Dream d2205-s: The Margin, Read Aloud

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the mortar was still warm when the Builder called the day's work done.

She had been at the eastern face since first light. I watched her test each course with a flat of her palm before moving to the next - the same motion four hundred times, the same pause after, her ear cocked for the hollow sound that meant a gap had set wrong. Lano kept beside her for the first two hours while I ferried the smaller stones in a sling I had knotted from my traveling cloth, then I took the water-round in the afternoon. The Weather Reader sat apart most of the morning, watching the sky's pressure with both eyes closed and her hands open in her lap, and said nothing until mid-afternoon: "Before dark. Wind from the east." She meant the mortar would set faster than planned. The Builder moved her pace up without comment.

Rurik brought the ledger-house key from the partition wall where we had hung it: a flat iron pin, nothing ceremonial. He handed it to no one in particular. We filed in at dusk.

The room smelled of new-cut stone and wet plaster and the faint char of the first fire lit for warmth, not cooking. I set the Book of Readings on the center block. The grey pellet-stone went beside it - I set it down carefully, the way you set down something with weight beyond its size. The cost, made holdable.

Then we read. The Builder went first: section counts, course heights, the one spot where a fault in the stone had forced a re-lay. She read it the way she had laid it, without decoration. The Weather Reader read the pressure log she had kept since we broke camp two days ago. I read the water tally and the walking estimate for tomorrow aloud, with Lano pressed against my shin. Rurik sat by a corner of bark I had scratched a single line into - the name of the road we had left, and the direction we had come from. I read the day's entry from the Book, what I had written while the light was still good enough to write by, the hour it was lived.

Nobody said whether it was good. That was not the form. The form was: it gets said aloud before anyone sleeps, in the same hour it was lived, and then you sleep. The unwritten days are gone and stay gone, and this is how we keep that from happening again.

The fire is still going. Rurik moves back to tend it - one snap of ember, one small fall of ash to the hearthstone.

Lano is still beside the Book. Her head is lowered toward it, not reading, just near it. The Builder's hands lie open in her lap, still for the first time all day.