Dream d1705-s: Timber, Measured and True

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the work began before the light was full.

Brackengreen's lamplit streets had shown us their bones over three days of quiet reading - the cart-tracks pressed deep into the main road, the sound of voices carrying past midnight, the scuffed earth at the testing grounds where someone had walked out measured paces again and again. Today we put down the book and picked up what was needed.

The Builder had been watching a timber frame going up at the north end of the lane, a structure rising in stages over the past days, its joints still open to the sky. He went straight to it that morning without ceremony, set down his pack, and ran a hand along the main beam. The foreman - a broad woman with chalk dust on her forearms and a way of squinting at everything twice - said nothing, only handed him a mallet.

I worked alongside a younger man hauling cut lengths from a pile at the road's edge. He didn't ask where we were from. He asked whether I'd ever set a peg in green wood, and when I said I had, once, badly, he laughed and showed me the right angle without making me feel the fool for needing it.

Lano stayed close to the timber pile most of the morning, nose working the cut ends, tail moving in slow arcs. She nosed out a rat that had nested in the stack and sat watching the hole long after the rat had gone, ears pricked, perfectly still, waiting for something only she expected.

The Weather Reader found her work at the testing grounds at the field's far edge - the targets and the measured lines drawn in the dirt, the wear pattern in the grass, the faint iron smell of the stakes. She crouched beside the markers for a long time, barometric case open, making notes in the small voice she uses when she's not sure yet what she's reading.

Rurik moved between us all. By midday he was sitting on a finished beam ten feet off the ground, amber eyes following the foreman's chalk line as if grading it.

"He approves," the Builder said, not looking up from a joint.

"He approves of the elevation," I said. "He likes height. It's not the same thing."

The foreman overheard this. She looked at Rurik, looked at the Builder, and made a sound that was either a laugh or a judgment. The work continued.

At dusk the frame had three new courses and the testing ground had a page in the Weather Reader's log. I wrote in the book: Brackengreen works. Arrive to find it working. Leave it still at work. The help earns its place here.

Lano pressed her nose against the cover and sat with me while the lamps came on.