The Black Noon

The sun died at midday.

Ulf Ironarm had seen storms turn the sky green, had watched the northern lights writhe like living fire, had once pulled a whale by its tail through pack ice with nothing but rope and fury. But he had never seen the sun go out.

It started small: a bite taken from the upper edge of the disc, a dark crescent gnawing at what should have been solid gold. The men on the benches noticed it first, one by one going still at their oars until twenty pairs of hands rested idle and twenty faces tilted skyward with open mouths.

“Row,” Ulf said.

Nobody moved.

“Row.”

Still nothing. Bjorn the skald was already muttering prayers to Odin, clutching the small silver hammer at his throat. Three men at the stern had grabbed each other by the arm the way children grab at their mothers in the dark. The ship drifted, its painted prow turning slowly in a windless sea as the sun continued to be eaten alive.

Then Dag’s hand closed around Ulf’s wrist.

“Let them be,” Dag said. His voice was low, private, as though he were speaking to Ulf alone in an empty hall rather than on a crowded longship in the middle of the open sea. “They’ll row when it’s done.”

Dag was the ship’s steersman and had been since before Ulf was old enough to shave. He was older by a dozen years, brown-skinned from forty summers of sun and sea wind, with a chest like a barrel and hands so scarred and calloused they looked like tools rather than flesh. He had seen Ulf’s father die. He had taught Ulf the names of the stars, how to read the colour of the water, and what the taste of the air meant when land was near but not yet visible. There was no man alive whom Ulf trusted more completely, and no man alive who could touch him on the wrist and make him go still like a horse that has been gentled.