Dream d3491-s: What Standing Water Holds

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the ground before Fennmill was soft all the way through, not mudded but saturated, the kind of wet that takes a boot print and holds it as still water holds a shape. The mill stood at the far edge of a shallow pool that had no business being there in this season, and its image stood below it in perfect silence, wheel for wheel, beam for beam, every dark timber doubled.

Lano moved ahead of me across the wet ground, her paws leaving small round impressions that filled slowly with dark water. Her ears were flat against her skull.

The relay clerk stood near the mill door with a folded paper in his hands, not unfolding it. I did not ask what it said. The entry-keeper was at the water's edge, looking at the mill's reflection rather than the mill itself, as if the copy were more legible than the thing.

I took the sheet from the ledger - a date and a place, nothing more - and set it against the base of the nearest post, weighted with a chip of old wood so it would not lift. The mill kept turning, very slowly, as if grinding something too fine to see. The sheet stayed.

The keeper of the place came out of the mill door and stood without looking at us. She looked at the fuel drum set against the far wall, the one with the rust mark along the seam. She tipped it slightly on its base. The hollow sound it gave back was not right. She set it down and looked at the relay clerk and he looked at the entry-keeper and nobody said anything that needed saying aloud.

The salvage pile at the near wall was low. I had not noticed how low until I stood still long enough to count. Two planks. A bracket. A coil of line I would not have trusted with weight.

Lano gave one short bark - not at a person, not at the mill, but at something in the direction of the road that led further out into the territory beyond Fennmill. Her ears stayed flat. The bark was not a call. It was a reading.

The relay clerk wrote something in a small notebook he kept in his coat. The mill's reflection held in the water beneath it, steady even as the real wheel moved.

I walked on. The sheet stayed where I had placed it. The mill would keep it in whatever way a mill keeps a thing - with weight and shadow and the slow turning that does not stop because a sheet has been left nearby.

The standing water held both the mill and the sky above it in the same surface, and nothing in that surface gave any indication of which was which.

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