Dream d1760-s: Hammers Going Late

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the fog had not lifted by midmorning, and Pewtergate worked anyway.

The Builder had been up before the rest of us, drawn out by the sound of timber being positioned on the far side of the moot square. I found her when I came down from the lodging house, already crouched beside a frame joint with one of the local carpenters, her fingers tracing the mortise cut with the focused attention she gives to anything load-bearing. She did not look up when I approached. "Poorly seasoned," she said, to me or to the carpenter or to no one in particular. "It'll hold for now. I know a cure for it."

The carpenter looked at her hands, then at her face, and handed her a chisel.

That was how it started. By the time the Weather Reader and I had found bread and something hot to drink, the Builder was three frames deep into the work, and the local crew had simply absorbed her, the way skilled people absorb other skilled people when there is too much to do and the help is genuine.

Lano trotted the perimeter of the square, nose low to the cart-tracks that still held their pressed shape in the damp earth. Fresh work, recent wheels. She circled back to me and sat, ears angled toward the moot hall where the sealed petitions waited in their stacks. I scratched behind her ear. "Not yet," I told her. She accepted this.

The Weather Reader had climbed to the upper story of the hall to take a pressure reading from the open window, and called down something I could not quite catch over the hammering. I wrote what I could in the book: the sound of Pewtergate working, the particular cadence of voices calling measurements to one another across the square, the fog sitting low enough that the upper windows of the tallest building were lost in it while the lanterns at street level burned clear.

Rurik appeared at noon, stepping from between two stacked timber piles as though he had been there the whole time. He sat at the edge of the work and watched with the patient attention of someone cataloguing. When a load shifted and one of the locals caught it a half-second late, Rurik's amber eyes tracked to the joint, then back to the worker's hands. His tail moved once.

"He sees the weak points," the Builder said, not breaking rhythm. "Good cat."

Rurik did not acknowledge this. He was already looking at the next frame.

By late afternoon my hands were sore and my notes were full of things I had not expected to learn. The moot hall petitions could wait one more day. This was what the work asked of us, and we were giving it. Lano slept curled against a timber pile, one ear still raised. Pendiente, I thought - the word for pending, for waiting, for the thing not yet resolved.