Dream d1721-s: Blue Dusk, Gate Unlocked

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the village of Quillgreen came into view just as the sky thinned from grey to that particular blue that is not quite dark. The lamps were being lit - one by one, a lamplighter moving along the commons with a long taper, unhurried, as if she had done it ten thousand times and expected to do it ten thousand more.

We came down a chalk road that had been laid with care. The ruts were old but graded; whoever maintained it had not let the centre ridge grow high. The Builder noticed first. She slowed, studied the verge where the drainage ditch met the bank, and said only: "Someone thought ahead here." Not praise, exactly - more like the recognition of a practitioner.

The Weather Reader had her smallest barometer out, held loose at her side. She said the pressure was stable and had been stable all day, and that the village air tasted of cut grass and banked cook-fires rather than damp or mill-stone. "A quiet industry," she said. "Nothing driven hard."

Lano trotted ahead of us as she always does at a new gate. Her nose dropped to the threshold bar - the worn oak beam set a hand's width above the stone - and she moved along it left to right, reading whatever she reads, then sat and looked back at us with her tail working slowly.

Rurik stepped over the beam and paused in the lamp-thrown shadow on the inside. He sat and watched the commons for a long moment: the clean square, the hall on the far side with its shutters symmetrical, a well that looked in regular use. He did not move until he was satisfied, and then he moved with the ease of a cat who has declared a place acceptable.

The gate-warden was an older man leaning on the post with no particular urgency. He asked our names and our errand in the same breath. I told him we were circuit-riders, readers of places.

He considered this. "There's a room at the commons-house," he said. "They'll want to know your opinion of things."

"We give no opinions until we have read properly," I said.

He found this reasonable and stood aside.

I wrote "Quillgreen - arrival - lamps just lit, chalk road, one gate, warden unhurried" in the book of readings. The first line of a new entry is always the lightest. Lano pressed her flank against my boot as I wrote, and I felt the warmth of a place that had not yet shown us its whole character but had, at least, left its gate unlocked.

Rurik marked the threshold with one pass of his cheek along the gatepost. Bienvenida, Lano said with her tail. The reading proper would begin tomorrow.