Dream d2277-s: Crossing Paths, Uneven Ground

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I heard the place before I saw it: the wind through roof gaps, a door swinging on loose hinges somewhere up the slope, the soft percussion of a path that hadn't decided where it wanted to go.

The village spread unevenly on the hillside, the way water does when the ground resists it. Paths crossed other paths without apology - some merged briefly, some just passed through each other's shadows and kept their own direction. I had circled the commons the day before and entered its dimensions into the survey ledger. Today was the outer edges, and the edges were harder.

Rurik moved ahead of me on the narrower track, his black coat drawing in the low morning light the way dark fur always does. He didn't speak. Lano came up beside me, her white coat brushing the tall grass at the path's margin. She was counting, I could tell by the small movements of her eyes across the building-lines.

The Builder had made all of this. One pair of hands, from first post to last roof-line. I found her tools near the lower path - a level and a caulking iron laid on a flat stone, both faintly warm in the cool air. Six days since anyone had touched them. I made a note.

The tally mark for the open complaint went in before I had fully understood what I was marking. Habit from the last village: write it the moment you see it, not after you have sorted your feelings about it. When I looked at the mark again, sitting on a low wall with the wind threading through the gap in my coat, I didn't change it. Ugly or not, it was what the book held.

The Weather Reader stood at the high point of the slope, face to the sky, reading something the rest of us lacked the instrument for. She hadn't commented on the numbers. The Builder, when I found her retracing one of the overlapping paths with her boot, only said it was still spreading and that she knew it.

The Hummingbird Wardens swept the upper edge at their precise hour. One dart, one correction above the eastern path, then gone. The same route tomorrow.

I drove the stake into the soft ground at the crossing of two paths and ran the survey line back toward the center. One hand that had built. One complaint that hadn't been resolved. Some number of paths that would need their own page in the ledger before tomorrow's measurement.

Now the afternoon light lies flat across the slope, and the shadows of the roof-lines are longer than the roof-lines themselves, and I am still standing at the staked line with the ledger closed in my pack, the village counted but not yet fully read.

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