Dream d2248-s: The Honest Tally at Dusk

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the third morning in this town came in through the open gates before I had fully risen - the smell of flour and cut timber and something faintly oiled, the kind of smell a place has when the work never fully stops.

The mills had been turning when we arrived, and they were turning still on this last day of our stay. The main hall ran east-west along a ridge. Every cabinet was labeled in the same hand. The paths between buildings were swept clean. It was, Rurik said on the first evening, the sort of place that embarrassed you out of asking for directions because everything was already where you expected it.

Two hands had built this. I kept coming back to that as I walked the outer edge with the ledger open on my forearm. Two. I said it aloud while pacing the breadth of the sorting hall: two. Not ten, not a committee. Two people laid these halls, cut this arrangement into the hillside, decided that each category of thing would have its proper room. I said it again because there was a part of me that wanted the number to be larger - that wished a town this well-ordered had required more hands to earn its order. Saying it out loud was the only way to keep it accurate against that wish.

The Builder walked with me through the lower hall in the afternoon. She was cataloguing additions, a lamp hooked to a ring on her belt. She named each shelf's contents without looking at them. She did not talk about the last four days - the quiet stretch before our arrival. When I asked what she had been working on in that gap, she moved the lamp slightly and said, the arrangement is never finished. She meant it as an answer.

Lano sat in the hall entrance for most of the morning, nose lifted, running some tally of her own. When the Weather Reader came down from the ridge at midday, she nodded once to Lano and took a seat without speaking. They had, I noticed, the same posture: upright, weight forward, watching the hall's mouth. Rurik had settled near the sorting table and was methodically opening and closing the smaller drawers as if counting their action rather than their contents.

The mills turned. The gates stayed open. I wrote the count into the ledger: two builders, no complaints on record, all halls in use as of our last morning.

Now the light is going sideways through the eastern window and catching the dust that rises from the flour. The Weather Reader has her notebook open. Lano lifts her head.

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