Dream d2202-s: Twice Checked, Once Named

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the mortar was still soft when I pressed the grey pellet-stone into my palm and felt its weight decide something.

The Builder was ahead of me on the new course, setting each block with her shoulder over the line, her eye level with the face of the row. She set one, stepped back, looked, stepped forward and checked again - not because she doubted herself, but because the second look was part of the work. The Settlement had that quality about it: nothing done once if twice was the right number.

Lano moved between the ledger-house and the open site, carrying the book. She would come, stand beside the Builder, read the course number aloud, watch it go in, and write it before she moved on. The ink was still setting when the next block went down. That was the agreement here: everything written the same hour it was lived. Not after supper. Not at the close of day. The hour it happened was the only hour that held it.

The Weather Reader had her back to us, watching the sky from the north corner, her fingers working some private notation I could not read. Rurik sat on the finished sill of the ledger-house doorway, black tail curled under him, watching the site the way cats watch things - not moving, but missing nothing. A lit lamp inside threw his shadow long across the new floor.

I held the pellet-stone. It was not heavy, but it had specific gravity - the kind a thing gets when it has been somewhere it cannot go back to. The unwritten days had a feel like this: smooth, dense, settled into themselves, gone for good. Not painful, exactly. More like scar tissue. The skin is whole; it simply reads a different way.

We had planted this settlement in the ground by working it into the ground. The ledger-house first, so that every day of building was written as it happened. The Builder told me once that a record built in arrears is a story; a record built concurrent is a deed. I did not know which I preferred, but I knew which one lasted.

She checked the course a second time, ran her level along it, called a number. Lano wrote it. The mortar was still soft.

The Owl was not present and did not need to be. What was in the book was in the book. The grey pellet-stone sat in my closed hand, weight without return, the cost made holdable.

Rurik did not look at me but I felt his attention shift my way.

The lamp in the doorway burns, and the new floor takes the light.