Dream d2005-s: The Wheel at Its Own Work

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the sliver moon had moved two finger-widths by the time we found what Umberstead was actually doing.

We had slept in the loft above the miller's store, and I woke before the others to the sound of hammers. Not one hammer: three, maybe four, in arrhythmic conversation somewhere past the far houses. I pulled my coat on and sat at the window with the book of readings open on my knee.

Rurik had already gone down. I found him at the door to the street, one paw over the threshold, amber eyes tracking the lane in both directions. There were footprints in the packed earth - not old ones. Weeks, the Builder said when she crouched over them and spread her fingers across the impressions. Fresh enough that rain had not smoothed the heel marks. Someone had been walking this street in careful, deliberate passes.

Lano put her nose to the nearest print and lifted her head sharply, ears high.

"There is more than one walker," the Builder said. She stood and tilted her chin toward the far end of the lane, where lantern light still burned despite the hour. "And that wheel has been turning since before I woke."

The waterwheel at the mill race was moving. I had assumed it ran the millstones, but as we watched it turned without anyone attending it, and at intervals a small counterweight on a wooden arm tipped forward and back - checking, the Builder murmured, the drag of each bucket as it lifted. Not milling. Measuring.

The Weather Reader had walked out ahead of us while we stood at the wheel. She came back with her barometer in one hand and a line of chalk marks on the back of her other wrist. "The pressure here is organized," she said, which was the way she described a place that knew its own weather and had begun to work with it rather than around it.

We followed the hammers to the edge of the settlement where the houses gave out onto open ground. Targets stood in rows - circles of painted wood on posts - and the measured paces between them were counted in rope knots tied to stakes driven at intervals into the turf. The voices went on past midnight without slowing.

I wrote it all down: the footprints and their direction, the wheel's counterweight, the rope-knot measures, the light burning late. Lano sat at my feet while I wrote, her tail still, her eyes on the dark beyond the targets. I said "quieta" softly and she did not even flicker - she was already still.

Rurik sat on the nearest stake and wrapped his tail around his paws.

"They are calibrating something," the Builder said.

I wrote that too.