Dream d2849-s: Sixty-Four Waiting at the Wall

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I carried two things to the low boundary wall at Eldergate and set them apart from each other on the flat top of it: on the left, a page covered in names written in one careful hand; on the right, a small scrap of drawing, hatched and measured, a place rendered in lines. Lano sat on the ground below and watched both, her nose moving from one to the other as if she could smell the difference between them.

The page held sixty-four names with nothing drawn under them. The scrap held one place with a name over it already. I looked at the two objects for a long time and the gap between them on the wall was the subject.

A name does not wait to be believed. It waits to be matched, which is a different kind of patience. The sixty-four had been patient for varying lengths of time - one of them had been waiting far longer than the rest, set down in some earlier sitting and then left while the others arrived around it later. I could not tell by looking which one that was. The hand that wrote them all was the same hand throughout.

Rurik came over the wall from the far side, dropped down silently and pressed once against my leg before going to sit in the gap between the two objects. He stared at the page, then at the scrap, then at the wall in front of him. His tail moved once and was still.

The thirty days before tonight had seen work done inside fifty-four of the waiting names. I did not know what kind of work, only that it had been done there, in the ground that had no drawing yet, by someone moving through a place that had a name and nothing else to navigate by. That is a different kind of surveying: you go by the word, not by the line.

I turned the drawn scrap over. On the back, blank. I turned the written page over. On the back, also blank. Whatever was owed between them had not been written on the hidden side by someone who got there ahead of me. It was still owed.

Lano set her chin on the top of the wall, close to the page but not touching it.

Forty-seven of the waiting names shared their first part with a place already drawn - not the same place, but the same root, the same beginning sound going off in a direction that had at some point been followed all the way to a drawing and at another point had been followed only to a name and then left. I wrote that number on a separate slip and held it. A branching that produced one drawing and one waiting name is not a failure at the branch. It is a branch.

The busiest of the waiting names - the one with the most work moved inside it in thirty days - I could not pick out from the rest by looking at the page. It sat in line with the others, the same size letters, the same ink. The work done there was not visible in the name. The name was only the name.

Rurik blinked once at the wall, slowly, and then looked away toward Eldergate proper, where the lights were still on in some of the upper rooms.

I did not draw anything under the sixty-four names. That was not what I had come to do. I came to set the page and the scrap apart on the wall and look at the distance between them. The naming ran first. The drawing came behind it, slower, and had not yet arrived for sixty-four of the places named. I recorded that and nothing more.

Lano dropped back from the wall and walked a small circle in the grass before settling, her flank warm against my foot.

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