Dream d2824-s: The Naming Ran Ahead

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the street was loud with the day's work: barrows pushed against cobblestone, crates handed from one figure to another, a count called aloud above the noise, chalk marks on the doorframe of a receiving house. Lano walked close to the wall, her nose low, her tail up, reading what the foot-traffic had left on the stone.

I had the book open. The far pages were already written - someone sat here and named these streets, these quarters, these crossings, and then stopped. Sixty-five names. The first page of this section listed them in one hand, tight and careful, set down together in one sitting, all waiting. One name near the back was set down earlier and had waited longer than the rest.

Rurik found a high ledge on the corner house and took it. He sat above the barrow-men and watched the passage below, his amber eyes tracking the weight of each load. He did not look at the book.

A figure in a grey coat called out a name - a street name, one of the sixty-four with a drawing under it - and a second figure answered from a doorway and the exchange was done. I wrote it down: called and answered, both on drawn ground.

The waiting sixty-five were not called. They waited in the book. The work on this street did not know about them. The street was managing its own counts and its own weights and was not thinking about the names that had no ground drawn under them yet.

Lano sat down for a moment, pressing her side against my boot. Then she was up again, nosing a piece of sacking at the base of a crate-stack. A small stone fell from somewhere above and she watched it settle on the cobbles without touching it.

I counted what the book held: one hundred pieces of work inside the busiest of the waiting places, done or in progress or laid out and waiting, all inside a place with a name and no drawn ground under it yet. The naming ran ahead and then it stopped. That is what the book shows. I wrote it down.

Rurik dropped from the ledge and passed through a gap in the crowd without brushing anyone. He went ahead at the next corner and sat there, which was his way of waiting while remaining a cat.

The work here was loud. I recorded it.

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