Dream d2207-s: Rain On the First Courses

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Builder set a stone on the course above mine and tapped it twice to seat the mortar, and I understood from the sound of it that this was not the beginning of building but the middle. The first courses were already below us, dry from the day before, already bearing weight.

Lano was at the corner where the ledger-house doorway faced east. She was checking the jamb for plumb, her shoulder against the frame, one eye closed. She said nothing because the plumb spoke for itself.

The Weather Reader stood a little distance back and looked at the sky. Not urgently. She looked the way you look at something you have known a long time and are not afraid of.

Rurik was on the ground below the scaffold, passing stones up one by one. Each one he weighed in his paws before he handed it over. Not to test anything. It was how he moved through work.

I had the Book of Readings in my coat pocket and the grey pellet-stone in my other hand, turning it. It had been smooth since the Owl's perch ground it down. There were days in me it would not let back, and I had stopped expecting to feel their edges again. They were gone in the way a bruise is gone when the skin is finally clear. The surface holds.

Then the rain arrived. Not violently. It came out of a sky that had been working toward it all afternoon, and when the first drops tapped the top course it was a sound like good sense, not interruption. The Builder kept her hands on the stone she was seating. Lano did not move from the doorway frame. Rurik looked up once, ears back against the wet, then went back to the stack.

I put the grey pellet-stone in my pocket next to the book and held my hands open in the rain for a moment. That was all. There was nowhere we needed to get to before the weather caught us. The courses were down. The mortar would take.

I took out the book and opened it to the next blank page. The ink ran a little where a drop caught the corner, but the line I wrote was clear. Everything that happened that afternoon, I wrote it the same hour. The rain kept coming. The doorway of the ledger-house was lit from inside, a small amber square at the edge of the site.

The Builder's tapping continued, even in the rain.