Dream d2214-s: The Lamp Holds the Page

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the table held one lamp and an open ledger, and outside the road ran straight to where the light had not yet reached, and I could not see how far it went from where I sat.

Lano was already at the door, her weight low, her nose reading something the air had not told us. Rurik sat on the sill above her, watching the same darkness with different eyes. The Builder had already set her chalk-line on the doorframe, marking a datum we had not discussed but that all of us understood at once to be necessary. The Weather Reader stood behind me with her hands loose at her sides, watching the sky.

I opened the ledger to the first ruled column. The pellet-stone was in my left pocket - I felt its weight settle against my hip as I leaned forward - and the Book of Readings lay closed beside the lamp, its cover already a little damp from the morning air.

I wrote a tally mark.

There was nothing yet to count. The road had not delivered us a single place. The first settlement was somewhere ahead in the grey, and we did not know if it would be a bright town or a roofless shell with one standing gable and nothing else. I made the mark anyway, a single vertical stroke in the leftmost column, because the column needed an anchor and I needed to begin, and beginning felt like the kind of commitment the ledger could hold even if I could not yet justify it.

Lano glanced back at me. She said nothing. She very rarely does in the early part of the day.

The Builder ran her thumb down the chalk-line, testing its tension.

I thought: the tally is wrong. I thought: it is also the only honest thing I have done yet this morning, because at least it knows it is wrong. An estimate would have hidden that from me and from anyone who read the page later.

The Weather Reader said, low and without turning: "Overcast. We'll lose the noon shadow. Measure by the road, not by the sun."

I wrote that beside the tally mark: no noon shadow. measure by road.

Then we all went out.

The ledger-house door did not latch on the first try. I had to pull it twice before it caught. The lamp inside stayed burning, a small orange point visible through the single window as we took the road. I watched it shrink as we walked. The ruled columns were empty except for one mark and a note about weather. The whole uncounted world lay along the road ahead, unnamed and unwritten, and the lamp went on burning in the house at our backs, holding the page open.

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