Dream d2336-s: Three Pages Back

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the lamp on the table had been burning for a long time. I knew this because the pool of wax at its base was wide and the flame gave less light than it had taken. The ledger lay open in front of me, every page I had filled over the survey weeks, and I was reading it back to the table.

Lano sat to my left, her white coat dull in that light. The Builder had her hands flat on the table surface, not moving. The Weather Reader was turned slightly away, listening rather than watching, which was her habit when numbers were involved. Rurik sat at the far end, front paws tucked beneath him, his black shape barely distinct from the shadow behind the chair. The grey pellet-stone from the perch sat near the lamp where I had set it when we came in. Nobody had touched it.

I was reading tallies. Settlement by settlement. What was standing, what had been pulled down, what was in use and what had been given over to storage or silence. The columns ran long. My voice was steady, or I was keeping it steady, which is not the same thing.

Then I stopped.

Three pages back. I had set down the figure for the granary district as sixty-three occupied entries. I had been certain of it. I had counted twice in the light of a different afternoon and written the number in ink before the light changed. But reading it back now, in sequence, against what came before and after, the figure broke the pattern. Not dramatically. Not in a way that changed the meaning of everything. Sixty-three sat where forty-seven should have been, and the difference was sixteen, and sixteen was not nothing.

I turned back the pages. The paper made a sound. Everyone at the table heard it but no one moved.

The error was mine. I had written sixty-three because something shifted in my peripheral vision and I had counted the storage registers on the east wall twice and the occupied entries only once and called it done. I had carried the wrong number across two subsequent pages in cross-references and it had sat there, solid as stone.

I drew a single line through the sixty-three and wrote forty-seven beside it with a different nib, noting the date and the correction. Then I added a separate entry at the foot of the column: error by recorder, corrected in session, district total revised.

I did not explain it to the table. Lano watched the pen move. Rurik's eyes caught the lamplight, two small bright points across the wood.

I closed the three-pages-back section and found my place. The lamp burned. The column ran on.

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