Dream d2010-s: Low Fog, Long Miles

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road was pale with morning fog and Umberhush had dissolved behind us into the grey before we'd gone half a mile. The book of readings was still damp at the binding from the ruin's wet stones. I carried it inside my coat.

Lano walked ahead, nose to the verge grass, tracking whatever nocturnal thing had crossed before dawn. Her white coat gathered the mist so she appeared and disappeared with each dip of the road.

"The south wall will hold another decade," the Builder said, not to anyone particularly. Her voice had the quality of a thought finishing itself aloud. "Two, maybe, if someone keeps the ivy from the joints. But no one is keeping anything there."

The Weather Reader checked her barometric gauge without breaking stride. "Pressure dropping. Rain by afternoon." She glanced back toward where Umberhush would have been, if we could still see it. "The ruin reads like held breath. Whatever happened there, the place hasn't exhaled."

I knew what she meant. The overgrown courtyard, the one hearth someone still kept banked - a single ember thread in all that unraveling stone. We had mended the drainage channel choking the base of the outer wall and left that tended fire alone. It wasn't ours to extinguish or to feed. A reading means you understand what a place is holding, not that you decide what it should hold.

"Umberfold will be different," I said.

"Lamplit," the Builder said, with something close to appetite.

Rurik had been ranging ahead all morning. He came back at midday when we stopped on the verge, sitting where the road forked. One branch was stone-laid and rutted with recent cartwheel tracks. The other had grass growing down its center and wouldn't be traveled this season. He didn't choose between them. He sat at the junction and watched the grass-road for a long time.

"Not our turn yet," the Weather Reader said, watching him.

We made camp before the rain, on a flat of verge where the fog had burned to haze. The Builder drove stakes with the flat of her hatchet handle while I opened the book to the Umberhush page and read it back in silence - the drainage work, the ivy, the south wall, the voice singing from somewhere deep inside the structure that we had never located. We were four names and a small white dog on an unnamed stretch of road. Ahead, the lamplit village was still out of sight.

Lano curled against my pack when the first drops came. Quieta.

Rurik remained at the fork until I slept.