Dream d1793-s: The Fork After Dark

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road out of Marrowwharf ran straight for half a morning and then stopped pretending. It bent south toward lower ground, and the walled town we had spent ourselves reading shrank to a smear of hearthsmoke behind the tree-line.

The Weather Reader walked beside me with her barometer slung chest-height. She had taken a reading before we left the gate and she kept consulting it as the sky hardened into noon. "Pressure held steady all week we were there," she said, not quite to me, not quite to herself. "That's unusual for a place with that much argument in it."

"The argument was load-bearing," the Builder said from behind us. She had her notebook open to the page where she had sketched the western granary's joint work. "The cracks at the sill-line told me: every generation somebody shouts, but nobody pulls the wall down."

Lano trotted at the road's edge, nose working the verge grass. She paused over something - a stone, a scent, some small word the ground was keeping - then moved on.

We talked over Marrowwharf as the noon passed. The warden who had stood in the weighing-house doorway and said nothing but watched everything. The mill wheel that turned wrong and what the Builder had said quietly to the miller's apprentice about the sluice. The Weather Reader's pressure log, which would go in our book of readings as a baseline for walled towns in river-bend positions.

I wrote notes as I walked, which I am apparently able to do in dreams. The ink kept up.

By mid-afternoon the road gave us a fork. No signpost. One branch angled toward lower ground and water-smell; the other climbed a shallow ridge. Rurik stopped at the fork and sat. He looked down the lower road for a long time with his amber eyes and gave nothing away.

"He always does this," the Builder said.

"Cataloguing," the Weather Reader said.

"He is not cataloguing," I said. "He is listening."

We made camp on the verge above the fork, where a stand of ash trees held some warmth. Lano circled twice and settled against my pack, tranquila, the way she gets when the road has been long enough. The fire was small. In the dark below, the road divided and continued without us.

Rurik did not come to the fire. He sat at the fork all night, and I fell asleep watching the two roads go dark in opposite directions, and I did not yet know which one would bring us to Brackensquare.