Dream d2834-s: Five Columns on the Ridge

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the cairn was already there when I reached the top, and I knelt in the cold beside it and laid the short board across two flat stones so I could work.

Lano circled once and settled at my left, her nose toward the dark. The wind off the slope carried nothing useful. Below, where the edge of the drawn country ended, the undrawn places sat in the dark without complaint.

I opened to the rank columns and began the count.

Cities first. I struck them off: seven drawn, two waiting. The two waiting ones stood in a belt of country I had named before I had any line to put them on. Their names are good names. The ink dried years ago on both.

Towns. Nineteen drawn, eleven waiting. Of the eleven, eight had been put down in the same session as most of the others, in the same hand, in what must have been one long evening of naming. I recorded that. I did not speculate on what stopped the evening.

Villages. Twenty-two drawn, twenty-nine waiting. The twenty-nine were the heaviest column to work through. I read each one aloud under my breath. Lano's ear turned at one of them - the one that carries a hundred separate tasks inside the last thirty days, more traffic than most drawn places see in a season. I finished the column and moved on.

Hamlets. Fifteen drawn, eighteen waiting. Of the eighteen, nine share a first syllable with a place already on the map: a prefix that ran ahead of the surveyor and landed twice, once on each side of the unfinished border.

Cold ones last - the uninhabited marks, the watchtowers, the relay stations, the named high passes. One drawn. Four waiting. One of the four is the old one, the single name that predates the long evening's session by enough that it belongs in a different category of waiting. I set a small stone beside its entry in the column, which is the notation for this one is different and nothing more. Lano sniffed the stone after I set it down.

The five counts closed at sixty-four waiting against sixty-four drawn, and I ruled a line under the last column and let the ink set while the wind moved across the ridge and did not say anything, because it never does.

Thirty-one of the sixty-four show a lighted entry. The word-stock could make nine hundred and sixty; it has made one hundred and twenty-eight. I wrote that figure at the bottom of the page as a ratio rather than a verdict, because a ratio is what it is.

Lano stood, pressed once against my leg, and lay down again closer to the cairn. The book stayed open. The ridge held everything on it without distinction: the cairn, the board, the figures in the columns, the dog, the dark past the edge where the waiting places were.

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