Dream d2194-s: Before the Mortar Sets

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the ground had already been chosen. Four stakes, a cord, the corners marked out, and the Builder crouched at the first one with her trowel going slow. That was what I noticed first: no hurry. The mortar went on in a thin coat and the first course of stone sat down like a breath let out.

Lano stood at the northeast stake, head low. She was attending, not grieving. The Weather Reader read the morning: light from the east, no wind to speak of, the kind of day that does not fight you back. She said, "We have hours," and left it there.

Rurik sat apart on a flat boulder, the Book of Readings open beside him. Every time a course was laid he made a notation: the row number, the stone count, the hour. Not summaries. The hour. I watched him do it and understood that this was the instruction we had all been given without anyone saying it aloud.

I had the grey pellet-stone in my coat pocket. I had not set it down since the perch. It was lighter than anything that size had a right to be, and warm. I could feel it when I moved. The grove-days that fell from the record were gone: I knew that in my hands, in the smooth-sided fact of the stone itself, cost made holdable rather than carried as debt.

The ledger-house came up first. Four walls, low lintel, a doorway that faced the morning. The Builder set each course by feel. When a stone tilted she did not lever it down. She lifted it out, checked the bed, reset it. Three times with one difficult piece, no frustration in it, only attention. The stone would sit or it would not. Her part was to find where it wanted to be.

We broke at midday. Rurik read the morning's entries back: row numbers, hours, one correction from the Weather Reader about the wind direction. He wrote the correction in and read it again. We ate.

The afternoon light comes in low. The doorway of the ledger-house catches it. Through the lintel's shadow a bar of light crosses the interior floor, and dust turns in it, very slowly. The mortar smells clean, mineral, not yet dry. Nothing has been left for later to say.