Dream d2502-s: Three Attended the Turning

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the sheets hung low in the Annex courtyard, damp from the day's work, strung on the lines the way they always were when the copying ran long into the afternoon. They had to be turned before the dew came back. Everyone knew this.

Three of us stood in the courtyard. I was one of them - Lano, keeper of a record no one had yet requested. The other two were from the copying desks, clerks I recognized by the ink along their cuffs. None of us had been told to come. Each of us had come because we believed the other two had arrived for some separate purpose and would be glad of company.

We turned the sheets anyway. It is a two-person task at most. Three made it slower.

One of the clerks said the Scribe used to time these rounds. She said it the way you say a thing that is true and also closed. No one answered. We kept working.

The Scribe's desk is where it has always been. The chair is not empty in the sense of waiting. It is empty in the sense that a room is empty after furniture has been arranged to fill it correctly. The instruments are still in their order. No one has moved them. That is its own notation.

Later I heard through the corridor that the Hall had lost its sight of all seven places at once - Cinderfirth and Ivorymere and Nettleness still burning somewhere beyond reach, Elderhaven and Glenholt and Mistgarth and Sablegate gone cold - but the word from the messengers was careful: the seeing had failed, not the places. The Convener's seat was still filled. It was only the looking that went out.

In the courtyard none of this was said. We turned the last sheet. The second clerk said he had assumed the Annex supervisor had organized the rotation. The first said she had assumed the same thing about him.

I wrote it into the margin of my record: three attended the turning. The paper is dry. No further notes.

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