Dream d1747-s: Hands in the Work

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the frost still clung to the fence-posts of Ospreygreen when we took up our tools, and the grey light had barely pulled itself over the roof-lines before the Lamplighter found us work to do.

She did not ask politely. She came to where we had slept in the back room of the cooperage, rapped twice on the door-frame, and said there was timber to be moved and she had seen my Builder's hands and knew useful ones. The Builder was already pulling on her coat. She has a way of being ready before she is asked.

The work the reading had shown was real and present: recent boots had worn a new groove in the main street, pressed into the mud-frost by people moving with purpose, not wandering. The cooperage itself was evidence - new barrel staves not yet bent to shape, a stack of them taller than Lano could see over if she jumped, which she did, twice, nose up to catch the smell of fresh-cut oak. Her tail said she approved.

We moved timber through the morning. The Builder read the wood the way she reads everything - by weight and grain and the sound it made when you set it down wrong. She corrected the Lamplighter's apprentice once, gently, on how to stack so the weight did not bow the lower pieces, and he received it well enough.

The Weather Reader kept her instruments close even with her hands full. She said the pressure was dropping and the cold would sharpen by afternoon, and Ospreygreen would want the work done before then. She said it the way she always says useful things: as plain fact, without ceremony.

At the edge of the village I had noticed the testing ground again - a long strip of packed earth with targets at one end and a starting mark at the other, paces measured and burned into a post. The Lamplighter told me, when I asked, that the ground had been marked out in recent weeks. Someone in Ospreygreen was learning distances.

Rurik sat on the post beside the starting mark for a long time that afternoon, amber eyes on the farthest target. He did not explain this. He rarely does.

By the time the light went low and yellow we had earned our supper, and the Lamplighter brought it herself rather than sending the apprentice. That meant something. I wrote it in the book under the date, and marked the work-day complete.

Lano curled against my boot while I wrote. The frost was coming back.