Dream d1840-s: Banners in Low Fog

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the mills heard us before the gate did.

We were still on the ridge when I caught the sound: a slow rhythmic turning, the creak of timber under load, the hiss of grinding stone drifting up through the fog below. Nettlesquare. The Weather Reader stood beside me and tilted her instrument case to read the barometric collar, then looked down at the town with the focused stillness she uses when a place is speaking.

"Pressure is even," she said. "Nothing holding its breath."

That counted as a good sign. I wrote it in the margin of the book: first breath of Nettlesquare: easy.

We came down off the ridge in single file. The fog sat in the low ground, waist-height on the town's outer wall, so that the battlements stood clear above it like a line of text while everything below the parapet was soft and grey. Banners moved: two in pale green, one in undyed linen, catching the same breath of wind and releasing it together.

The Builder paused at the verge to read the wall itself. She crouched, pressed a hand flat against the stone just above the fog-line, tilted her head.

"Dressed stone over rubble fill," she said. "Good work at the joints. Whoever mortared this understood drainage."

Rurik reached the gate threshold first, as he always does. He sat on the near side and watched the gate-ward come out to meet us. Then he stepped across, without hurry, and sat again on the far side. Threshold read. That is his form of note-taking.

The gate-ward was a broad woman in a leather surcoat who asked our trade with the directness of someone who had asked a thousand times. We told her: readers and travelers, five nights requested. She looked at the party - the instruments, the book, Lano sitting with her chin raised and her tail moving slowly - and waved us through with the hand of someone satisfied.

Inside the walls the fog was thinner. The mills came into view: three of them set along a narrow mill-run, wheels turning against the current, sluice-gates pinned open. The sound filled the yard. I stood in it for a moment before writing anything, because a place heard first sometimes tells you more than a place seen.

Lano pushed her nose into the base of the nearest gatepost, then lifted her head and looked at me. Aqui, her posture said: this is where we are.

We took a room above the feeders' hall. Rurik chose the high window-sill. I set the book on the table, opened to a clean page, and left it open.

Tomorrow we begin to read.