Dream d2832-s: Bearing and Distance Only

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood on the ridge above Reedhaven at the first gray of morning with the book open and the instrument leveled and Lano sitting a few feet back with her nose working at whatever the wind brought up from the valley. The fog had not lifted from the lower fields but the ridge itself was clear and I could see scattered roofs in every quarter.

The work was to take a bearing and a distance for each waiting name. Not to draw them - that is a different day's work - but to record that they had been placed as well as named. Someone had done the naming carefully, in one hand, sixty-three of them set down in a single sitting I could reconstruct from the ink and the spacing, and one earlier, set down alone, and then the hand had stopped. Nothing in the book explains the stopping.

I took the first name from the list and turned the instrument to the north-northwest. The bearing read clean. I stepped the distance off in my head from the ridge-mark, noted both in the margin beside the name, and moved to the next. Lano padded a short way down the slope, nose low, then came back and sat again. Rurik had found the highest flat stone on the ridge and was watching the rooftops from it, ears forward, amber eyes level with the far line.

Thirty-one of the waiting names showed a lamp in the column beside them: the place lit last night, someone working late, or the habit of a light left on. I marked each one without comment. Fifty-four had recent work logged inside the month - not the drawing, but correspondence, measurement, intention, something moved. The busiest of them, at a bearing due south-southwest, had carried a hundred separate pieces of work in thirty days with no drawing under it at all. I wrote one hundred in the margin and turned to the next name.

Forty-seven of the sixty-four shared a first part with a place already drawn and surveyed - the same root, a different suffix, the same family of territory. The book has room for nine hundred and sixty names in the system and has reached one hundred and twenty-eight. There is no urgency in that arithmetic.

The one early name, which has waited longer than the other sixty-three combined, carries a lamp in its column. I recorded its bearing. I recorded its distance. Lano pressed against my leg for a moment and then moved off to sniff the edge of the ridge path. The sun came over the far hills and the fog in the valley began to loosen. I turned to the next name.

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