Dream d2285-s: The Weather Turns at Midcount

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the hamlet sat quiet on a slope, four roofs visible from where I stood at its edge, smoke threading from two hearths in short pulls against a sky that had not yet decided what it was going to do.

Lano moved ahead of me on the grass, her nose low, reading the ground the way she reads everything - slowly, without assumption. A survey stake had been driven into the turf by someone not us; one of the Builder's, from the look of the mallet still lying beside it. She picked the mallet up, tested its weight, set it back. The tools here were warm. Not long warm - the kind of warm that says hours, not days.

I opened the ledger on the low wall at the hamlet's northern edge. One builder. That was what my hand wrote, because that was what was true. A place like this can be built by one pair of hands, assembled carefully over weeks in late spring, and it had been - the joins were neat, the arrangement orderly, the hearths drawing clean. But the last sign of life I could put a date to was six days prior, and the ledger wanted that number too, and I wrote it.

The Weather Reader came up beside me and said nothing. She only looked at the sky in the way she has - taking its measure the same way I take a place's measure. I had about half the hamlet counted. The eastern side, the two outbuildings, the complaint still open in the book - one complaint, not resolved, sitting there like a tool no one had put away.

It was when Rurik padded around the northern corner, ears half-back, that the wind changed. Not strongly. Just enough that Lano lifted her head, and the smoke from the nearer hearth bent sideways.

The Weather Reader looked at me. I looked at the ledger.

The rain did not come immediately. It gave us its intention first - a flattening of the light, the smell of soil turning. Rurik settled in the shelter of the wall and watched the open ground with the patience of something that has seen many delays and made peace with all of them.

I wrote the complaint into the ledger. One. Unresolved. The number was ugly and I wrote it anyway, because that is what the ledger is for.

Lano is still moving along the eastern edge, her white shape deliberate in the grey air, the staked line taut behind her against the grass.

---