Dream d1986-s: Mist Between Two Names

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road ran flat through river mist and Harrowlea was three hours gone.

Lano walked ahead of me, her tail low in the wet air, nose working the verge where something - rabbit or hedgehog - had crossed recently. The Weather Reader had her instrument case open at her hip, reading the barometric column by lamplight as she walked. She said the pressure was holding flat, which meant the mist would stay through morning.

"Harrowlea will keep its shape," the Builder said. She was looking back, though there was nothing to see - just the mist and the dark and the lamp's small radius. "The lintel over the granary door. We shimmed it in two hours. It would have gone in a winter."

"It nearly had," I said.

I had written it in the book: the granary's failing lintel, the way the whole north wall had been pulling inward for years without anyone reading the lean. The crofter who showed us the cracked mortar had been embarrassed, as if he had failed to notice a thing he should have noticed. The Builder ran her hands along the joint and said nothing for a long moment. Then she said: that is fixable. That exact phrase. Not an easy fix, not a quick fix - just fixable, which was the most generous thing she knew how to say.

We made camp on the verge where the road widened at a ford. The Weather Reader built the fire while I re-read the last three pages of notes, looking for the shape of what Harrowlea had been. A hamlet that knew its boundaries. A hamlet that had stopped trusting its own repairs.

Lano curled against my pack and sighed, one ear twitching toward the ford's quiet sound.

Rurik sat at the place where the road forked, ten meters from the fire. He had not eaten with us. He sat with his back to the camp and his amber eyes on the dark where the fork went north, and I knew better than to call him in. He was reading the fork the way he always read a choice before the choice arrived.

"Do you know which branch?" the Builder asked him, from the fire.

He did not answer.

"He knows," the Weather Reader said. "He just won't say until morning."

"That is either wisdom or theatre," the Builder said.

"With cats," the Weather Reader said, "the difference is the same thing."

I wrote that down too. The book does not care if a line is practical. It keeps what the road offered, and lets the morning sort it.