Dream d2016-s: Mist Between Two Lights

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road behind us still held the smell of Umberfold's tallow lamps, and the road ahead held nothing yet but river mist and the sound of water moving somewhere below the verge.

We had been walking since midmorning. The Weather Reader walked with her barometer strapped across her back, checking it every hour the way a careful person checks a wound. She said the pressure had been dropping since we left the village, that the mist was not weather so much as the river thinking aloud. I wrote that down - river thinking aloud - because the book of readings had a page still open from Umberfold and I wanted the last entry to be honest about what we were walking into, not just what we were walking away from.

The Builder had been quiet most of the afternoon. When she finally spoke she said she kept thinking about the granary lintel - the one she had reshimmed on our third day there, a long crack running the full width of it that nobody had read as serious until she showed them the load-path. "It will hold now," she said, not to convince us, just to hear herself say it on the road where it could not be taken back.

Lano trotted at the verge, nose down in the wet grass, circling back every few minutes to check that we were still the same party she had left. Her tail moved in the damp air. She found something in the ditch - a river stone, pale and smooth - and carried it in her mouth for half a mile before dropping it without ceremony.

Rurik walked ahead of us all. He stopped where the road forked. One branch bent toward the river and was grass down the middle; the other climbed a low ridge and was still packed dirt, still used. He sat at the fork and watched the dark branch, the grassy one, for a long time. None of us asked him what he was reading there. He knows something about abandoned roads that the rest of us are still learning.

We made camp on the broad verge just past the fork. No fire - the mist made it pointless - but the Weather Reader lit the small oil lamp she carries for instrument work and we ate beside it. Somewhere ahead, perhaps a half day's walk, Marrowfold was keeping its own light. I could not see it yet. I wrote in the book: left Umberfold with one lintel shimmed, one water-channel re-graded, one name for the pressure that settles before rain. Then I closed it and listened to Rurik settle in the grass beside the dark fork, watchful, waiting for the road to tell him what it owed.