Dream d2281-s: Still Where It Was Set

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the slope leveled and the first roof appeared below my feet, and I was finishing a count. Seven structures, the commons between them swept clean as a hall with its ceiling gone - the lamps coming on below, one and then another, while the sky went the color of settling ash.

We had been here three days. By now I knew the village the way you know a room you have slept in: the grain of it, the morning sound, the particular quiet that falls at this hour when work either stops or does not.

Rurik had come back from the lower yards. He settled beside me on the slope, black and still, looking where I was looking. He had found something down there; I could tell by the way he said nothing.

"One hand built all of this," I said.

He did not answer.

I opened the ledger on my knee and wrote: clean, well-laid. One builder. No complaint in the book. Last worked a day ago. The tally: roofs, halls, the common ground measured in my own paces, morning to morning. The Book of Readings was in the pack below my knee, unopened today. The village did not ask for interpretation. It asked for counting. I had held the grey pellet-stone in my palm this afternoon without meaning to - the way you touch a familiar thing when you are trying to keep a number accurate.

The Builder was in the lower hall - I could hear Lano's claws on the swept stone, the white dog moving through whatever she and the Builder were working on together. Once Lano's voice, short and decided, the way she speaks when she has made up her mind. The Weather Reader had gone to the commons with her pocket instrument, taking the evening temperature the way she did at this hour every day, the tool going back into her breast pocket before anyone could ask to see it.

On the bench outside the lower hall, a plane was lying on its side. I had first seen it when we arrived, three days back: blade angled toward the hill, handle toward the path, the shavings curled and going dry by the second morning. It had not moved. The work it had been mid-pass on was somewhere inside, finished or not, and no one had named it.

Lano came out and stood in the doorway. She looked at the plane.

She did not touch it.

The lamp in the lower hall throws its light across the bench, and the plane, and the shaving that has dried in its curl and not fallen yet.

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