Dream d2009-s: The Last Page, Umberhush

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the morning came in low and pale, the heat already thickening before the sun found the plaza. I sat at the edge of the fountain basin with the book of readings open on my knee and wrote the final entry for Umberhush. The page filled slower than I expected. There was more to say.

The Caretaker found me there. She was the one who had never left this ruin - had stayed when everyone else took the road south, years ago, stayed because the fountain still ran and someone ought to hear it. She set a clay cup beside my hand without asking if I wanted it.

"You cleared the overflow channel," she said. Not quite a question.

"The Builder did," I told her. "She said the stones were sound. Just needed reseating."

The Builder was across the plaza taking one last measure of the eastern wall - something she had noticed yesterday she wanted to confirm before we left. Her notes were longer than mine, filled with careful proportion drawings she would copy clean when we camped tonight. Lano sat at her feet, nose working at a crack between two paving stones, calma, tail moving in slow arcs.

The Weather Reader stood near the road's edge with her barometer cupped in both hands. She turned it once, twice. "Still," she said. "The whole basin is holding its breath."

"Is that forecast or complaint?"

She pocketed the instrument. "Fact. Both."

I wrote the last line of the entry and held the pen. The sum of Umberhush was not large in the book: ruin in still heat, a woman who stayed, a fountain that persisted. The overflow now running clean through its channel into the grass. We had not relit any node here. But reading a place truly was the first half of relighting it, and we had read it.

The Caretaker walked with us to where the stones gave out and the dust road began. She stopped at that edge. She had not crossed it in years. She did not cross it now.

Rurik went first. He always goes first at thresholds - quick and decided, amber eyes already on the next curve, no ceremony. Lano followed at a trot with one look back over her shoulder. I looked back longer.

The ruin sat in its heat and its stillness. The fountain, too quiet to hear from here. The overflow running the way it should.

The Weather Reader touched my arm once. "The road is not going to wait."

I closed the book of readings and went.