested that they go back. Neither of them suggested they move apart.

At some point, they had sat down together on the wide oak beam that curved up toward the prow beast: shoulder to shoulder, close enough that the hair on their bare arms touched. It had happened gradually, the way all dangerous things happen, so slowly that neither man could have named the moment it began.

“You were watching me this morning,” Sigurd said. Not an accusation. A fact offered plainly, the way he offered everything.

Björn’s jaw tightened. “The light was behind you.”

“It was.” Sigurd turned his head and looked at him directly, with those dark-water eyes that had always made Björn feel as though he were being measured for something he had never agreed to. “And yet you kept looking even when I moved out of it.”

The sea breathed softly beneath them, the hull rocking in a slow swell that passed through the stillness without any wind to account for it, as if the water itself were shifting in its sleep.

“Eight years,” Björn said at last.

“Eight years,” Sigurd agreed.

“And in eight years, you never said a word.”

Sigurd’s mouth curved. It was a small thing, barely a smile, but Björn had spent eight years cataloguing every version of it without meaning to. “Neither did you.”

That was, with crushing precision, true.

Sigurd’s hand settled on Björn’s knee. Not tentatively: firmly, with the same certainty he brought to every physical act, every decision at the steering oar, every judgement call in a following sea. Björn looked down at it. A large hand. Scars along the knuckles. The hand of a man who had fought and worked and hauled rope in all weathers and had never once, in Björn’s experience, been uncertain about what he was doing.

“We have no wind,” Sigurd said. “No course to hold. No duty.” His thumb moved, just once, across the inside of Björn’s thigh. “There is nothing to do but wait.”

Björn turned to look at him. Close now. Close enough to smell salt and sweat and the particular warmth of him, that scent Björn had committed to memory without ever consciously choosing to.

“Then we wait,” Björn said.

Sigurd’s eyes dropped to his mouth.

The kiss was not gentle. It was a combined eight-year-long worth of restrained passion.

It was every unspoken word and every glance caught and quickly looked away from, every time their hands had passed within inches on a rope or a mast or the handle of an oar. Björn felt it like a wave breaking, like the release of pressure he had not realised he had been holding in his chest for the better part of a decade. He kissed back with everything he had, one hand gripping the back of Sigurd’s neck, the other pressed flat against that broad, hair-rough chest.

Sigurd made a low sound against his mouth. Satisfaction; hunger; both at once.

They moved from the prow to the narrow space between the sea-chests amidships, where an awning cloth had been strung for shade. The rest of the crew slept on, undisturbed. Privacy on a longship was less about distance and more about the unspoken agreement of men who knew when not to look.

Sigurd knelt over him, both hands planted on either side of Björn’s shoulders, looking down with a focus that made Björn feel like the only fixed point in a slowly spinning world. In the low golden light, the dark hair on his chest and stomach caught the sun like bronze wire.

“I have thought about this,” Sigurd said quietly. Not boasting. Simply true.

“How long?” Björn asked. His voice was rougher than he intended.

“Since the first day.” Sigurd moved one hand to Björn’s jaw. “Since you told me I had no feel for the stars and then spent two weeks proving the opposite.”

Björn laughed, short and surprised, and Sigurd kissed him because of it: a kiss different from the first, slower and deeper, the kind that made a man’s hands find their way without him deciding to move them. Björn’s palms ran down the length of Sigurd’s sides, over the ridges of his ribs, coming to rest at his hips, fingers curling into his lustreous bush.

“Off,” Björn said.

Sigurd pulled back just far enough to comply, kneeling up and unlacing them without ceremony, the way a competent man approaches any practical task. Björn did the same, shoving his own down his thighs, and then they were tangled together again in the pool of golden light: all bare skin and shared heat and the long-awaited press of body against body.

Sigurd’s cock was thick and already fully hard, the head flushed dark against his stomach. Björn wrapped his fingers around it and felt Sigurd’s breath catch for the first time, a small involuntary sound that Björn decided instantly he would spend whatever remained of his life trying to produce again.

“By Freyr,” Sigurd breathed against his ear.

“Don’t invoke gods,” Björn said. “There are no gods here. Just us.”

Later: the light the same, the sea still flat, the ship rocking in its slow breathing swell.

Björn lay on his back, looking up at the pale canvas above him. Sigurd lay across him, heavy and warm, one arm slung over Björn’s chest, his beard rasping against Björn’s shoulder when he breathed. They had been here long enough that their skin had dried in the warmth, and long enough that neither man had felt any urge to move.

Björn stared at the awning's roof and thought about eight years. It seemed, now, like a considerable time to have waited for something this straightforward and this necessary.

“Wind will come,” Sigurd said, without moving.

“It always does.”

“We will reach harbour in four days if it holds.”

“And then?”

Sigurd was quiet for a moment. Björn felt the pause as a physical thing: a held breath, a considering silence. Sigurd did not speak carelessly, and he did not answer carelessly.

“Then we work out how two men on the same ship arrange their lives,” Sigurd said at last, “so that the next eight years do not look like the last eight.”

Björn looked down at the dark head resting on his chest. He thought about the harbour. The autumn. The questions and negotiations that would follow them onto shore. He thought about none of it for very long.

“That,” he said, “is a navigation problem.”

Sigurd’s chest moved with a quiet laugh, the sound of it settling into Björn’s ribs like something finding the place it had always been meant to live.

The sea waited. The sun circled. The Serpent’s Eye rocked gently in the stillness, cradled by water that had, for its own inscrutable reasons, decided to hold them here a little longer.

The wind has not come yet.

And neither man was in any hurry for it.

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End of story. © The Naked Viking.