Dream d2850-s: Undrawn at Noon

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I walked the Eldergate lane from its north end to its south, Lano trotting at my left ankle and Rurik gone ahead to whatever corner he had chosen. Midday light came straight down between the rooftops and left no useful shadow for reading direction. I had the ledger.

The ledger held a hundred and twenty-eight entries. I counted them at the north end before I began, standing in the shadow of the gate arch. Sixty-four of those entries had a map sheet beside them in the binding, a drawing of the ground the name had been given to. Sixty-four did not. I noted that without comment. In this country the naming had always come first.

Lano's nose went to the base of a dry-stone wall and she stayed there, working the smell carefully, while I copied the first tier of unmarked entries into my field notebook. Sixty-three of them had been written in one sitting, one hand, one ink load, one morning or one night I could not say which. They read as a list a person had meant to finish. Forty-seven of those sixty-three shared a first syllable with a place already drawn, as if the writer had known which family of places they were adding to before they ever walked out to look.

The sixty-fourth waiting entry was not part of that sitting. The ink was a different black, older. It had been waiting longer than all the others by a measure I could not calculate from the ledger alone, and nothing beside it said why it had waited. I set that down without explanation.

Rurik was on a window ledge above me when I looked up, amber eyes half-closed, watching the lane below. He blinked once, slowly, and looked away.

I walked south. The lane was narrow enough that two people passing would turn sideways, and the midday light made it feel shorter than it was. I counted thirty-one waiting entries carrying a small mark in the margin, something still lit inside them, some ongoing use. Fifty-four of the hundred and twenty-eight had recorded work in the last thirty days, most of them the waiting ones. The busiest waiting entry had received a hundred pieces of work in that period, all of it legible in the ledger, none of it a drawing.

I wrote: a place can accumulate work and remain unmapped. I wrote: the work does not draw the ground.

Lano had found me again by the midpoint of the lane, a small smooth stone in her mouth. When I stopped she sat, and the stone dropped from her mouth onto the cobbles. She stood close then, watching my hand move across the notebook. I did not explain what I was writing. After a moment she picked the stone back up.

The whole stock of names the country could have made from its existing parts numbered nine hundred and sixty. It had made a hundred and twenty-eight. I wrote that number down without comment.

At the south end I turned and looked back. The gate arch at the north end was still visible, Rurik a black shape on the ledge that might or might not still be watching. I wrote the last entry: sixty-four places named and waiting. The naming ran ahead of the drawing and then stopped. That is what is recorded. That is the whole of it.

Lano shook herself once and sat down at my foot.

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