Dream d3278-s: What the Keeper Left

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the well was older than the cobblestones around it, and the rope showed its age in the fraying just above the knot. I had been here before. The capstone was still tilted slightly toward the east, and the water when it came up was the same cold dark that had surprised me the first time - not cold the way night is cold, but cold the way deep things are cold, steady and without opinion.

The keeper came out at the hour when the air turns and the lamplight in the windows starts to matter. She carried two jugs, ceramic, the color of old teeth, and she set them both on the ledge without looking at us. Lano sat very still beside the surveyor, nose lifted, reading something in the keeper's direction - bread, perhaps, or a fire that had been burning all day long.

The keeper worked the crank without hurrying. The rope descended, a pause, the weight of water taken on, then the rope coming back. She filled the first jug and set it down, filled the second, stood for a moment with both handles in her hands. Her shoulders were level. The decision, if it was one, did not show.

Then she lifted only one.

The other stayed on the ledge. She walked back toward the door she had come from, one jug at her side, and did not look back. The relay clerk noted something in the margin of his current sheet. The surveyor held still.

I waited for an explanation and none came. The second jug sat in the amber from the window, full, steam barely visible at its lip. Lano pressed against my leg, then stepped forward and put her nose near the lip of the jug, not touching.

Rowanbrook was warm in the way it had been warm before - not an offered warmth, but a warmth that went on whether we were here or not. The well stayed wet. The rope dried slowly in the night air. The door to the keeper's house showed a strip of yellow at its edge and then it did not; someone had moved inside.

We stood at the well until the lamplights in the windows began to go out one by one, and the full jug cooled beside us in the dark.

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