Dream d2846-s: Ink Before Ground

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I came to Eldergate in the dark, and the keeper was still at her post beneath the arch with the book across her forearms, not holding it by its spine but carrying it flat, the way you carry something heavy and awkward that must stay level. The lantern at the post cast enough light to read by, and she was reading.

Lano trotted ahead of me through the arch and stopped just inside, nose to the flagstones, ears pricked. Rurik had gotten there first. He was up on the lintel watching, his amber eyes catching the lantern as two separate points.

I asked the keeper what she had there and she said: the book of the far pages. She said it simply, as a record clerk names a ledger. I came around to her side to look.

The right-hand pages were drawn places, one page per place, with ink lines for streets and ground. The left-hand pages were the same size and the same ruled format, but they held only a heading at the top, and below the heading, nothing. The ruled lines ran empty to the foot of the page.

She told me there were sixty-four of them. Set in the same ink, the same hand. Sixty-three laid down together in one sitting. The sixty-fourth was older, she said, pointing to a page near the beginning: the ink there had browned slightly, going to sepia at its edge. That one had been waiting longer than the others. She did not say how much longer.

I looked at the heading on that page. It was a town name in the same register as all the others, a place, not a person.

Lano pressed against my leg and I reached down and felt her warmth there, the small solidity of her. Rurik on the lintel did not move.

The keeper told me that forty-seven of the waiting headings shared a first part with a place that already had a drawing. I looked and found one: the drawn version two pages over, with its streets and its ground marked. The waiting heading was not the same place but it was family to it, the first syllable identical.

I asked her whether anyone had tried to draw the waiting places and she said: not that the record shows. The headings are there. The paper is there. No drawing was begun.

She closed the book then, carefully, with both hands pressing its covers together. She said: this place was drawn on a sheet once. She was not talking about the empty pages. She was talking about the gate itself, the arch above us. It had a page with ground under it, a drawing someone had made. She was recording that it had been drawn.

Lano stepped back through the arch and sat on the threshold outside, looking in at me. Rurik slipped off the lintel without a sound and disappeared into the dark of the street behind the keeper.

I wrote in the margin of the keeper's record: present this night, second night of eight, witnessed. I did not add anything to the empty pages.

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