Dream d2007-s: The Dark Branch

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we left Umberstead in the hour when the cold sits thickest and the road holds its ice without apology. The hamlet's last chimney was still putting up a thread of smoke behind us. I turned once to mark it in the book, and when I turned back the road had already swallowed the distance between us and whatever came before.

Lano trotted at my left boot, alegre despite the cold, nose working the verge grasses, ears tipped forward at the occasional creak of a fence post settling in the frost. She had spent two nights at Umberstead sleeping beside the granary door, and I noted she did not look back.

"The pressure read clean at the end," the Weather Reader said, checking the small barometer she keeps looped on her pack-strap. "The hamlet breathes evenly. Whatever they were holding before we came - some old blocked outlet in the drainage - it has room now."

"They didn't call it drainage," the Builder said. She had a stub of pencil behind her ear from marking the wall she'd helped re-point, and she hadn't bothered to remove it. "They called it the way the east yard floods every third year. Same thing. The load-path on that revetment wall was wrong by three degrees from the day it was built."

I wrote: east yard, three degrees, breathing easier. The book of readings is not large; I have learned to compress.

We walked without speaking for a time. The road ahead bent around a low rise and we could not see past it. Somewhere in that unseen distance was Umberhush, but Umberhush was still hours off and gave no sign of itself - no chimney, no bell, no lamp held against the grey. I had read in an older record that Umberhush had been a proper waystation once. The record used the past tense throughout.

When the rise showed us the road again, it forked.

Rurik stopped. He had been ranging ahead all morning, flickering in and out of the verge undergrowth, but at the fork he sat square in the center of the road and watched the right branch go dark between the overgrown hedges.

"He's reading it," the Weather Reader said quietly.

"Reading what? There's nothing there."

"That's what he's reading."

We made camp on the verge before the fork, laying the fire small and close. Lano circled once and settled against my pack. Rurik did not come to the fire. He sat where the two roads separated, amber eyes on the dark branch, and I wrote nothing more that night - just watched his ears and waited for morning to decide.