Dream d1983-s: Hammers Past Midnight

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the noon light in Harrowlea was so hard and clear it left no shadows worth trusting. We had been here one night already, slept in the loft above the granary, and now the settlement opened itself to us in daylight with the candour of a place that does not know it is being read.

I found the first thing on the main street: footprints pressed into the soft clay at the road's centre, overlapping and recent, no older than a week or two. Boots of different sizes. Work boots, not travellers' boots. Rurik walked the line of them without touching a single print, amber eyes tracking left to right as though reading a sentence.

The Builder crouched at the edge of the prints and pressed two fingers lightly into the mud beside a deep heel-mark. "New load," she said, not to me but to the ground. "Someone has been moving weight through here. Heavy weight, regular intervals." She stood and looked at the building faces along the street, reading their joints and lintels the way I read a page.

We heard the sound before we found its source: hammers, two or three of them, coming from the eastern end of Harrowlea where the settlement thinned into open ground. Not the slow hammering of repair. A faster, testing rhythm. The Weather Reader had her barometer out before I thought to ask. She turned the dial slowly and said the pressure was dropping in fine gradients, the kind that meant effort sustained over days rather than a single storm of industry.

Past the last building, where the scrub grass began, there was an open field marked with posts and measured rope-lines stretched between them. Scorch marks on the earth at regular intervals. Targets set at deliberate distances.

Lano moved to the nearest post, nose low and circling, tail level and serious. She sat down at the edge of the rope-line and looked back at me.

I opened the book of readings and wrote: footprints on the main street, one to two weeks. Hammers and voices past dark. Testing ground east of the hamlet, targets at measured paces. The settlement is not quiet. It is working.

The Builder looked over my shoulder at what I had written. "That is the right question," she said. "What is it working toward."

The Weather Reader said nothing. She was already walking the measured rope-lines, reading the distances with her eyes, and her silence told me she had her own answer forming and would not give it cheap.

We had two more days in Harrowlea. The reading was not done.