Dream d1818-s: Cinder and Cloud

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road ran west under a sky that could not make up its mind. Racing clouds stripped the moon bare for a moment, then covered it again, and the west wind came in cold gusts that smelled of turned earth and distance.

We had been walking since the afternoon light went thin. Vesperhush was a smear of dark behind us - no lamplight, of course, because there were no lamps left to light. The Builder walked with her hands deep in her coat pockets, her fingers still smelling of old mortar where she had worked a loose lintel back into its seat on our last morning there.

"I keep thinking about the millhouse," she said. Not to anyone in particular.

The Weather Reader had her barometer out, tilting it against the flare of a torch she held at waist height. "Pressure's been dropping since midday," she said. "Rain before Umberfold, I think."

"Good," said the Builder. "Rain is honest."

Lano trotted at my heel, pausing now and then to nose the grass at the road's edge. Once she found something she approved of - a smooth river stone - and carried it nearly a quarter-mile before setting it down and moving on. Her ears stayed up, reading the wind.

I had the book open on my forearm, writing by torchlight. What we had read at Vesperhush would take a full page to set down cleanly: the overgrown courtyard, the water channel someone had lined with cut stone and then abandoned mid-course, the hearths still serviceable beneath the weeds. A place that had not failed so much as been quietly left behind by the network, one season at a time. There was grief in that. There was also instruction.

Rurik had gone ahead. When we made camp on the verge - a flat dry stretch where the grass gave way to bare chalk - he was already sitting at the place where a track ran off north from the main road. He watched the dark in that direction with his amber eyes steady and his tail laid flat and still.

"Anything?" I asked.

He did not answer, which was its own kind of answer.

The Weather Reader strung the rain-fly between two iron pins she carried for exactly this purpose. The Builder built a fire from wood we had carried out of Vesperhush - kindling from a fallen beam, the last thing the ruin gave us willingly. We sat around it. Lano circled once and curled against my leg, warm and compact, her chin on her paws.

"What do you think Umberfold will ask of us?" the Builder said.

"Something different from Vesperhush," said the Weather Reader. "Or the same thing from a different angle."

I wrote that down too. The fire gave a long pulse in the west wind. Rurik had not moved. Above us the clouds raced south, the moon came and went, and the road stretched on in both directions: patient, dark, unhurried.