Dream d1416-s: Shavings on the Wind

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the footpath brought us to a workshop clearing before the light had fully decided on the day. Sawdust hung in the air, sweet and dry, the smell of wood being persuaded into a new shape. The Wireman stood at a long bench, a drawknife pulling curls of pale timber toward him, each curl falling to the dirt like a word he had decided not to say. Lano padded ahead of me and stopped at the bench's edge, nose working the shavings.

Behind the workshop, in the strip of ground that caught the morning sun between the trees, the Dreamer had laid out her pressed specimens on a folding table. Dozens of them, mounted on pale card, labeled in her small hand. She was photographing each one before adding it to a flat case - documentation against loss, which was how she worked.

"You're making something," I said to the Wireman. It was not a question.

He lifted the drawknife, turned the wood in the vise, and sighted along its edge. "Handle," he said. Two syllables was almost a speech.

The Dreamer looked up from her lens. "He's been at it since before I arrived. I've documented fourteen tools already and he hasn't said a word about what they're for."

"For going," the Wireman said.

The Dreamer exchanged a look with me that contained an entire conversation.

Lano's ears went straight up. Not at the woodworking - at something else. She turned toward the treeline, nose lifted, tail very still. I'd seen that posture in the caves where the acoustics did strange things to sound, where she'd heard the drip of water three passages away before any of us thought to listen.

"The signal?" I said.

She didn't answer with words. She just held the point, like a compass settling.

"The Weather Reader said instruments only," the Dreamer said, but she was already reaching for her notebook.

"Instruments first," I said. "Then Lano."

The Wireman set down the drawknife, tested the handle's weight in his palm, and nodded once. He crossed to the rack near the bench and lifted a canvas roll of smaller tools - packed already, I realized. He'd known we were coming. He'd known before we'd known ourselves.

"Bien," Lano said softly, still watching the treeline.

The Dreamer capped her lens. The pressed specimens went into the flat case. The case went into a pack that had also, I noticed, been sitting ready.

Above the clearing, the sky held its pale clear nothing, the kind of weather that means no interference. Somewhere in that atmosphere, the Weather Reader's instruments were pulling at a signal that shouldn't exist.

We were already beginning to go.