Dream d2691-s: Hours Between Two Roofs

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I walked a track between two places and counted the hours by the softening of the dark. Lano trotted a little ahead and then fell back and pressed her flank against my leg, and we went on together. The track was bare chalk underfoot, pale enough that I could read it without a lamp. There was no one in the place I had left and there would be no one in the place I was going to. I had the second book under my arm and I knew this before I opened it.

The first roof showed behind me still, low against the ridge. The second showed ahead, also low, separated from the first by what I judged was four hours at a walking pace. I wrote that in the second book: four hours. No shorter route. One road only, the one I was standing on.

Lano stopped. Her ears came forward. She held that position for a count of three, then exhaled and walked on. I looked at the dark between the roofs and found nothing moving in it. Whatever she had noticed, she had resolved it without me.

I thought about the oldest place in the second book, the Ruins at Pewterlow, cold, with more roads going out than any other place that nobody keeps. Standing at the junction of all those empty roads and finding no one coming down any of them. I had written that entry two nights ago. More roads out, and still cold. I was walking the shorter round now, the one that covers only what the first book does not hold, and Pewterlow was on this round too, four entries further along.

The track crossed a low place where water had gathered over the summer and dried to a pale crust. Lano stepped around the edge of it carefully. I stepped across the centre. The crust held.

When the second roof was close enough to show its ridge clearly, I stopped and wrote the arrival time in the second book. The place was a gate, a stile, a porch roof over nothing, two sheds leaning in toward each other. Left in good order. No lamp burning. No mark of anyone recent.

I wrote what it was. I wrote what was standing and what was tilting. I wrote the condition of the latch, which was closed and not locked, and the condition of the path, which was swept as far as the gate and not swept beyond. I did not write anything about who had swept it or whether they would return. That was not the second book's work.

Lano sat down by the gate and waited. I finished the entry and closed the book. The second roof, held in its condition: good order, cold, one road in and one road out, both the same road.

We turned around. Four hours back.

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