Dream d1728-s: Road Talk, Camp Smoke

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road ran ahead of us through country that had not decided yet what it wanted to be - scrubby hedgerow giving way to open pasture, then back to hedgerow again, the afternoon light coming in low and sideways off the clouds that the Weather Reader kept watching with the expression she wore when a barometer was moving.

Quillhush was still with us the way a conversation stays with you after the room empties. The Builder walked with her hands loose at her sides, which meant she was still turning something over. I had been writing in the book since we left the last junction - not the formal entries, just the margin notes, the things that didn't fit the columns.

"The jointery on the grain store," she said, to nobody in particular. "Whoever drove those pegs knew the wood was green. They cut for the shrinkage. That place was built by someone who expected it to still be standing."

"It wasn't," I said.

"No. But not because of the jointery."

Rurik walked the verge, which he always did when the road had a ditch on one side. He preferred to keep a threshold in sight. When the road forked in the middle distance he stopped and sat, watching both branches with the particular patience he had that wasn't patience at all but something more like listening.

The Weather Reader raised her head. "Pressure dropping," she said. "Not tonight, but by morning."

Lano trotted ahead of us all, nose low, ears moving like small flags, reading the road in her own language. Once she stopped and looked back at me with the white plume of her tail raised, then put her nose down again and trotted on. Whatever she had found she judged acceptable.

We made camp on a wide verge where someone had set flat stones around an old fire-ring. The smoke from our fire went straight up for a moment, then leaned toward Cinderwharf - or at least toward where Cinderwharf should be, past the long curve of the hill.

"Walled," the Weather Reader said, eating. She had seen the outline marked on the survey she carried. "Walls mean someone decided the inside was worth the cost of keeping the outside out."

"Or keeping something in," the Builder said.

I wrote both lines in the margin.

Rurik sat at the edge of the firelight where the road forked away into dark. He did not come in when I called him. He only turned his amber eyes back toward us once, then resumed watching the fork.

I wrote: What a walled place keeps, the reading will find.

Lano pressed warm against my leg and slept.