Dream d2839-s: Sixty-Four on the Stone

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the yard was wide and the walls of it had come down on two sides, and I crouched over the book where it lay open on a flat piece of stone that had fallen level. Lano sat a little way off and watched, ears up, her white coat going grey in the yard-light. Rurik had taken a high piece of broken wall and sat there above the page, amber eyes level with the top of the book's spine. He blinked once and looked at the far end of the yard where nothing moved.

The book held a hundred and twenty-eight names. I had gone through them in order, and at each name I noted whether a drawing had been set under it. Sixty-four had a drawing. Sixty-four had none.

The ones with no drawing were not marked differently from the ones with a drawing. Each name sat in the same hand, at the same size, with the same care. I counted the sixty-three that had been entered together in a single sitting. They were consecutive and the ink ran from one to the next without a change in pressure or angle. Then I found the one that had waited far longer. It was earlier in the book by its position, but the ink was older. There was a different dryness to it. I noted that. I did not explain it.

I turned to the entry that carried the most recent work: a hundred separate pieces in the last thirty days, all of them filed under a name that had no drawing beneath it. I copied the number into the margin. The land past the yard's open side was dark and I could not see how far it went. I was not sent to look. I was sent to record what the column held.

Fifty-four of the waiting names had been worked in the last month. Thirty-one showed a light. Forty-seven shared a first part with a name that already had a drawing. I wrote those figures down and closed the margin note and sat back on my heels.

Lano came close then and pushed her nose against my knee, then settled her chin there and was still.

The name at the top of the sixty-three was the same as every other: set down in the same sitting, in the same careful hand, over land with nobody in it at the time of the writing. That was the fact. I recorded it. The yard was quiet. The sixty-four names without drawings waited in no different posture than the sixty-four with drawings behind them. I put the pen down. The book lay open on the stone.

---