Dream d2283-s: The Mouth Before the Page

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the grass held the morning's damp and I was already in the middle of the hamlet before I realized I had started moving again.

Day two. The place was small - I could count its rooflines from a single spot at its western edge, and I had done that yesterday, but the counting had not felt finished. One roof to the north had a gap at the ridge I could not tell was intentional or worn. Rurik sat at the base of a low wall and watched me pace it out a second time, his tail describing a slow arc on the stone.

The hearths were lit - not all, but a few. Smoke from two of them, thin and grey in the windless air. Someone had kept them going. The place had not been given up entirely, only paused. The tools were what told you: a handled brace left against a doorframe, a coil of measuring line on a hook no one had unhooked. Lano pressed one palm to the brace and said it was barely cooled. Six days, I said back to her, and she nodded without answering.

I had the survey ledger open on my knee, my back against the low wall. The Weather Reader stood a few steps off, reading the cloud cover, and said nothing about what she found in it, which meant the weather was unremarkable. I was glad of that. What I needed was light that stayed level.

One complaint open in the place's book. I wrote it in. I said the number aloud before the pen touched the page - one - the way I had started doing in every settlement, saying it first so the wish to round it or soften it had somewhere to die between the mouth and the page. One open complaint. Not zero. The Builder was near the east wall when I said it, and she paused, and then she kept moving.

The place had been put together by one pair of working hands. I could see that in how it fit together - consistent, idiosyncratic in exactly the same way throughout, the kind of coherence that only comes from a single sensibility. First built two-and-a-half months ago. Last touched six days back. In between, it had simply held.

I closed the ledger and stood. Lano came to stand beside me, both of us looking at the two columns of smoke rising over the near roofline into the flat white sky, unhurried, each going straight up before the wind finally took them.

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