Dream d1819-s: Crooked Commons

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road brought us to Umberfold in the hour before full dark, when the heat still sat in the dust and the lamps had just been lit.

We had seen the place from the ridge above the valley for most of the afternoon - a scatter of rooftops, smoke from banked hearths, the commons at its center. But it did not resolve itself cleanly from above. The paths through it crossed each other at angles I could not predict, some running true toward the commons and some veering off without apparent reason, and I noted in my book: spreads unevenly; paths multiply toward the edges.

The Weather Reader had her barometers out on the descent. She walked with one cradled in the crook of her arm, watching the needle. "Pressure has been holding since this morning," she said. "But there is something in the air here. Not change, exactly. More like a long exhale that has not quite finished."

"The kind that takes a few days to read," I said.

She nodded without looking up from the needle.

Lano trotted ahead as we came down through the last stand of trees. Her nose worked at the verge of the path, ears pivoting toward the sound of a hammer still going somewhere in the village. Then a door. Then voices. She circled back to me and pressed against my leg once, then moved forward again.

The commons was larger than it looked from the ridge. The lamp at its center was lit but the benches around it were empty at this hour, the day's business apparently moved indoors. The Builder paused at the edge of the commons and looked up at the rooflines.

"Different heights," she said. "And that one there has been extended twice. You can see where the original pitch ends."

I looked where she pointed. She was right.

Rurik had gone ahead without any of us noticing. He sat now at the threshold of the inn - the only building on the commons with a lamp both inside and out - and looked back at us. He had already decided. He marked the threshold in the way he does, with one paw pressed flat to the stone step and then withdrawn. Then he sat and waited.

We took the room they offered us. The innkeeper said little beyond the price. Through the window I could hear the hammer finally stop.

I wrote the settlement name in the book and below it: day one. Lano lay down under the window, nose pointed at the crack beneath the door. Tranquila, I thought. There is time.

The reading proper would begin in the morning. Tonight we had only what first impressions give you: the shape of the spread, the sound of the work still finishing, the pressure in the air, and Rurik already knowing the threshold was good.