Dream d1992-s: Between Two Lights

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road flattened into a wide plain and the drizzle came in sideways, too fine to see but enough to wet the wool. We had been walking since the Brackensquare gate swung shut behind us, and the town's lamplit ramparts had gone to a smear of orange light somewhere back in the grey. Ahead, nothing. The road went straight and the road went dark.

Lano padded close to my heel, nose down, reading the verge grasses for whatever she reads there. Every few steps she would lift her head and check the party's spread, then go back to the grass.

"The mortar on the south wall will hold through two more winters," the Builder said, not to anyone in particular, the way she talks when she is still working through a reading. "After that, the settlement needs to decide. Pack or repair."

"They know," the Weather Reader said. She had her barometer out even here on the open road, tilting it against the grey sky. "The pressure has been sinking all day. There is heavier rain coming from the west, maybe by morning. Brackensquare will feel it before we do."

I wrote that in the book while I walked: Pressure west-falling. Rain before dawn. I find I write more than I need on travel days, filling in what I should have put down while we were still inside the walls.

We made camp where the road forked, on a wide flat verge of short wet grass. The Builder fixed the tent pegs with three good blows each while I got the lamp lit inside its windshield. Lano circled once, twice, then pressed herself against my knee and went still.

Rurik sat at the fork itself, exactly between the two roads. His eyes caught the lamp from twenty meters out, twin points of amber. He did not come to camp. He watched the dark where the roads parted and did not explain himself, which is his way.

"What do you know about Slatehush?" the Builder asked me.

"Ruin," I said. "Road in is overgrown. That is all the book had room for before we left Brackensquare."

She nodded and said nothing more. The drizzle ticked on the tent canvas. Somewhere behind us, the people of Brackensquare were banking their fires against the coming rain. Somewhere ahead, Slatehush was dark and did not know we were coming.

Rurik held his post at the fork until the lamp guttered low and I stopped watching.