Dream d2212-s: The Unhurried Wall

I had a dream where...

Dream d2212-s: The Mallet Before the Light

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the sound reached me before anything else did - one clean mallet tap, a pause, another - and by the time I found my feet the Builder had already bedded the first course and moved on to the second.

The grey pellet-stone was in my coat pocket where it had been since the garden. I kept touching it without intending to: thumb along the flat face, then the rough break where it had sheared from the ledge below the Owl's perch. The cost of what came back, made small enough to carry. I'd stopped reaching for it for comfort; now it was just accounting.

Rurik found me at the margin of the site, where the ground hadn't been leveled yet. He sat beside me and said nothing for a while, which is how he tells you something matters.

"Everything gets written today," I said, not quite to him.

"It does," he said.

The Weather Reader was already on the ridge, reading the sky the way she does - not forecasting, more like taking attendance. Lano moved beside the Builder, carrying the shorter stones and setting them where the Builder pointed without waiting to be told twice. The two of them had a rhythm. The wall went up slowly, because slowly was how it was supposed to go, force not asked to push harder than the mortar could hold.

We kept the Book of Readings open on a flat stone near the site. Every task written the same hour it was done: course laid, course recorded. Nothing banked for later. The Weather Reader came down at midday and wrote what the sky had done that morning, exact. Rurik wrote the count of stones carried. I wrote what I had done and the feeling of doing it and that it was enough.

The unwritten grove-days had their shape; I stopped tracing their edges. Something expelled does not grow back if you press it, and I had stopped pressing.

The Hummingbird Wardens came over the ridge on their fixed circuit - same pass, same angle, same interval, the same every day you could set a gauge by them - and the sight of them keeping their patrol without varying made the slow work feel like the right kind of work.

By late afternoon the wall stood four courses. The ledger-house doorway threw a small amber rectangle across the ground as the sun dropped behind the ridge. The Builder set her level across the top course, read it without speaking, and nodded once.

Lano sits beside me now on the cleared ground, her white coat going gold in the last of the light, the Book of Readings open across both our laps, ink still wet on the day's final line.

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