“Once there was a place,” the old woman whispered, “a better place than this. A beautiful place, and strange. Where we didn’t spend all our time grubbing in the earth.”
The girl looked fearfully around and asked in a low tone, “What are you talking about Gran?”
The old woman rocked back in the rickety chair, her hands always busy with the coarse wool and wooden knitting pins. She looked at the girl and whispered again, “A dream, it was a dream. But it seemed so real, realer than this place. Even in ruins, it was better than this.”
The girl looked around again at the small, bare room, the hearth of mud and stone, the wooden walls. It was all she’d ever known, and until now she’d never thought if it was good or bad. It simply was. All the houses in the village were similar and she’d never been more than a day’s walk from the village.
“Just a dream,” she said softly, “And what’s the use of dreaming?”
“Once….,” the old woman replied, “once it was a great thing to Dream, to walk those halls and learn strange lore and visit with folk from beyond the Mists.”
The girl snorted, “You can’t go beyond the Mists! Everyone knows that.”
“The Dream was somewhere else. No Mists. And folk came there in dreams, not walking through the Mists,” the old woman retorted. “Once it was a great pride to a family to have a Dreamer. Now you keep your tongue still in your head and you don’t tell none but maybe your closest kin.
“The great days are gone, the Great Houses closed and dark, the great Rulers and Teachers dead and gone,” the old woman looked down at the coarse shawl she was knitting and sighed.
The girl opened her mouth to reply, but before she could speak, a loud voice from outside the cabin called out. “Nan, where are you, girl? Get out here and tend those chickens! They’re in the garden again!”
Nan scrambled to her feet and ran outside to chase the greedy birds.
The rest of the day passed in the usual round of chores. It was not until she lay down on her pallet in the loft and pulled her blanket around her that Nan remembered her grandmother’s words
A better place than this, she mused. She remembered the peddler who’d come by a few months ago. He’d had things such as she’d never seen before; strips of fabric in colours like flowers, rings made of metal as shiny as ice. Her father had snorted and turned away: nothing in the peddler’s pack that he could use.
But Nan had hung around, looking at the bright wares and listening to the man’s chatter.
He’d been as far as the City, the peddler claimed, “Where the houses are all stone and the streets are stone as well. And lasses wear ribbons like these, and jewelry as well.”
Now she wondered if her Gran’s dream was like the City, with stone houses and everyone wearing pretty ribbons and fine things.
Nan blinked and looked around her. She stood in an open space, a pool in front of her, two graceful stairways arcing up to either side. Everything appeared to be made of large blocks of dressed stone, no mud, no dingy rotting wood. She blinked again and remembered her grandmother’s tale of a City of Dreams.
Hesitantly, she stepped forward, wondering if she dared set her dirty feet on those fine stone stairs.
