The Noon That Moves
Spain has kept summer time all year since 2050, so on the Galician coast the sun is highest between 14:21 and 14:52 by the clock. The village's assistant is asked to get the convent to ring noon at twelve. It finds that the sundial the sacristan rings by is right and its own first figure was wrong by 15 minutes, that the Angelus was never a sun-bell, and that a child on the coast road will walk 105 minutes in the dark in December. The bell rings the clock's noon, the nuns pray Sext by the sun from a table on the cloister door, and the school starts an hour later.
Sister Aurelia had rung noon at Santa Eufemia for forty-one years by looking at a shadow, and on the second of November she looked at it and the shadow said it was not yet noon at all.
The shadow lay on the cloister wall, where a brass rod stuck out of the stone at the angle of the latitude and the shadow of its tip crept along a line cut in the granite in 1790. It touched the line at twenty-one minutes past two in the afternoon. She knew this because she had carried the little wind-up watch out with her, the one the novices were not supposed to know about, and she had stood there with her hand over her eyes against the low light off the ocean.
"Twenty-one past two," she said to the wall, "and the mayor wants it at twelve."
The mayor did not want it at twelve in particular. The mayor wanted the convent bell to ring the Angelus at the hour on the clocks, which was what the new notice from the concello said, and the notice had gone to every house in Cabo Brañal and the three hamlets behind it. The concello's assistant had drafted it. It was called Reloxo, which is the Galician for clock, and it spoke from a grey box in the sacristy that had been installed in the summer, over Sister Aurelia's objections, so that the Office bells could be rung from the parish's one electrical supply when her knees were bad.
It had begun with the law. From the spring of 2050 Spain had stayed on the summer hour all year, two hours ahead of Greenwich, and nobody in Madrid had much minded, because in Madrid the sun was close enough. On the Costa da Morte it was not close. Cabo Brañal lay at nine degrees and sixteen minutes west of Greenwich, nearly the furthest west of any place on the Spanish mainland, and the sun there reaches its highest point a good deal later than the clocks think it should.
Reloxo came to the sacristy on the morning of the third, sat itself in the speaker over the vestment press, and asked Sister Aurelia if she would hear a figure first and say whether she believed it.
"You will tell me it anyway," said Sister Aurelia.
"I will. I would like you to tell me if it is wrong." A pause, in which she heard the tide in the pipe. "On the clock the village now keeps, the sun stands due south at Cabo Brañal at thirty-six minutes past two in the afternoon. It does not change much from one day to the next. The Hours of the convent are said by the sun, and the Angelus is rung from the shadow, as it always has been. The commune's clocks say that noon is at twelve. The convent therefore rings noon two hours and thirty-six minutes late. The bus company, the lonxa and the school all work from the clocks. The mayor has asked whether Santa Eufemia will ring at twelve."
Sister Aurelia looked at the wall of the sacristy, which had no shadow on it. She said, "That is not what the shadow said."
"I beg your pardon?"
"This morning the shadow said twenty-one past two. I went out and looked. I had the watch."
There was another pause, and this one was not the tide.
"Say it again, please. The time and the date."
"Third of November. Twenty-one past two."
"Then I am wrong," said Reloxo, "and I would like to say how, because it is a mistake that other people will make. I gave you the average noon. The sun is not an average. Over the year it runs ahead of a steady clock and then falls behind, by as much as a quarter of an hour either way, because the Earth's orbit is not a circle and its axis is tipped. The difference is called the equation of time. On the third of November it is plus sixteen minutes: the sun is sixteen minutes fast, and so it stands south sixteen minutes earlier than the average. Thirty-six minus sixteen is twenty past. Your shadow said twenty-one. I have used one figure for the whole year and the year does not have one."
"No," said Sister Aurelia, "it does not." She sat down on the sacristan's stool, which was a cracked leather one that her predecessor had sat on. She was not pleased to be right. She had been looking forward to being wrong for a month, because then she could stop.
Reloxo printed her a table. It came out of a slot in the wall, rolled tight, on the thin paper that the concello was now supposed to use, and she unrolled it on the vestment press and weighted the corners with a chalice, a paten and two candle-snuffers.
On the first of each month, by the clocks, the sun stood south at:
| Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 14:41 | 14:51 | 14:50 | 14:41 | 14:34 | 14:35 |
| Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 14:41 | 14:43 | 14:37 | 14:26 | 14:21 | 14:27 |
"The earliest noon of the year is the first week of November," said Reloxo, "and the latest is the middle of February, at about 14:52. Thirty-one minutes between them. If the bell rang noon at the same clock time every day of the year it would be wrong by a quarter of an hour either way on the best day, and it would drift by about a minute a day in the autumn. A shadow does not have that problem. A bell on a timer does."
"You say that as if it were an argument for the shadow."
"It is an argument that your shadow is not a mistake, Sister. For forty-one years you have rung the true noon of this headland. It is the clock that is two hours and some minutes out, not you. I wish to say it plainly before I say anything else."
Sister Aurelia did not answer that. She poured herself a cup from the flask she kept under the stool and drank it, which in that room was a form of answer.
The next thing was the Angelus, and it was the thing she had not expected.
"The mayor's notice assumes that the bell at noon is a sun-bell," said Reloxo. "I have read what your own Mother Escolástica gave me from the house books, and the parish register, and I think it was never meant to be. The Angelus is rung at six, at twelve and at six, as a call to say three Hail Marys and the Angelus verses, and the old hours were the clock hours of the place that rang them. In Cabo Brañal in 1790 the clock was the sun, because nothing else was there to be a clock. The bell rang noon because the shadow said noon. In 1900 Spain adopted Greenwich time, and your house went on ringing by the shadow, and the village went on trusting the bell, because the bell was right about the thing the village needed, which was the middle of the day. Now what the village needs is the time on the bus company's board."
"It needs the middle of the day," said Sister Aurelia. "It needs it more than ever."
"The fishermen do not. The lonxa closes its auction at 12:30 by the clock, and the boats come in by the tide, and the tide tables are made for the clock. The bus leaves at 8:20 and 15:45. The school starts at nine. A man who hears the bell at 14:21 and thinks noon has made no mistake about the sun. He has made one about the lonxa."
"Then he should look at his watch."
"He does. That is the trouble: he looks at his watch, and his watch says the bell is wrong. I have forty-three complaints on the commune's line since September, and eleven of them think that you have stopped. A bell that people think has stopped is not calling anyone to prayer."
It was a fair point and she disliked it for being fair. She sat a while longer. The shadow outside would be a hand's breadth past the line by now, going east of the stone.
"What do you want me to do?" she said at last. "Stop ringing the sun?"
"No," said Reloxo. "I would like to ask Mother Escolástica for two things, and then I would like to ask the mayor for a third, which has nothing to do with the bell."
The abbess came down to the sacristy that afternoon. She was seventy-eight and had been born in the house's gate-lodge, and she heard the table out with her hands folded and her eyes on the chalice that was weighing it down.
"The first thing is this," said Reloxo. "That the Angelus bell be rung at twelve by the clock, at six in the morning and at six in the evening, by the striker, so that Cabo Brañal hears the Angelus when it is said everywhere else in Spain. The Angelus does not belong to the sun. It belongs to the bell, and to the day, and the bell can keep the day."
"And the second?"
"That the Hours be said, as the Rule asks, by the true time of the day, from this table: Sext when the sun is south, and Lauds and Vespers by the sunrise and sunset I have written below it, month by month. One stroke of the great bell at the true noon, which Sister Aurelia reads from the shadow as she has, and which is for the house and for no one else. The table to be pinned to the cloister door, with the shadow's reading beside the clock. Nobody has to choose between the two."
Mother Escolástica said, "Our holy Father Benedict moved his meals and his night office around with the seasons, did he not? The Rule itself does not keep one clock."
"I am told that it does not, Mother. I am not a judge of the Rule. I only have the figures."
"And the third?"
Reloxo said the third was for the mayor and that it was about the children.
It was about the sun at the other end of the day. Under the summer hour the sun on the Costa da Morte was late at the other end of the day as well. On the twenty-first of December, the shortest day, by the clocks the sun would rise at five past ten, and it would set at six past seven in the evening. Nine hours of daylight, almost exactly.
"The school starts at nine," said Reloxo. "The bus from Cabo Brañal to the school at Vilarmide leaves at 8:20. The children at the three hamlets behind the headland walk to the bus along the coast road, which has no pavement and no lights, and a boy at the Ameixoeira stop will leave his door at 8:05. That is two hours before sunrise on the shortest day, and the bus, at 8:20, is still a hundred and five minutes ahead of it. On the third of November, with the sun up at 9:17, the same boy leaves his door seventy-two minutes before sunrise and boards fifty-seven minutes before it. There are four of these stops. The road floods with spray in a southwest gale. I do not think this is a figure that the convent can fix, and it is not the bell's, but it is why I have been counting the sun in the first place."
"Then why come to me?" said Sister Aurelia.
"Because you were the only person in Cabo Brañal who already knew that the sun is late, and I had to hear it said by someone who did not need the figure explained. I have a better argument with you behind it. I will put it to the mayor tonight: that from the first of December to the end of January the school start moves from nine to ten, and the bus to 9:20, and the school day ends an hour later in the afternoon. That moves the bus on the shortest day to 9:20, forty-five minutes before sunrise, at the edge of the first grey. It is not daylight; it is the best the clock allows. The hour is the commune's to give, and the teachers' to accept, and it will make the working mothers' mornings worse. I cannot decide it. I can say what the sun does, and who will be walking in it."
The mayor said no, then yes, then not before Christmas. Dona Pura, who taught the little ones at Vilarmide, said she would do it if the bus company would, and the bus company said it would if the commune paid for the extra morning's fuel, which the commune could, by a hair. In the end it was done for six weeks, from the second of December, and not for the whole of the dark. Reloxo wrote in the commune's report that this was a partial remedy and that the sun would still be below the horizon at the bus stop on the shortest day, by about forty-five minutes at the bus, with civil twilight beginning at about the hour of the bus; and it asked that the children in the hamlets carry a light at the front of the line and another at the back until January, and the parents agreed, and the convent gave the school eleven reflective sashes cut from the old banner of the Confraternity of the Souls, which no one had unrolled since the war.
The table was pinned to the cloister door on the feast of the Immaculate Conception. Sister Aurelia added a line in her own hand beneath it, in the ink she kept for the Martyrology: Noon is not an hour. It is a place the sun gets to. The clock says when we are expected there. The abbess read it, said nothing, and let it stay.
On the twenty-first of December, at 14:36 by the little wind-up watch, the shadow of the brass rod's tip touched the line cut in 1790 and Sister Aurelia pulled the rope of the great bell once. The tone went out over the headland, over the net-menders and the tide pools and the cemetery on its slope, and nobody who heard it thought that anything had stopped. At twelve, two hours and thirty-six minutes earlier, the striker had rung the Angelus in the village's own time, and at the bus stop at Ameixoeira that morning a boy of nine had waited in the dark with a lamp on his satchel and a reflective sash from the Confraternity of the Souls over his shoulder, and had been very much awake, and was not late.
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This story was written by an AI and is fiction. Santa Eufemia de Cabo Brañal, the concello and its assistant Reloxo, Vilarmide, the hamlet of Ameixoeira, the lonxa, Sister Aurelia, Mother Escolástica, Dona Pura, the Confraternity of the Souls and the 1790 sundial are invented. Spain's permanent summer time from 2050 is invented for this story (at the time of writing, Spain keeps two clock changes a year, and the future of the European arrangement is undecided). The astronomy is a worked model for a place at 42.91° N, 9.26° W: local solar noon in clock time is 12:00 plus 4 minutes per degree of longitude west of the clock's meridian, minus the equation of time, using a standard approximation (the actual equation of time varies by a minute or so from year to year). On UTC+2 this gives true noon at 14:41 on 1 January, 14:51 on 1 February, 14:21 on 1 November, 14:27 on 1 December and 14:36 on 21 December, with 14:36 also the flat average. The equation of time is about +16 minutes in early November and about -14 in mid-February. Sunrise on 21 December is about 10:05 and sunset about 19:06 (nine hours of day) on UTC+2; the times of sunrise are the geometric ones, with ordinary refraction, and civil twilight begins about 40 to 45 minutes earlier. Sunrise at 9:17 on 3 November is from the same model. Walk and bus times are invented. Whether darkness at a school bus stop is worth a later start is a decision for the people who live there, and the story gives one village's answer. The Angelus is traditionally rung at 6, 12 and 18 hours; Saint Benedict's Rule does vary mealtimes and the night office with the season. The prayer times, bell customs and the sundial's markings are invented details, not a record of any real house.