Dream d2013-s: The Wheel's Own Count

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the noon at Umberfold was hard and clear, the kind of light that leaves no shadow for guessing. We had been in the village three days by then, long enough for the novelty of our presence to thin, and so the place had begun to behave as itself.

I was on the main street with my book open when I noticed the footprints. Not ours - different, recent, the dust still crisp at their edges. A week old at most, perhaps less. I crouched beside one and called to the Builder, who was already measuring the spacing with her eye.

"Loaded," she said. "Whoever left these was carrying something. See how the heel sinks?"

She read load-paths as naturally as I read text. I wrote it down.

The Weather Reader came around the corner with her barometric case under one arm, having been up since before the light, taking the village's pressure at intervals. "It's been stable here longer than the season warrants," she said. "Something is keeping this place in tension. Active tension, not decay." She pointed toward the edge of town where we could hear, even now in noon's full quiet, the sound of hammers. We had heard them the previous two nights going long past supper, past the time when tired hands should rest.

Rurik had gone ahead without us. He was sitting at the edge of the testing grounds when we arrived - a cleared flat space, targets set at measured distances, a line of chalk marks at intervals on packed earth. He sat at the nearest mark, regarding the farthest target with amber patience. He did not look at us when we arrived. He rarely needed to.

Lano walked the chalk line nose-down, back and forth, cataloguing what the earth had held. She paused at one mark, ears up - quieta for only a moment - then trotted to find me, satisfied with whatever she had confirmed.

The waterwheel at the mill end of the street was turning. We had noted it on the first day and assumed someone was working inside. On the second day the mill was closed and the wheel still turned. Now on the third day I stood and watched it receive each load of current, check it, pass it through. It worked with the certainty of something that had been asked to count and was counting - without fatigue, without distraction.

"What are they building?" the Builder asked. Not to any of us in particular. She was still looking at the targets.

"That's what we're here to read," I said, and wrote the question down too, because the questions are part of the reading, and the reading is the first half of the work.