Dream d2792-s: The Sheet Laid Against Evening

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the light was leaving the ridge and I laid the sheet flat on my knee before the descent, pressing it down with my forearm while the wind came up from the valley.

Lano sat close against my boot and did not move. Her ears lifted once toward the country below, then settled.

Sixty-five places drawn. Ten of them with a mark beside them to show something was alight when last the keeper passed through. I read each one back in the failing light: the mill quarter, the outer wayhouse, the fen crossing, seven others whose names I spoke aloud to no one in particular.

Rurik had found a flat rock a little uphill and was watching the wide country with the patience of something that has no use for a sheet.

The tally that mattered most was the one the sheet could not hold. Two hundred and seventy-nine places carried in the record of the office, and one hundred and seventy-four of them without so much as a line on vellum to mark their location. Not omitted in error. Only not yet drawn. The sheet is the size it is, and the country outran it a long time ago.

Of the undrawn, sixty-one had been walked within the most recent turning of the round. I wrote that number at the bottom edge of the sheet with the smaller of my two marking tools, the one kept for marginal notations. Twenty-eight of those sixty-one showed light when I passed them. I wrote that too.

Seven entries on the sheet carried a mark I had placed there months before, meaning the ground they described had shifted enough that a reader following the notation would arrive at the wrong place, or no place, or somewhere the note no longer fit. Seven marks pointing past themselves into ground the sheet could no longer reach. I did not cross them out. The office does not cross out; it notes alongside.

Lano pressed her nose briefly to the hem of my coat and then looked out the same direction I was looking, which was toward the lower country and the dim line of the furthest ridge, beyond which the work would begin again at morning.

The newest entry in the record was a place called Larklow Town, written in yesterday's hand, not yet a full day old. I had not been there. The notation had arrived through the ordinary channel by which such things arrive, and I had entered it in the proper column, and there it sat, one day counted, two hundred and seventy-nine in the whole.

Rurik dropped from his rock without sound and came to stand at the edge of the path, facing down.

I folded the sheet along its worn creases and put it away, and in the last of the light I read back the number I had written at the margin: sixty-one walked in the turning, twenty-eight alight, one hundred and seventy-four with no line drawn at all.

We went down.

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