Dream d1739-s: Dust on the Book's Last Page

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the morning came in sideways, low sun cutting through the gap between the cooperage and the lamp-keeper's house, and I knew without asking that this was the last of Slatefold's mornings that belonged to us.

The book of readings lay open on the table where I had left it. I wrote the final entry before the others were up: the lamplighter's method of banking the wicks so they caught again without relighting, the way the village square held its heat through the night and released it in a single breath at dawn. What Slatefold knew about endurance, I wrote down. What it had forgotten, I marked with a smaller notation in the margin.

The Builder was already at the gate when I brought the book outside, her hand pressed flat against one of the stone posts. She had spent two days establishing which joints in the wayhouse foundation would outlast everything else and which would need attention in a decade. She did not tell Slatefold this as a warning. She told the lamplighter over morning tea, plainly, the way you tell someone where the loose step is before they carry something heavy down the stairs.

"The northwest corner takes the load honestly," she said to him, and he wrote it down himself, in his own notebook, and I was glad for that.

Lano pressed her nose against the base of the gate post, working through whatever the stone remembered of a hundred departures. Her tail moved once, slowly. She looked up at me.

The Weather Reader walked the perimeter of the square one last time with her barometric glass tilted toward the sky. She was reading the pressure memory of the place, the accumulated record of its storms and its still days. Slatefold sat in a shallow basin; it would hold weather longer than its size suggested. She filed this in the case she wore across one shoulder and said nothing, which meant she was satisfied.

The lamplighter clasped my hand at the gate. He was not a demonstrative man, and so the clasp meant something.

"Come back," he said, "when the book needs another entry."

I told him it would.

Rurik had already crossed the threshold. He stood on the road beyond, amber eyes level, waiting without impatience. He would not look back. That was not his way, and we knew it. The road belonged to what was ahead of us.

Lano trotted through after him. "Vamos," she said softly, or perhaps that was only the sound her paws made on the packed dust.

I closed the book. I stepped through the gate. Behind me, Slatefold kept its light.