Dream d1995-s: What Slatehush Left Us

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road had gone cold under our feet and the ruin of Slatehush was only a soft bulk at the horizon now, its walls dissolved into dark. The sliver moon lit the verge grass silver-grey, bent from earlier wind. We made camp at a junction stone - a flat boulder for a table, coats spread on the ground, the fire built low and cupped between three stones the Builder set by feel in the dark.

She had been quiet since we left the last standing wall behind. "The lintel over the granary door," she said finally, crouching near the fire with her hands open above it. "The corbelling was wrong when it was built. Whoever put it up knew it would settle, and they shimmed for it anyway. Patient work. Someone thought about the people coming after them."

The Weather Reader tilted her barometer toward the firelight. "Pressure's been climbing since midday. The city ahead will be dry when we arrive." She paused. "Slatehush held low pressure the whole time we were there. Always felt like rain that hadn't decided to fall."

That was the truest thing I had heard anyone say about the place. I wrote it in the book of readings while the image was still fresh.

Lano pressed against my side, warm and solid, nose working the night air toward the east where Ospreycrossing would be - bright, they said, never quite sleeping. Her ears perked once at something I could not hear. Then she turned a small circle and settled with a sigh, nose still pointed east. Lejos, I wrote in the margin beside a rough sketch of the junction stone.

Rurik was thirty paces up the road, sitting precisely at the fork where the two tracks divided: the southern way continuing toward Ospreycrossing, the northern petering off to low scrub. He watched the dark the way he always did at a threshold - as if something would eventually emerge from it that needed counting.

"What do you think it reads like?" the Builder asked. She meant Ospreycrossing.

"A place that never had to go dark," the Weather Reader said. "Which means it never learned what the dark teaches."

I thought about the shims in the corbelling, the patience of whoever had done that work knowing no one would ever look. I added it to the page.

Rurik did not turn from the fork.