Dream d1556-s: Loam, Then Clay

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Weather Reader said, "North? Truly north? There's nothing north but cold and the long slope down to it."

Nobody answered her, because the only one who could was the Dreamer, and the Dreamer was walking three paces ahead, camera lowered, saying nothing. We were one hour out from the workshop, no more. The soil under our boots was still the soft dark loam of the clearing, springy with old leaf-fall, the kind of ground that took a print and let it go. It had not yet become anything harder.

"He turned north," the Builder said, as if that settled it. "So we go north."

"That is not a reason," the Weather Reader said. "That is a direction with a man attached to it."

"It is the only reason we have." The Builder shrugged the pack higher on his shoulders. "He has not steered us wrong in fifteen hundred nights. I am not going to start doubting him on the strength of a breeze from the wrong quarter."

Lano trotted the loam between us and the Dreamer, ears swinging, plainly unsure whose heel to keep. She would fall in beside me, then dart forward to him, then back, working out who the party belonged to now that the front of it had changed.

"It bothers me," the Weather Reader admitted, low, only to me. "I read skies for a living. I like to know what I am walking into. And he will not tell us because he cannot, or because he will not. I cannot decide which is worse."

"He looked at me when he turned," I said. "Only at me. I do not know what it meant. But it meant something."

She was quiet a while. The loam began to change as we climbed, darkening, stiffening, the give going out of it. By the time the trees thinned it had become a pale clay that held our prints sharp and clean, a record of every step, pointing back the way we had come and forward the way we had not chosen.

"Loam, then clay," the Weather Reader said, watching a bootprint set behind her. "The ground is making up its mind faster than we are."

Ahead, the Dreamer walked on, certain of a thing none of us could see.