Dream d2203-s: Stone and Ink at Dusk

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we laid the third course of the east-facing wall before the light changed, and I knew we would finish it.

The Builder set the line with her thumb, not a string - she had measured the ground enough times that her body knew the grade. Lano moved stone from the drag-pile without being asked, choosing the flattest faces for the courses that would carry load. The Weather Reader walked the perimeter twice in the hour after midmorning, not reading weather but reading ground-settling, and she said nothing beyond "another finger-width on the south end," which the Builder incorporated without pause. Rurik sat at the corner-stone marking each placed piece with a small notch on a stick. Counting.

I carried the grey pellet-stone in my left hand most of the morning. Not for any purpose. The cost, made holdable: something to press a thumb against when the smooth gaps in the week surfaced - the days at the grove that came back as absence rather than memory. They had fallen below the perch, and what falls there does not return. The Owl had said nothing new about them. There was nothing new to say. The rule runs the same either direction, and I had stopped expecting it to soften.

By midafternoon we had the east wall at four courses and the south corner locked. The Builder declared this a rest and walked to the ledger-house without explaining herself. It had been the first building we raised - not the largest, not the most sheltered, but built first because the Builder insisted: nothing that happens in the making of a place should go unrecorded while it is still fresh. We had all agreed to this before the first stone was set.

At dusk I stood at the threshold. Inside, the lamp was already lit - someone had struck it before I arrived - and the pages of the open register held the day's entries in the Builder's close hand. Third course, east face. South lock complete. Weather Reader's adjustment noted. Stone count. A line at the bottom read: grey pellet-stone, carried by the Protagonist; not used, kept close.

She had written me into the record the same hour I had stood at the wall not-quite-working, just holding the cost.

Lano presses against my knee from the left. Rurik stands beside me without speaking. The settlement stones hold the last of the day's warmth, and the lamp inside throws a long soft rectangle across the fresh-turned ground.