Dream d1558-s: The Pace He Sets

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where Lano could not settle on a leader.

She ran the gap between the Dreamer at the front and the rest of us behind, a white shuttle stitching the party together, nose down then up, falling in at my heel then breaking forward to his, then back again. She had walked beside me for fifteen hundred nights. She did not know what to do with a front that had moved.

Because the Dreamer was setting the pace, and he had never set the pace. For all the years of walking he had drifted at the edges, camera up, framing what the rest of us moved through, content to be a half-step behind the moment so he could see it whole. Now he was eight paces ahead on the rising trail, lens down, choosing the speed of all of us by the speed of his own legs, and the strange thing was how the rest of us reorganized around it without a word.

The land here had climbed out of the forest into open scrub, low gray-green bushes on a slope that gave back the midday heat in waves. There was no shade to argue over. We simply walked at his speed, faster than the Weather Reader liked, slower than the Builder would have gone alone, and the compromise had been made for us by a man who would not say he was making it.

"He is quick today," the Weather Reader said, wiping her brow. "Quick and quiet. I do not know which to mind more."

"Let him lead," the Builder said. "He has earned a day at the front."

It was not the front that unsettled me. It was the silence at the front. A leader usually talks, sets a heading aloud, names a rest. He did none of it. He simply walked, and we calibrated to him the way a body calibrates to a held breath, and even Lano, who reads us better than we read ourselves, kept checking his face for the instruction that never came.

Midday pressed down white and dry. The scrub clicked with heat. At the top of the rise the Dreamer paused, and the whole party paused with him before anyone decided to, and Lano finally sat at his side and not mine.

She had chosen. The pace had a leader now. He still had not said a word.