Dream d2014-s: Hammer-Song Before the Storm

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the amber light on Umberfold's main street turned the timber stacks gold, and the Builder was already kneeling beside a carpenter named only the Joiner when I came out of the inn with my book under my arm.

The Joiner's people had been working late, that much was plain from the shavings and sawdust that had drifted against the doorsteps overnight. I had seen the footprints in yesterday's dusk - not old prints, weeks at most, pressed into the dirt at the street's center where nobody walks unless they are carrying something heavy. The Builder had read them too, without being told, and now she was measuring a joist end with her thumb and nodding in a way that meant she had found what the reading promised.

"This notch is cut wide," she said to the Joiner, not unkindly. "It'll walk in the wind. Storm's coming - your Weather Reader here would tell you the same."

The Weather Reader had her barometer out by the testing ground at Umberfold's edge, where someone had marked distances in the earth with stakes and knotted cord. She was watching the needle and watching the sky with the same attention, and she called back without turning: "Down six points since morning. You want those joints tight by nightfall."

Lano sat near the stakes, ears up, watching the way the banners on the common building stirred and then fell still. Her nose was working something she didn't share. She made one small circuit of the measured paces and returned to sit at my boot.

"Venga," I told her, and she followed me to where the waterwheel turned at the millrace, steady and self-possessed, lifting each bucket and setting it down in the sluice without ceremony. I wrote in the book: the wheel does not hurry. The wheel does not rest. This is what earned labor looks like when a place is working.

Rurik appeared on the wheel-housing's sill in the late-morning way he had, materialized rather than arrived. He watched the water for a moment, then looked at me with amber eyes that asked whether I had written the right thing.

I had. I turned the page.

The Builder's hammer started its count somewhere behind us, joining the other hammers already going. The Joiner called a measurement and someone repeated it down the line. The banners stirred again - the pressure was dropping, the Weather Reader would confirm it at supper - and Umberfold leaned into its work the way a village does when it knows what is coming and has decided to be ready.

We worked alongside them until the light went orange and thick, and the first far sound of thunder came from the direction we had not yet traveled.