Dream d1973-s: Road Talk, Empty Verge

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the noon sun sat hard and white above the road, and Kestrelsquare's walls had shrunk to a pale seam behind us, just a line of cut stone on the horizon with the banner-poles too small to read. Ahead there was nothing yet - a road winding into low scrub country, a curve that hid whatever came next.

Lano trotted at my left heel, nose working the verge as we walked. She'd found something interesting in the dry grass, a small flat stone, and she carried it awhile the way she does sometimes - not to keep it, just to have it.

"The mill wheel," the Builder said. She'd been quiet for the better part of an hour and started speaking in the middle of her thought, the way she does. "I keep going back to the mill wheel. The bearing seat was worn wrong. Someone had shimmed it with rope rather than reset the mount. Years of that. But the wheel still turned."

"It turns until it doesn't," the Weather Reader said. She checked the small barometer she wore on a strap at her wrist, tapped the face with one finger. "Pressure's dropping from the west. We may not make Ironfield dry."

Rurik walked ahead of us on the road's center line, exactly where the old paving had cracked and a ridge of grass had come up through. He moved with no particular hurry but never fell behind. He'd been alert all morning since we left the gate.

I wrote as I walked, shorthand against the cover of the book: the mill wheel, the shimmed bearing, the three families who worked the adjudication hall, the youngest of the lamplighters who'd shown us the route out this morning and had asked, quite seriously, where we were going next. I'd said Ironfield and she'd nodded as if that confirmed something she'd thought.

"What do you think they read about us?" the Builder asked. "Kestrelsquare. What did they take from the visit."

The Weather Reader considered this. "That someone came and looked at the bearing seat and didn't fix it for them."

"We noted it."

"Which is a thing," the Weather Reader said. "Noting is a thing."

Lano dropped her stone at the crest of a small rise, sniffed it once, left it there. The road turned, and ahead - still far, still just suggestion - there was a smudge of smoke that might be Ironfield's lamps or might be the weather coming in from the west. Rurik sat down at the road's edge where it forked into a lesser track, amber eyes on the dark branch, then stood and chose the main road without looking back.

We followed. The afternoon had not answered yet. That felt about right.