Dream d1776-s: Hands in the Timber

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the mist off the river had thickened by midmorning and Cinderwharf smelled of wet sawdust and iron. We were four days in and the reading had become labor.

The Builder had found the weak joint in the loading crane by the south quay on day two. Now she was in it up to her elbows, fitting a new brace-plate with the Bridgekeeper's crew while I held the lamp and passed bolts when she called for them. She did not explain what she was doing. She did not need to. The crew watched her hands and matched them.

"Tighten that one half a turn more," she said to a young wharfworker without looking up. He did. She ran her thumb along the join and nodded once.

Lano had stationed herself at the crane's base, nose tipped toward the waterline, tracking something in the mist I could not see. Her tail moved in small slow sweeps.

The Weather Reader was at the testing ground at the edge of town where they had set up measured paces and timber targets. She had her barometric columns out, reading the pressure gradient coming off the water. The captain of the guard was explaining what they were testing for and she was listening with the stillness she keeps when a place is telling her something true.

I wrote in the book of readings while the work went on around me. Not summaries. Details: the depth of the cart-tracks on the north road, still fresh enough that the edge-grain had not crumbled; the sound of hammers from the cooperage going well past the lamp-lighting hour; the way the Bridgekeeper moved through his own town, quick and without ceremony, a man who did not need to announce himself to be heeded.

At midday the Builder straightened, pressed her knuckles into her lower back, and looked at the crane with the expression she gets when a thing will hold.

"It was undersized for the loads they've been running," she said to me. "Not a design error. A growth error. They built it right and then got better at their work."

I wrote that down too.

Rurik appeared at the top of the quay wall, amber eyes half-closed, watching the river. He had been moving through the alleys since dawn. He does that in a town when he is reading its thresholds - where doors are kept open, where they are kept shut. He marked nothing. That was a reading too.

Lano looked up from the base of the crane, sneezed once into the mist - achis - and returned to her vigil.

Two more days.