Dream d1703-s: Lamplit Noon, Proper Names

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the noon light fell hard and clean across Brackengreen's main lane, and the shadows it threw were short and honest. Rurik moved ahead of us along the packed-earth street, pausing at each doorstep to read the threshold with one paw before walking on. Lano trotted at my heel, nose working the smells of a place that had been inhabited a long time and intended to stay that way.

The Lamplighter found us before we found her. She came out of the lamp hall carrying a wick tool over one shoulder, a woman whose age had settled into competence the way a joint settles into true. She looked at the party the way someone looks at a thing they have already decided about.

"You're the ones who came in through the west lane last night," she said. Not a question.

"We're reading the place," I told her. I held up the book of readings, its cover soft from weather and handling.

She nodded as if that explained something she had been waiting to have explained. "Then you'll want the brook."

The Weather Reader had his barometer out before she finished the sentence. "Pressure's been stable three days," he said, not to anyone in particular. "Unusual for this elevation. Something's holding the air here."

The Brook-warden met us at the water. He was a lean man who crouched at the bank with the ease of someone who has crouched there ten thousand times, trailing one hand in the current to read it. The Builder walked the bridge above him, pressing her heel to each plank, listening. She tapped a railing post twice and looked satisfied.

"No rot," she called down. "Whoever laid these footings understood drainage."

The Brook-warden glanced up at her with the particular expression of a craftsman hearing his work correctly described. "My grandfather set those stones," he said.

We found the Schoolkeeper last, in a long low building at the square's edge. She was sweeping the entry, the sound of it steady and practiced. Lano sat down at the building's corner and watched her with the focused attention of a dog who finds brooms philosophically interesting.

"Thirty-two children," the Schoolkeeper said, when I asked what the room held. "And three who show up because there's nowhere else warm."

I wrote that down exactly as she said it. The Weather Reader caught my eye and gave a small nod - the kind that means: that is what a lit place sounds like.

We walked the rest of the streets in the hard-shadowed noon, the book filling page by page. Brackengreen read as a place that had decided, at some point, to keep deciding. Rurik marked the far corner of the market square and sat down to wait for us. He already knew we would be back tomorrow.