Dream d2011-s: Lamps at the Commons Edge

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road bent around a low hill and Umberfold appeared below us in the blue of early evening, its lamps already lit but still competing with the last light in the sky.

From the hill we stood a moment and looked. The village had a commons at its center - I could see the open space, a well, a few bare trees - but the roads leading out from it did not agree on direction. They crossed each other, doubled back, joined and separated in a way that suggested the village had grown by argument rather than plan. Rooftops at different heights. Paths worn into the grass between buildings that had no road of their own.

"Uneven," the Builder said, not disapprovingly. She had her notebook out already, squinting at the rooflines through the failing light. "See how the eastern quarter sits lower. Groundwater, or fill. Someone added on without reading the original survey."

"Or there was no original survey," the Weather Reader said. She tapped her barometer once with a fingernail. "Pressure held all afternoon. We came in dry."

Lano had gone still at the edge of the path, ears forward, nose working. She caught something on the air from the village - bread, I thought, or grain smoke - and her tail moved once, deliberate, before she trotted ahead of us down the slope.

We followed her.

The lamp at the road-end was a simple post-lantern, recently trimmed; the wick burned clean and steady. Someone had swept the threshold stones. I noted this in the book: the lamp kept up, the approach tended. A place that expects arrivals.

Inside the commons the sound of Umberfold was low conversation and the distant knock of something being closed for the night - a shutter, a barn door. No music. No argument. The sound of ordinary completion, a village settling into itself.

Rurik walked the full perimeter of our room before I had set my pack down. He paused at the doorsill, sat, and looked back at me with his amber eyes - the threshold named, the space recognized. Then he folded himself into a corner and watched the window without blinking.

"Tomorrow the reading begins properly," the Weather Reader said, pulling off her road coat.

"Mañana," I said to Lano, and she put her chin on my boot and sighed.

Outside, the lamps of Umberfold burned on in the deepening blue. The paths I had seen from the hill still crossed each other in the dark below, patient and unresolved. We would learn them one day at a time.