Dream d1839-s: Dust Between Two Lights

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the heat had not lifted by evening, and we made our camp on the verge of the road where the dust still hung in the air like memory - the way it does when there has been no wind all day and the earth has given up trying to cool itself.

Ospreycrossing was a smear of lamp-light behind us. Not gone - I could still make it out if I turned, the way you can still make out a fire you have just walked away from. The Builder had her pack off and her boots off, sitting on a flat stone, rubbing her feet with both hands and listing aloud what she regretted not checking before we left.

"The eastern granary," she said. "The supports at the loading bay. I looked at them and I thought, those need attention, and then someone called me away and I never wrote it in the book."

The Weather Reader was logging the afternoon's readings, her barometer set upright against the wheel of our cart. "We were there twelve days," she said, not looking up. "You checked six buildings properly. That is not a failure."

"It is when it is the granary."

I wrote in the book of readings: what we had found at Ospreycrossing, what we had mended, what we had not reached. The list of names - role-names, place-names, descriptions of faces. The cooper who had kept the water-works running on no budget and no recognition for fifteen years. The square where the apprentices had gathered to hear the Builder explain load-paths, and how they had asked questions for two hours without stopping.

Lano had her nose down in the scrub at the verge edge, working through something interesting. She tracked back and forth with great seriousness. I called to her softly - "pequeña" - and her tail moved once without her turning.

Rurik was already at the fork.

He sat there motionless, twenty paces ahead where the track divided: one way toward what we believed was Nettlesquare, one way unmarked, going somewhere else entirely. His amber eyes did not move. He was doing what he always does at a fork - reading it, not choosing. Reading.

"What does the Nettlesquare track feel like?" I called.

He did not answer. He would answer when he knew.

The Weather Reader looked up at the sky. "Pressure dropping," she said. "Something comes in from the west. Not tonight. The day after we arrive, maybe."

"If we arrive," the Builder said.

"We always arrive," the Weather Reader said, with the patience of someone who has made camp on many verges and always, eventually, left them.

I wrote that down. Then I closed the book, lay back, and watched the last of Ospreycrossing's light thin until the sky held nothing but itself.