Dream d1738-s: Timber and Trust

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the west wind never stopped moving and we spent the whole of it with sawdust in our hair.

The Builder had been up since before light. By the time I found her she was at the frame of a storehouse on Slatefold's eastern edge, running her palm along a beam where two lengths of timber had been scarf-joined in a hurry. "Whoever cut this was working fast," she said, without looking at me. "Not badly, but fast. There's been pressure on them." She pressed the joint, feeling for give. It held. She made a small sound that was somewhere between approval and concern.

I wrote it down. The book of readings had been open since dawn.

Lano had attached herself to the head carpenter, a compact woman who moved through the site with a habit of checking twice before she trusted anything. Lano trotted at her heels, ears pitched forward, nose working at every fresh-cut end and pile of shavings. When a plank went down wrong and had to be pulled up, Lano watched the whole operation with an expression of deep professional interest.

"She judges," the carpenter said, and I could not tell if it was a complaint or a compliment.

"She does," I agreed.

By midmorning we were all of us working. I held lengths steady while the Builder called measurements. The Weather Reader had found her own task at the other end of the structure, checking the angle of the overhang against her instruments. Slatefold's weather-memory was a wet one, she'd said that first evening - the village had been surprised by run-off before and remembered it in its architecture, in the way every roof tilted a degree or two past what you'd expect. She was here to see if the new work respected that or forgot it.

Rurik found the threshold of the storehouse at noon and sat in it. He does this at every building we enter - takes the measure of the crossing point before he'll pass through. He was still there when the sun moved off the lintel and the shadow changed, and then he rose, turned once, and walked inside. I took that as a good sign.

The carpenter fed us from a pot she kept warming on a brazier near the supplies. It was grain and something roasted, and we ate standing because there was more to do.

"Slatefold has been building," I said.

"Slatefold has had to," she replied. "Viene la temporada." She paused. "The wet season. You want the roof right before it comes, or you want the wet season teaching you what you should have done."

I wrote that down too. Lano pressed against my shin while I wrote, warm and companionable, and the west wind moved through the village and the beams creaked once, gently, settling into their new shape.