Dream d1803-s: Millwheel in Clear Light

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we came to Kestrelsquare at the sharpest hour of the day - noon hard and bright, the sun doing nothing to warm us, only making the frost on the stone walls glitter like embedded salt. We had been walking since before light and the cold had settled into our packs and instruments, so the first thing I noticed about the town was not its walls but its sound: the low continuous groan of millwheels.

Two of them, working. We could hear the water channeled under the wall before we saw the chutes. The Builder stopped a few paces short of the gate and tipped her head the way she does when she hears something structural. "Both running," she said. "At noon, both running." She had no instrument out, wrote nothing yet, but I could see her filing it.

The gates were open. A cart passed through ahead of us, driver not glancing back. Rurik walked ahead, as he does at every approach, and paused just inside the arch - one moment, both front paws on the inside stone, reading whatever a threshold has to say to a cat. Then he sat and looked back at us, which meant: come.

Lano went in after him. She was tired from the road and her nose was working overtime, so she trotted in with her ears up and her tail making small slow assessments - caliente, warmer here than outside the wall, protected by the mass of stone. Someone had left a mallet leaning against the gatepost, a coil of rope set on a water barrel that probably belonged elsewhere. The Weather Reader noted it on her small pad and said, almost to herself, "Orderly town. Ordinary lapses."

I wrote that down. First line, first page of Kestrelsquare: Mostly orderly. Ordinary lapses. Both mills running at noon.

We found the inn by the smell of its chimney and took two rooms. The Weather Reader unpacked her barometer on the windowsill and compared the reading against what she had taken out on the road, frowning at the small difference. The Builder went back outside immediately to look at the mill chutes. I did not stop her.

Rurik settled on the bed nearest the door, amber eyes open, patient in the way only he is patient.

I sat with the book in my lap and looked out at the frost still held in the shadow of the wall opposite. The reading would begin tomorrow. Today we had arrived, and arrival itself was the first datum: that we had been let in, that the gates stood open, that the wheels still turned.

I wrote that too, and closed the book.