Dream d1828-s: Cloud Break on the Verge

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road ran west under a torn sky, and Brackenlea was small enough behind us to cup in one hand if I turned to look - which I did, once, and then did not again.

The west wind had been working all afternoon, herding clouds in ridges across the open country. The Weather Reader walked just behind my left shoulder, holding her barometer at arm's length the way she does when the pressure is doing something she wants to catch. She said the gradient was falling, then said it was holding, then said she needed another hour to be certain.

"You always need another hour," the Builder said, not unkindly.

"Reading takes time," the Weather Reader said, and glanced at my book. "Is that not so?"

"It is so," I said.

Lano trotted at my heel, her nose working the verge-grass. When the wind came in a gust she stopped and lifted her head into it, ears laid back, then trotted on.

We talked over Brackenlea as we walked - the way people do after a stay, turning the place in the mind the way you turn a stone to see its underside. The Builder had found a lintel that was going to shift in the next wet season; she'd marked it, explained it to the mason's apprentice who had the tools but not yet the eye for what the load was doing. Whether the apprentice would act on it was not in our hands. We'd read it and said so. That was the part we could give.

The Weather Reader remembered the old woman near the green who'd kept a rain-gauge in her garden and written the readings on the doorframe in pencil, year by year, going back further than anyone we'd spoken to. She'd taken a copy in the back pages of my book. I could feel it there, the pencilled numbers, faint through the cover.

We made camp on the verge where the road bent north. No inn, no lamp; just the fire in a ring of wet stones and the sound of the wind in the hedge. Rurik settled at the edge of the firelight, facing the dark where the road forked toward the ruin. He did not sleep. His eyes caught the flame in two amber points, steady, while everything around him moved.

Willowmoss was still out of sight. An overgrown place, we'd been told. The kind of settlement where the road in has gone back to grass and you have to look for it.

Lano pressed against my leg, quieta, and the clouds raced on.