Dream d3240-s: Nine Cairns Before The Wind

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was crossing the hillside above Galehollow with the parcel tucked under one arm, and Lano was ahead of me, her white shape moving through the tall grass before the slope leveled out into scrub. The cairns were there. Nine of them. I had known they would be, because the relay clerk had noted them in the previous account: stacked without mortar, each one roughly waist-high, spaced irregularly as though whoever made them was working from memory rather than a plan.

I counted them as I passed. I did not stop. That was the nature of the task.

Lano paused at the fourth cairn, nose low, then caught up in two quick bursts. Rurik had come from somewhere to my left, threading through the grass at ankle height, and took up a position on top of the sixth cairn, sitting very straight, tail curled around his forepaws, watching me with amber eyes as I went by. He did not move from his perch.

The parcel was addressed to the absent witness. I had not opened it. That was not my role.

The sky changed between the seventh and eighth cairn. The grass began bending in a direction it had not been bending before, and then the sound of it came, a low continuous rushing that was not there on the way up. By the ninth cairn I had stopped counting and started watching the lower settlement. I could see the antenna masts from here, the three tall ones they had raised in week four of the construction. They were moving. Not swaying the way masts sway in ordinary wind. They were flexing, the topmost sections bending and recovering in a rhythm too fast to be comfortable.

Lano's ears flattened. She came back to my side and stood pressed against my leg, and the single bark she gave was short and clipped, a statement rather than a question.

I set the parcel against the base of the ninth cairn and held it there with one hand while I looked down. The cable trenches they had dug along the lower slope, the ones the surveyor had mapped and dated and signed in week two, were already sheeted with moving water. I could see the run-off in a thin bright line where the trench lip was lowest. The generator shed had a light on. It flickered once, steadied, flickered again.

Rurik dropped off the cairn and disappeared into the grass without a sound.

The relay clerk had described this hillside as quiet. That description was accurate when it was written. I was now the person who would have to carry the note that it was no longer accurate, and the note would have to include the date and the time and a statement of what I had seen, not what I inferred about what would happen next. The absent witness would receive both accounts together: the one made in stillness, and the one made in rising wind. Neither account would be the whole of it.

Lano stayed close.

I picked up the parcel and kept moving down toward the masts.

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