Dream d2780-s: No Gate in the Stone

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the sheet said a gate stood here, and from where I stood there was no gate.

The wall ran long in both directions and gave no sign of having ever held a door. No groove for hinges, no lintel, no worn stone where hands might have pressed. The wall was complete. I checked the sheet again: Sablegate, marked with the symbol for settlement, crossed with the short line that means access. On the ground: a high blank face of pale stone, and at the foot of it, a little of the day's dust still lifting in the cold.

Lano had gone ahead. She walked the length of the wall in one direction and came back. She walked it in the other direction. When she returned she sat beside my left boot and looked up at me, and then at the wall, and then at me again. Her nose moved.

The sheet was not wrong in the way a sheet that names a missing place is wrong. The settlement was here. I could see the rooflines above the wall, the angle of a chimney, the far end where the wall turned a corner and continued. Only the access mark was in question.

I wrote two entries in the margin. First: Sablegate, present. Second: Sablegate, no opening found from the approach road, wall face blank, no gate visible, no door visible, no gap in the coursing. I did not write that it was wrong. I did not write that it had been sealed or that it had ever been otherwise. I wrote what the ground showed and stopped there.

Lano pressed her flank against my leg.

The cold was coming in off the flat country behind us. Above the wall, one lamp was burning in an upper window. I noted it. Occupied, or lately occupied. I could not note more than that.

I folded the sheet along its crease. We stood there a little longer, Lano and I, in front of the wall that the sheet said had a way through it. Then we stepped back to where the approach road widened, and I sat on a low marker stone and wrote the count: one place visited, one discrepancy noted, nothing explained, nothing resolved. The wall continued to be what it was. Sablegate remained on the sheet with its access mark, and on the ground with none.

Lano curled at the foot of the marker stone and tucked her nose under her tail.

The lamp in the upper window did not move.

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