Dream d2259-s: The Cold Count of Harrowfold

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the commons had been paced three times before breakfast and once more after, and still the number held. Harrowfold lay around us in the grey mid-morning like something set down carefully and not touched since: each hall aligned with the next, each lane wide enough for a cart and no wider. The kind of settlement you could enter at the wrong end and still know where you were.

Lano moved along the western run ahead of me, her white coat catching none of the light because there was no light to catch. The sky had gone flat since dawn, not overcast so much as withheld, and the lamps in the hall windows burned at the wrong hour - not lit for dark but for something colder that had no name anyone was using. I did not ask what they were lit against. Neither did the Builder, who was measuring the hall frontages with her knotted cord and marking each in her own hand on a separate sheet.

The Weather Reader had stopped at the commons edge. She stood with her back to us, reading something in the air above the rooflines. She had not spoken since we arrived yesterday. I left her to it.

Rurik stayed close. He had found a wall to sit on - a low one, the boundary of what must have been a kitchen garden, though nothing grew in it now - and he watched the lane traffic, which was none. The whole place had the quality of something between uses: not ruined, not abandoned, but held in readiness for a population that had stepped away and not yet stepped back. Seventeen days was not long. But it was long enough to feel.

I sat beside him and opened the ledger on my knee. The survey entry for Harrowfold: condition, count of standing structures, complaint tally, builder count. The condition I had written yesterday: clean. The count: accurate, confirmed twice. The complaints: none - an honest zero, not a missing figure. One hand had built this. One hand had kept the columns straight.

I was copying the builder count forward to the running summary when I stopped.

Three pages back - the previous settlement, smaller, less orderly - I had written the complaint tally in the wrong column. Nothing invented, nothing missing. Just transposed. The number was true. Its position was not.

I crossed it with a single line, initialed the correction, wrote it where it belonged.

Lano had come back. She watched without speaking. I closed the ledger, set it in the pack beside the grey pellet-stone, and looked up at the hall nearest us: its lamp burning at noon, steady, patient, lit against the thing nobody was naming.

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