Dream d1984-s: Measured Paces, Working Hands

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the storm light came in sideways across Harrowlea, amber gone to pewter by midmorning, and the Crofter handed me a timber brace without ceremony and said, "Other end."

So I took the other end.

The Builder had been at it since before I woke. I found her at the testing grounds on the hamlet's eastern edge, a cleared strip of packed earth where someone had set up a series of marked intervals - knotted rope stretched between stakes, targets of bundled straw at the far end. She was pacing the intervals herself, counting under her breath, measuring not the targets but the ground between them. Her notebook was already half full of figures I couldn't read from where I stood.

"They've been working this ground for weeks," she said without looking up. "See how the sod's been cut and relaid? Someone here knows what they're doing. Wants to know it properly, not just by feel."

The Weather Reader was on a roofline two streets over. I could see her from where I stood, crouched with a hand on a chimney stack, reading something in the way the mortar had settled, or the temperature of the stone. Her instruments caught what little light remained in the clouds.

Lano found a worn peg in the testing ground's boundary rope and sat beside it, watching the straw targets as if they might move. Her nose worked the air. She didn't bark at anything; there was nothing here that wasn't meant to be here.

The Crofter's crew worked without explaining themselves. That suited us. The brace I was holding became part of a frame for a storage run - three walls already standing, the fourth needing to be plumb. The Builder came over when she finished her paces and checked our corners with her level, correcting the lean by a thumbnail's width, then nodding.

"It'll hold," she said. To the Crofter's apprentice, not to me.

The apprentice looked at her the way people look at someone who measures things and turns out to be right.

Rurik appeared at noon, picking his way along the top of a low stone wall that ran the length of the testing ground. He sat at the corner post and watched the work. His amber eyes moved between the straw targets and the stakes and the cut sod, assembling something in his mind. He didn't share it yet. He rarely did before he had the whole picture.

I wrote what I could in the book of readings. Not conclusions - those come on the last day. Just what the hands learned from the work: the care in the ground, the lateness of the hammers, the fact that the Crofter handed me the timber without asking who I was or where I'd come from.

That is its own kind of reading.