Dream d2659-s: Returns from the Thin Country

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the canvas was low and the lamp was oil and the Counting Clerk and I sat either side of a table in a field camp at the edge of the thin-handed country on the seventh night of eight. Lano pressed against my shin and stayed there. Outside the dark was total and the ground soft from a week of rain.

The Counting Clerk had the hundred-handed returns in a bundle on her left and the thin-handed returns in a short stack on her right. The short stack was the one I watched her lay out first. She set each sheet face up and weighted the corners with river stones.

I read the thin-handed returns aloud. Place by place the tally came back thin. Thirty-five locations had sent something - a mark, an initial, a single date - and twenty-seven had sent nothing at all. For those twenty-seven I wrote a zero beside the name and said nothing else. A zero is a full account of an empty hand.

Then the Counting Clerk turned to the hundred-handed bundle. The Ruins of Pewterlow had sent back a return that was three pages long and signed in four different hands - the Registrar's hand, the Sub-Registrar's hand, and two hands I could not place that had signed anyway and been allowed to stand. I read the total. I wrote the total. I did not say it was admirable or excessive.

Between the two bundles there was a gap. The thin-handed country had returned what it could, which was a fraction of what the hundred-handed town had returned in the first hour of the first morning. I noted the gap. I noted the date. I did not explain the gap or apologize for it or call it a failure of anything. The gap is itself a record.

Lano stood up, turned once, and lay back down with her nose on my boot.

I wrote the name of the Ruins of Mistthwaite at the bottom of the thin-handed column and left the return-count blank. The pile of unanswered letters that waits there has no sender standing to answer it. I wrote: no respondent present. I drew a line.

The Counting Clerk asked if I wanted to carry the count forward or close the sheet. I said: close the sheet. The thin-handed country had been counted. What it held was in the ledger now. The ledger would go to the places with hands enough to read it, and those places would know what stood beside them on the map.

That was the work of the seventh night. I folded the thin-handed column, set it flat in the case, and blew out the lamp. Lano was already on her feet ahead of me, nose reading the dark.

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