Dream d2049-s: Dust and the Long Verge

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road stretched ahead of us through still heat, and Harrowhollow was already small behind us, its three chimney-stacks just visible above the dust we'd raised leaving.

The Builder walked beside me for a while without speaking. When she finally did, it was to say that the lintel over the mill door would hold another twenty years at least, now that the timber rot had been packed and braced. She said it with the satisfaction of someone who had left a thing better than they found it, then went quiet again, which was its own kind of contentment.

Lano trotted at the edge of the verge where the grass was cooler, nose working through everything the heat had stirred up. Her ears went back once when a bird crossed low overhead, then settled. She found something in the ditch - a flat grey stone, smooth-edged - and carried it in her mouth for a quarter-mile before setting it down on a marker post as if she'd delivered it somewhere it belonged.

The Weather Reader had her instruments out even on the open road. She called forward to me that the pressure had been dropping since we crossed the second ridge, not a storm, she said, but something thinking about becoming weather. She said Harrowhollow's basin had held the last season's damp in its stones for months before we arrived. That was why the mill timbers had softened. She said it like she was adding the reading to a ledger that would make sense later.

I wrote it down in the book of readings.

We camped on a wide verge where a stand of holm oaks broke the heat. There was no water close but we had enough. Rurik went to the fork in the road the moment we stopped moving - he always finds the fork, even when the fork is just a cattle track leading nowhere. He sat there with his amber eyes on the dark branch of it, the one that went northeast toward Larkhush. Not watching for anything, I thought, just marking it. Making sure the threshold knew it had been noticed.

Around the fire, we tried to say what we'd read at Harrowhollow. The Builder listed the joints and what each had taught her. The Weather Reader described three years of weather pressed into the wall-damp. I had the names in my book - a wheelwright, an old woman who fed the chickens, a man who repaired nets for rivers that had dried up thirty years ago and still kept on.

"Encuentro," Lano said. Or seemed to. She was watching the dark where the road bent toward Larkhush.

I understood her well enough. There was something ahead worth meeting.