Dream d1754-s: Quiet Ruin, Long Amber

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road bent around a stand of old juniper and Juniperbarrow appeared in the gap: walls still upright, rooflines mostly intact, but the silence of the place came at us before we reached the gate. Not an unfriendly silence. The kind that comes when everyone who used to shout has been gone a long time.

"Settled," the Weather Reader said, more to her instruments than to us. She had a small aneroid barometer hung from her pack strap and she watched it the way some people watch faces. "No recent disturbance. The air here has been sitting in this shape for weeks."

The Builder said nothing yet, only walked a little slower as we passed under the lintel stone. Her eyes moved the way they always do entering a new place, tracking up the walls, reading the joints, noting where mortar had been repointed and where it hadn't. She would have an opinion by morning. Tonight she was still gathering.

Rurik moved ahead along the main road between the halls. He paused at every threshold, sat for a moment, then rose and moved on. Marking them, or being marked by them. I have learned not to hurry him.

Lano stayed close to my heel as we passed the first row of buildings. Her ears were up, rotating slowly. Once she stopped, nose working, tail low but not tucked. Then something settled in her reading of the air and she trotted forward again, easy and certain.

The place was clean in its bones. That was the first impression I wrote in the book of readings, standing at the edge of what had been a central yard: clean-laid, properly proportioned, the halls arranged so the long amber light of the low sun reached every door in turn before setting. Whoever built this had been thinking about the day's whole arc. Something in it still remembered that intention.

We found a hall with a roof sound enough and a floor swept by no human hand recently but by wind only. We took it. The Builder ran a hand along the main beam and said: "Dry rot in the corner post. The rest is good." She almost smiled. For her that was praise.

I lit one lamp. The Weather Reader set up her instruments by the window. Rurik settled himself in the doorway, facing out, amber eyes half-closed. Lano turned three circles on my pack roll and curled into a comma, her chin on the crook of my ankle.

Outside, the juniper stood along the rim in the last of the day's colour. Tomorrow we would begin to read properly. Tonight I wrote only: Juniperbarrow, day one. The bones remember proportion. The silence is inhabited.