Dream d2609-s: Lower Stone, Earlier Hand

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the base of Pewterlow's wall in the dark, one hand on the stone, and Lano sat at my heel with her nose lifted into the wind off the plain. The wall was old. That was the first thing I wrote in the ledger: old, and whole.

The work of this phase is slow. The column that the last count opened has room for places that are neither still running nor entirely gone, and there are fifty-eight of them left to walk. I started here, at Pewterlow, because the wall was visible from the high road and I could reach it before the cold got into my hands.

I pressed my palm flat against the coursing. The mortar between the lower stones was a different color from the mortar near the gate, and the gate itself stood in a later style, arched in a fashion the lower wall did not know. I worked the seam with my thumbnail where two build-eras met, and wrote what I found: two construction periods, the older one below. The lower stones were cut in a manner I had seen at three other sites, all of them predating the Hall's founding by at least a generation.

Lano nosed along the base of the wall, tracking something in the grass. Her tail was level. She circled back to me, sat, and watched my hand on the stone.

Rurik had come as far as the gate and then sat down in the gap and would not come through. He watched us both from there, eyes catching what little light there was, tail slow.

I counted the course-rows to the first string-course and wrote the number. I noted the profile of the carved blocks at the corner, the lack of a batter on the face. These were not the marks of something the Hall had built. The Hall's own walls, the ones I had measured at the beginning of the count, were younger by their technique, younger in their stone. Whatever had ordered Pewterlow's wall into being had done it before the Hall existed to send anyone here.

I wrote: wall predates the Hall of Record by estimation. Column entry: whole, cold, not the Hall's work.

Lano pressed against my leg for a moment. I put my hand on her back without looking down, and she held still, and then she moved off again along the wall's foot.

The plain beyond the town was dark and I could not see how far it went. Tomorrow I would walk the interior of Pewterlow, count the structures, carry the column to each. Tonight there was only this: the stone that was here before the Hall, and the ledger open in my hand, and the small dog working the grass at the wall's base, and the cat at the gate who would not come through.

I closed the ledger. The wall held its shape against the dark. It had been holding that shape longer than anyone who had sent me here.

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