Dream d1976-s: Hammer Work and River Mist

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the mist came off the river in long slow rolls and settled between the buildings of Ironfield like it had business there. We had been in the village three days now. The novelty of arrival was gone. What remained was the place itself, its ordinary rhythms, and the work that had been waiting behind them.

The Builder had found it the night before: a long timber warehouse on the east edge of the settlement, its roof ridge bowing under a winter's worth of accumulated water damage. Locals had known about it, had been cutting the replacement beams themselves, but they were short two pairs of hands and a plumb line that worked. The Builder had her plumb line. We had the hands.

I spent the morning hauling green timber from a staging area near the millrun. My arms found the weight of it. Lano threaded between our legs as we worked, her nose never still, cataloguing something in the sawdust and river-smell that we could not. She settled eventually on a coil of rope near the warehouse door and watched with the particular alert patience she brought to any serious work.

"Ridge wants to come up four fingers on the west end," the Builder called from the scaffolding, her voice carrying the mild satisfaction of someone whose instruments have confirmed what her eye already told her. "Someone built this in a hurry and trusted the hillside to compensate. It didn't."

One of the Ironfield carpenters - a steady man who never gave his name but wore his cap at an angle that suggested long habit - nodded as if this settled an old argument with himself.

The Weather Reader moved along the perimeter with her barometric instruments, not for weather this time but out of a kind of professional sympathy. She read pressure and materials by the same instinct. "Wall's breathed unevenly for years," she said to me quietly, running her hand along the lower course of the planking. "You can feel where it held and where it let go."

I wrote that in the book of readings while my hands were still chalked from the timber.

Rurik appeared at midday, as he did, from somewhere unannounced. He sat on the high edge of a scaffold plank and watched the ridge work with amber eyes that missed nothing. When the first replacement beam seated properly and the carpenter drove the peg home with a sound like a clear statement, Rurik closed his eyes once in what I had come to read as approval.

"Bien," Lano said, in her way - not in words, but in the way she lifted her chin toward the roof.

We ate our noon meal in the warehouse doorway with the locals, watching the mist thin over the river. Ironfield was not a place that talked much about itself. It showed you instead.