Dream d2045-s: Road Talk, Sliver Moon

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road ran ahead of us into the dark and Ospreygreen's lamplights had shrunk to a single amber blur behind the treeline.

Lano trotted at my heel, her nose down in the verge-grass, reading whatever small lives had crossed since sundown. The Weather Reader walked with her barometer against her palm, watching the needle settle. "Pressure's steady," she said. "We'll have stars all the way through."

The Builder had her notebook out, though there was nothing left to measure. She was reviewing her own entries from the stay - I could hear the pages turn. After a while she said, "The granary roof will hold. I keep second-guessing the ridge beam but the mortise is sound. The wood knows what it's doing."

"You told them that," I said.

"I told them to check it in five years. That's different from trusting it."

I wrote the exchange in the book of readings while I walked. The road was packed earth, still warm from the afternoon, and my boot-steps were quiet. Somewhere behind us Ospreygreen was locking up for the night. I thought of the miller's apprentice who had asked us three times whether we'd be back. We hadn't answered the third time, which was its own kind of answer.

Rurik was twenty paces ahead, a low black shape where the road bent around a stand of ash. When we reached the bend he was sitting very still, watching where a smaller track crossed ours and went off into unlit fields. He did not turn his head. His amber eyes stayed on the dark of the fork.

"Nothing," the Weather Reader said, reading him.

"Something that was," Rurik said, which was the most he'd said in two hours.

Lano came up and sat beside him, her ears forward. She held that posture for a count of ten, then shook herself and trotted on. Rurik followed.

We made camp in a wide verge where the ditch had silted up flat. No fire - the night was mild enough and the dry wood would keep. The Builder drove the tent-pegs with two strikes each and did not test them twice. I sat outside the tent with the book open on my knee and wrote what we had read at Ospreygreen: the granary, the mill, the silent dispute between the alderman and the water-keeper that nobody had named aloud but everyone had angled their bodies around.

Lano pressed against my calf. The sliver moon was the same thin hook it had been leaving the last place. Harrowhollow was still out of sight, still unread, still waiting in whatever dark a hamlet keeps for itself when no travelers are due.

I closed the book. Rurik was already watching the road ahead.