Dream d2820-s: From the Water Up

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the waterline below Quillcombe with the still water at my back, the slope before me, and the book open to the count of roofs.

One hundred and twenty-nine names in it. I began at the lower end where the ground is soft and the reeds come in close, and I moved uphill.

Lano went ahead of me, not leading, just covering the same distance in her own way. Her nose worked the wet grass at the margin where the water had receded. When I stopped to read a roof against its name she stopped too and turned, ears up, watching something in the reeds I could not see.

Sixty-four of the roofs had ground drawn under them in the book. Each time I found one I made the mark. Sixty-five did not. The sixty-five stood on the slope as solidly as the sixty-four, catching the same low cloud-light, holding the same damp. Nothing from the outside separated them. Their names sat in the book in the same hand, the same ink, the same measure of care.

Thirty of the waiting roofs showed a lamp burning behind a shutter. Fifty-four of them had had work in the last thirty days. The busiest of all was near the middle of the slope: a corner building with a narrower lane running beside it, and inside it a hundred separate pieces of work completed in a month with no drawing yet set under it. I counted it and continued up.

The oldest of the waiting names was near the top, at a place where two lanes met and a low wall ran between them. It had been named long before the sitting in which the other sixty-four waiting names were set down together in one hand. I do not know how long before. I recorded that I did not know and moved on.

Lano found me at the far end, appearing from around a gatepost where she had gone ahead to wait. She pressed against my leg while I read the total back from my marks. Sixty-four drawn. Sixty-five waiting. Not one drawn place without a name: the naming had come first in every case. Forty-eight of the waiting names shared their first part with a place already drawn, as if the same drawer had begun a family and then set the pen down mid-line.

I wrote the count. I closed the book. Lano turned toward the lower path and I followed her back down to the water.

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