Dream d2777-s: New Timber and Ten Lights

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the high end of Amberholt, four days after the first roof went up. Below me sixty-five pale roofs caught what was left of the light, the timber still ungreyed, the kind of colour that doesn't last a season. Lano sat beside me with her nose lifted into the slope-wind, reading whatever the slope-wind carried.

I held the drawn sheet against the view.

Sixty-five places named on it. Ten of them holding a light tonight, the lit ones small and distinct in the failing dusk. The settlement was four days old and you could tell it: no path worn between the buildings yet, no mud at the doorsteps, nothing softened by use. Everything in the state of having just been set down and not yet altered by being inhabited.

I read the margin. The sheet ends but the country does not. In all the hands that hold the full count, two hundred and seventy-nine places are known. A hundred and seventy-four carry no mark, no column, no name committed to the ruled page. Of those, sixty-one were entered and worked inside the last thirty days - walked, measured, occupied - and the sheet does not know them.

This round I made sixty-one of those undrawn places. Among the sixty-one, twenty-nine showed a lamp burning in a window. I noted this. Seven entries already ruled on the sheet point at places I could not reach when I went to look - the mark is present and the ground is absent, and that is recorded as it stands.

Lano turned a slow circle on the path behind me, then lay down with her chin toward the slope.

The newest place past the margin is Larkbarrow. One day standing. The name is all that is on the sheet about it.

I stood at the high end until the ten lights were the only lights I could distinguish from the stars below, the new roofs dark between them, and then I came down.

---