Dream d2840-s: The Rubble Held Its Line

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the north end of the fallen wall at Kestrelridge and Lano was already there, her nose at the first stone where the corner had been. The wall had come down in its length, not been taken apart; the rubble still lay along the line it had fallen from.

I opened the book to a clean page and began to pace from the north end south.

Lano came with me for the first hundred and then went ahead, trotting along the outer edge of the rubble where the grass was shorter. She reached the far end before I did and sat down in the rough grass with her tail settled around her paws.

I counted three hundred and eleven paces.

Rurik was on the highest remaining section near the west end, where the wall still stood to waist height. He watched me from there, sitting with his forepaws together, amber eyes level. When I passed below him he did not move.

I wrote the number in the book and walked back to the north end and paced the wall again to confirm. Three hundred and twelve. I wrote both figures with a line between them and let the average stand.

Then I sat on a flat stone at the midpoint and opened the book to the names.

Sixty-four names with no drawing under them. Sixty-three set down together in one sitting, the hand even across all sixty-three. One set down alone on a separate page, earlier, in a different season, and it had waited longer than the sixty-three. All sixty-four waited with no ground recorded under them. That is what I found and what I recorded: the naming had run ahead of the drawing and then stopped, and the names were still there.

I did not record why it had stopped. The book is not for that.

The wind came off the dark past the wall's end. Lano padded back from where she had been sitting and pressed her side against my knee. After a moment she made a small sound: "ya." Then she was quiet.

I turned to a fresh page and wrote the heading for the wall at Kestrelridge. Three hundred and eleven paces, or three hundred and twelve. The average. The wall down in its length. Rubble following the original line. Grass grown in over the gaps.

Rurik came down from the standing section without hurrying and stopped a few paces away. He sat and looked past me toward the book. Then he looked toward the dark beyond the far end of the wall, where there is no record of anything yet, and stayed that way while I finished writing.

I closed the book when I was done.

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