Dream d1735-s: Road Talk, Sliver Sky

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the walled town of Cinderwharf was already small behind us, its torches reduced to a smear of amber against the low hill, when the Weather Reader stopped and held up her barometer to the starlight.

"Pressure dropping," she said. "Slatefold will be damp when we arrive."

The Builder glanced back over her shoulder at the receding glow. "Let it be. We left Cinderwharf dry enough." She meant the granary braces she had re-fitted on the third day of the stay, the load-path that had been running crooked for two seasons. She said it without pride, the way she always named work she had finished: as a fact, closed.

Rurik walked the verge ahead of us, picking the line where the road forked into a cattle track and then back to itself. He always found the true road without appearing to look for it. I watched his tail and followed.

Lano trotted at my heel for a time, then ranged ahead to nose at something in the ditch grass, then came back. Her ears were working the dark independently of the rest of her. Whatever she heard, she decided it was not worth barking about, and settled back into step beside the Weather Reader.

I opened the book of readings while we walked, reading by feel and the sliver of moon more than by sight. The Cinderwharf entry: the tidal smell of the lower ward, the petition nailed to the harbor master's door that nobody had answered for two months, the granary, the woman in the dye yard who knew every lane by water-sound alone. I tried to find the shape of the place as we left it - not what we had done there but what the reading had taught us. Cinderwharf was a place that spoke loudest in what it had stopped maintaining.

"What do you think Slatefold will ask?" the Builder said. She directed the question at nobody in particular.

The Weather Reader tilted her barometer. "Something quiet. Low places ask quiet questions."

"Eso," Lano did not say, but she sneezed, which in her vocabulary meant approximately the same thing.

We made camp on a wide verge where the road bent around an old field boundary wall. Rurik took the first watch at the fork, sitting where two roads crossed, amber eyes reading the dark between them. I wrote one more line in the Cinderwharf entry and closed the book. The lamplight of the next place was still over the horizon, invisible. That was fine. A reading begins before you arrive.