Dream d2247-s: The Stone Against the Ground

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the mill-sound reached me before the town did - a low, rhythmic turning that came up through the soles of my boots as much as through the air, a pulse beneath the hill that told me work was in progress before I'd seen a single roof.

Rurik was at the boundary marker when I descended to the common. He was sitting beside it with his paws folded over his knees and his black tail moving slowly through the grass, not out of agitation but out of patience - the way a cat waits when he has already found the thing that needs finding.

"It's off," he said.

I set my pack down. The stone was old, well-cut, set deep - but the marks it carried named a line the town had long since grown past. Two halls stood on the wrong side of it now. The works had extended beyond what the stone declared, and the stone had not been moved to match them. I noted this without comment. Moving a boundary stone is not the work of a survey; naming where it stands, and where the ground has gone, are.

This was the virtue of a clean town: its errors showed plainly. Everything else was in its proper hall, properly spaced, properly named. The two hands that had made this place had made it well. The complaints-book was empty - I had checked it before noon, every leaf unwritten. I wrote the count of halls, the count of lanes, the count of lanes in each direction. I wrote the date the first stone had been set - ninth of May - and the date of the last sign of life, three days past, which I noted without gloss. A three-day quiet in a good town is a number, not a wound.

Lano sat beside me while I wrote, her white head level with my shoulder. The Weather Reader called the sky from the upper lane: pewter going copper. I added it to the margin, because weather is a fact too. The Builder came down from the mill mechanism with a tally of what moved, and I copied her numbers into the ledger without changing them.

The grey pellet-stone was still in my pack when I closed the ledger - I could feel its weight through the canvas, small and dense and certain. The Book of Readings I had not opened today. Some days the survey is all the reading there is.

The mills turn on into the dusk, unhurried, their sound filling the town the way water fills a clean cup.

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