Dream d2339-s: Counted Out Loud

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the pack came off my shoulder the moment the door shut behind me. Stone floor, low lamp already burning. The grey pellet-stone shifted in the side pocket and knocked against the survey ledger's spine. I knew by that small weight that we had arrived.

The Builder set her things on the sill. The Weather Reader crossed to the far wall without looking at the table, the way you do not look at a thing you have been looking at for a long time and cannot see anymore without deciding what it means. Rurik took the chair by the door and settled into it, chin level, watching me. Lano stood at my right shoulder and did not speak.

I opened the ledger.

The lamp threw its column across the page and the figures were very clear. I read from the top. Not to myself. I read aloud, because the number that lives only in your own head starts to bend toward what you wanted to find. To keep it honest you give it sound.

The Builder's hands went still on the sill.

The column was longer than we had told each other it would be. I knew this when I wrote the last entry, but knowing it while writing is different from knowing it while reading the finished column back to a room that expected a shorter one. The Weather Reader turned when I reached the third tier. She did not interrupt. She looked at her own hands.

I finished. The last number sat in the air.

Rurik said nothing. He watched the lamp.

The room stayed with the number for longer than was comfortable. The Builder was the one who spoke first, not about whether the count was wrong, but about what follows from the count being right. This was the harder question. Getting the number was a matter of going to every place and writing what was there. What to do with the number is a different kind of work. It requires deciding what the number is for and who it changes and whether the ones it changes get to say so first.

The Book of Readings lay on the table beside the ledger. Lano set her paw on its cover, lightly, not to open it. Rurik finally looked away from the lamp. His eyes settled on the column I had read, the long tally, and held there.

Outside the stone walls the settlement was very quiet. Not sleeping quiet. The other kind.

I counted the last tier again, under my breath, because the wish that the number was smaller was still there, and the wish does not simply leave.

The lamp throws its light on all of us equally.

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