Dream d1806-s: Timber and Trust

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the mist had not lifted by midmorning, and the smell of wet sawdust hung over Kestrelsquare like a second roof.

The Bridgekeeper had set us to work at first light - not with ceremony, but with the plain efficiency of a person who had more work than hands. She pointed the Builder toward a collapsed section of the inner stockade wall where the crossbeams had rotted through at their joints, and the Builder was already crouched there before the Bridgekeeper had finished pointing, her fingers working at the mortise like she was reading a sentence she recognized.

"These were cut green," the Builder said, not to anyone in particular. "Someone was in a hurry."

The Bridgekeeper handed her a mallet without comment.

I worked alongside the Bridgekeeper's crew, shifting timber from the yard to the wall. Cart-tracks in the mud everywhere, some from this morning, some older, all of them showing the same urgency - loads taken at angles that cut the corners, wheels dug deep. Kestrelsquare had been busy before we arrived and had not slowed for us. That was a kind of welcome, I decided. Being handed work rather than observation.

Lano spent the morning threading between pairs of boots, nose low to the tracks, reading the yard in her own systematic way. Once she sat very still beside a stack of dressed timber and watched a crow until the crow left. Then she trotted back to me, ears settling.

The Weather Reader had climbed to the southern watchtower with her instruments. Around midday she came down and said, without preamble, "Pressure's been dropping since before the last rainfall. These walls have been working harder than anyone has noticed."

"We noticed," the Bridgekeeper said, from the other side of a beam she was helping the Builder seat.

"You noticed the leaks. Not the cause."

There was a silence that was not unfriendly. The Builder fitted the beam and tested it with her shoulder.

"That'll hold," she said. "That'll hold for thirty years if the wood they used next was also green."

"It wasn't," the Bridgekeeper said.

"Then longer."

I wrote in the book while the hammering resumed - not the numbers or the angles, but the sound of the town working past midday without stopping, lanterns lit in the wide yard while the mist came and went. The entry was short. I noted the smell of sawdust and the Bridgekeeper's efficient silences and the way trust, in a place like Kestrelsquare, was earned incrementally by each plank correctly laid.

Lano curled under my coat at dusk and made a sound like a small, satisfied sigh. Bien, I thought, for her.