Dream d3290-s: Turning Behind the Rise

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the flour road ran pale before us and the mill did not stop.

We left in the hour before the sky changes color. The keeper had been at the door since before I was up, lamp low, watching the party come down with its satchels. The surveyor was first. The clerk had the last sheet folded and away. The distant reader stood at the gate with the patience of someone who has waited more than once. I came down last and Lano was at my heel, her white coat furred already with the flour that settles on everything here - the door latches, the window ledges, the inside of the ears.

The road holds the white well. In the cart tracks it lies in thin lines. Under our boots it prints dark and then pales, and pales more, until by the second bend our boots are white too. Lano's paws are already the color of the road. She shook once at the gate, standing briefly still, and a small cloud rose off her coat. Then she put her nose to the air ahead and went on.

The mill sound travels. I had learned this in ten nights - how the grinding carries through walls, through sleep, through the hour between sleep and not-sleep when the pre-dawn is quiet and the wheel turns and turns. Behind us now the sound still came, softened by distance, and the occasional knock of the wooden assembly, and beneath both of those the steady water-voice of the race. The place does not wind down for our going. It was turning before I arrived. It turns after.

At the first rise the surveyor stopped and looked back. The wheel was still visible, cutting its slow arc, and the smoke from the kiln chimney went straight up into the cooling air. We stood for a moment, the party of us, not speaking. Lano sat at my left side and looked back also, ears forward, nose lifting to something I could not name.

Then the road bent and the mill went behind the rise. The sound held for another hundred paces. Then the road curved again and the water-race sound went too, and there was only the flour on our boots, which would be there when we reached the next place, a record of where we had been, white and fine and already beginning to fade.

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