Dream d2284-s: First Smoke, First Count

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the hamlet appeared below the ridge before I was ready for it - a few rooflines catching the last horizontal light, smoke from two or three hearths threading up into air that had gone still and pale. I stopped at the crest and looked. Lano sat beside me, nose working, reading something I couldn't.

The road down was short. We came in on the eastern edge, where someone had left a coil of measuring rope looped over a fence post and a mallet leaning against the same post at an angle that said: I meant to come back for this. The tools were not rusted. The wood on the mallet handle was still faintly warm from a hand that had held it recently enough to matter.

One hearth was actually lit. I could see the glow through a single window, orange and steady. The rest of the warmth was residual - the kind a place holds in its stones and thatch for a few days after the work stops.

Rurik moved ahead without being asked, threading between the buildings in that low, deliberate way he has, checking angles I hadn't thought to check yet. The Builder walked the near wall with her hand not quite touching it, reading the courses the way she reads everything - as a question she has already begun answering.

I opened the survey ledger on my knee, crouched at the foot of the fence post, and wrote the name of the place and the date and the count: one complaint open in its book, one pair of hands that built it, one builder who stopped here six weeks and a season ago and then did not come back. I put a mark beside the complaint before I had read it properly. I knew I had done this. A tally before the thing tallied is understood - a small betrayal, I wrote that too, in the margin, as a note to myself.

The Weather Reader stood a little apart, tilted slightly the way she does when she is listening to pressure. She said nothing. The hamlet said nothing back. Even Lano had gone quiet, sitting with her chin raised, watching the lit window.

I had one open item in my ledger and I had not yet knocked on the door behind that window. I had the grey pellet-stone in my coat pocket and the Book of Readings in the pack against my back and I was crouched in the last light in a hamlet of a few hearths, and the smoke from the nearest one was still rising.

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