Dream d2185-s: Lamplight on Fresh Pages

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the first stone of the day was not the hardest one.

The Builder had been at it since before light, reading the grade of the ground with her boot-heel, then her hands, then her eye. By the time I reached her she had a corner set and mortared, the lime still pale at the joints. She did not look up. I took a stone from the stack she had sorted - the flat ones, all she would use for the first courses - and set it where she pointed. Then another. The rhythm of it was simple enough that thinking stopped.

Lano worked beside me, smaller stones carried in her mouth sometimes when the gaps needed filling, her white coat reading grey with dust by midmorning. She did not seem to mind. Rurik hauled water for the mortar in a clay jar that sweated in the heat, and between trips he sat with his back against the half-risen wall and watched the Weather Reader walk the perimeter. She paced it three times before she said anything, and when she said it she said it quietly: the wind will lay flat tonight. Good drying weather.

The ledger-house went up first, as it had to. Not the largest building or the warmest, but the first, because without it there was no record, and without record there was no proof that any of this had happened. The Builder had laid its walls four courses high before she started any other structure. That was a decision she made without discussion, and none of us questioned it.

I carry the grey pellet-stone in my coat pocket. It is small enough that I forget it is there until my hand finds it, and then I remember what it cost, what it stood for, and I put it back without squeezing it. The unwritten grove-days are smooth gaps now - expelled cleanly, no ragged edge. What the Book holds is back. What was lived unrecorded is gone for good, and the gone parts do not ache the way I expected. They are simply not there, the way a missing step is not a ruin, only an absence.

The Book of Readings is with the Weather Reader. She has been the one most careful with it, most exact about what goes in and what stays out.

At dusk we stopped. The Builder ran a string-line along the top course to check for level and found it good, and she let the string run slack and sat down in the cooling dust.

The ledger-house door is open. I can see Lano inside, bent over a low table, a page already started - not a plan, not a record of what we mean to do, but what we did today: the stones, the water, the corner set before dawn. The lamp is lit. Fresh pages catch it. Everything that happened is getting written the same hour it was lived.

I stand at the threshold and do not go in yet. The lamplight falls across the sill and stops just short of my boots.