Dream d1720-s: Between Two Lamps

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the fog came low off the fields and wrapped the road in something between silence and wool. Ironbrook was behind us - not gone, but small, its lamp-posts shrunk to amber pins in the grey distance - and Quillgreen was nowhere yet, just a direction and a name. The road between places has a quality all its own. It belongs to no one's reading.

The Builder walked with her hands clasped behind her back, the way she does when she is still sorting a place in her mind. She said, without looking up from the road: "The mill joint. I keep returning to it. Someone shimmed it with river slate, which works until the slate flakes, and that shim is thirty years old. They know. They chose to know quietly."

"That is a kind of reading too," the Weather Reader said. She had her barometer out even here on the open road, tilting it against the fog. "Ironbrook holds its breath about certain things. I felt it in the pressure before rain - that slight delay between what the air promises and what the clouds deliver. A practiced pause."

Lano had her nose down in the verge grass, quartering back and forth across the road ahead of us with her tail moving in small arcs. She found something in the ditch - a stone, smooth and pale - and carried it in her mouth for a while, satisfied with its weight.

I wrote nothing in the book of readings. The book was for places, and we were between places. I held it under my arm and let the fog collect on its cover.

At the fork where the Quillgreen road split from the old timber track, Rurik stopped. He sat down in the exact center of the fork and watched the timber track a long time. His amber eyes did not blink.

"Is there something down there?" the Builder asked.

He did not answer. He rarely answers that question. After a moment he stood, turned onto the Quillgreen branch, and walked. We followed.

We made camp on the verge where a stand of ash gave shelter from the road. The Builder read the ash trees the way she reads everything - quietly, with her palm flat against the bark. The Weather Reader noted the barometric reading in her ledger, said the fog would lift by mid-morning, said Quillgreen probably stood in a basin and would pool heat by afternoon.

"Then we arrive warm," I said.

"Warm and already behind," she said, smiling at her instruments. "A place in a basin has already had its afternoon by the time you understand it."

Lano set her pale stone down beside the fire and curled around it. Rurik watched the dark where the road forked. The timber track was invisible now. Whatever he had seen, or not seen, he kept.