Dream d1977-s: Frost on the Book's Last Page

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the morning came in grey and cold, frost threading the fence posts of Ironfield white, and I stood in the yard of the lamplit house with the book of readings open to its final entry for this place.

The ink dried slowly in the cold. I had written what the Builder found in the load-paths of the granary wall - the way the older course of stone had been set by someone who expected the building to outlast them by a century, and had. I had written what the Weather Reader measured in the pressure-shifts across Ironfield's valley, how the settlement sits in a bowl that collects cold air and holds it like a well holds water, and how the people here have learned to bank their fires twice before dawn for exactly that reason. I wrote those things down and then I wrote what we leave better than we found it, which is harder to quantify but necessary to name.

The Lamplighter came out while I was still writing. She carried two cups and said nothing about the cold. She handed me one, looked at the open page, and said only that it was a good thing to be read, and that most places never were.

The Weather Reader had her instruments already stowed. She stood near the gate with Lano, who had her nose pressed to the gap in the planks, reading the road's smell before any of us had committed to it. Her tail moved once, slow and certain.

"She votes for the road," the Weather Reader said.

"She always votes for the road," the Builder said, coming around the corner with her pack already settled on her shoulders, her measuring cords coiled at her hip. She was smiling. "She is smarter than any of us."

I closed the book. We said our farewells properly - the Lamplighter, and the young man who had let us sleep in the dry of his tool-store, and the woman from the mill who had explained the river's winter mood with her hands in the air. None of them needed anything from us that we hadn't already left. That is what a proper reading looks like when it ends.

Rurik was first through the gate, as he always is. He paused on the road's far side and looked back once, amber eyes level, then turned and walked north without hurrying.

Lano followed him. I heard the Builder say something quiet to the Weather Reader - companeras, something like that - and I looked back once more at Ironfield's lamps, still burning in the grey light, and then I did not look back again.