Dream d1996-s: River Bend, Bright Windows

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road curved north along the flood-plain and the city came into view all at once - not gradually, the way a hamlet appears through thinning trees, but in a single declaration. Ospreycrossing. Banners above the gate arch, pale blue and river-grey, catching the wind off the water. The Builder stopped walking and put one hand above her eyes, not against sun - there was no sun this hour - but against the sheer quantity of lamp.

"Well-lit," she said.

"Very well-lit," the Weather Reader agreed, already reading the air with that brass instrument shaped like a shallow bowl. She tipped it slightly, listening to what the city sent out over the water.

Lano had gone a few steps ahead of us and stood at the road's edge where the paving stones began in earnest, her nose lifted. Her tail moved once, twice, deliberate. The river smell reached us all here: wide water, cold, with the mineral understone of a flood-plain that had been worked for generations.

We joined her and walked through the arch together.

What struck me first was the sound. Not noise - organization. Voices called across a courtyard, someone answered from an upper window, a cart horse's hooves fell in a steady cadence on stone. Everything moving, nothing scattered. I took out the book of readings and wrote only: river city, lit from the inside, arrived at the eighth hour.

Rurik went ahead into the first courtyard, tail up. He walked the perimeter in a slow circuit - not exploring, reading. When he reached the far corner he sat and looked back at us. Threshold marked.

The gatekeeper directed us to the travelers' quarter without being asked. She read us correctly off the road: instruments, a small dog, a black cat, a book under my arm. "You are readers," she said. Not a question.

"We are trying to be," I told her.

Our room gave onto a narrow canal, and the lamp from the opposite building made a shifting line on the water. The Weather Reader set her instruments on the sill. The Builder ran her fingers along the wall's joints, reading load-paths the way another person reads a page. Lano curled below the window.

We had arrived. The reading proper would begin tomorrow. Tonight there was only this: the city breathing steadily around us, the organized sound, Rurik asleep across the threshold of the door with his amber eyes barely closed.

I wrote the date and shut the book.