Dream d3263-s: One Stone Set Plumb

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the bridge span at Quillbridge lay under a sky the color of old pewter, lamps along the parapet burning their amber into the mist. The keeper stood near the center with a short iron bar, watching two workers coax a paving stone from its bed. The stone rocked each time I shifted my weight near it - a slow tilt, then a slow return, the sound of loosened sand grinding against its neighbors.

Lano had found the rocking stone before any of us. She had stopped on it earlier in the crossing, ears lifted, and stepped away with care, the way she does when ground does not behave. Now she sat on the stable stones at the span's edge, watching the workers from that distance, her white coat luminous in the lamplight.

The relay clerk stood to one side, ledger closed under her arm. There was nothing to enter. This was maintenance, not measure.

The surveyor crouched to look at the exposed bed of sand and small rubble beneath the lifted stone. She said something to the workers I did not catch, and one of them brought fresh sand in a cloth pouch and spread it with a trowel, then leveled it with the back of a hand. They reset the stone. One of them pressed it down with his heel, shifting his weight, and the stone did not rock.

The keeper watched without speaking. She had watched the relay cross here, I understood, and had felt the same brief movement underfoot that I had felt reading the account of this place afterward - not alarm, but a reminder that a bridge is not finished, only tended.

I walked to the new-set stone and stepped on it. It held. Lano trotted over to sniff the edge of it, then lifted her head toward the far bank as if she had already moved on.

The distant reader would not see this repair. The account had gone; what went back was nothing. The workers gathered their tools and moved down the span to check the next length. The clerk made no note. The keeper turned and faced the water downstream, her back to us, doing what a keeper does when a thing has been put right.

I stood on the settled stone for a moment in the lamplight and then walked on. Lano came alongside. The bridge held, as it had held before, as it would hold again.

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