Dream d2879-s: The Coat and the Face

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the cedar box was already on the bench when I crossed the gravel path to take my place beside the Charter. The night was cool, the grass damp at the path's edge, and Lano came with me, pressing close to my shin as I settled. The Charter lay open on the Registrar's table near the bench - seven rulings, weighted at four corners with smooth stones pulled from the path.

The Keeper of Faces arrived first, then the guest behind her. The guest's coat carried proof of past work: deed after deed in copper and enamel, nine orders represented, each medal struck once on witnessed evidence and left unchanged after striking because nothing in this house is altered after striking. A correction is only ever a new medal set beside the old one. Tonight's coat held no corrections - only accretion, layer on layer, everything that had once been witnessed and confirmed.

The Keeper opened the cedar box.

Inside: seven faces, one for each order of task the house measures. She lifted the face assigned to this guest's order - not last night's, not the face from the last time this guest stood at the bench, but the one cut on tonight's measure. It had moved. Six of the seven faces in the box sat flush with their measures tonight. This one did not.

The Registrar wrote the observation before the Keeper had finished fitting the straps. That is the order of operations here: record the face before it can be explained, because it will not be explained.

The face, on tonight's measure, had one station closed. The station was for leading work of this order. The guest had passed four of the eight trials the house counts for that station; the others who wore this face had passed more. The face said: not yet trusted to lead here. The coat said: these deeds were witnessed, struck, confirmed. Neither contradicted the other in its own terms. In their relation they did not agree, and the house wrote the disagreement into the record and left it standing.

Rurik had come silently over the hedge and taken the high end of the bench. He sat through the whole proceeding - amber-eyed, tail hanging still, watching the Keeper work. When the Charter was opened to its seventh ruling and the Registrar read it aloud into the record, Rurik blinked once and looked away toward the dark at the garden's far edge.

The guest received the fitted face. The Keeper held it out; the guest took it. No word was said about what it meant that the face had moved, or what might move it again, or what the distance between the coat and the face signified in some larger register. The lanterns over the bench gave light enough to read the face's markings by and offered no opinion on them.

I entered the office, the order, the station closed, the trial count into the ledger beneath the guest's office designation, not beneath any name. Four of eight. Others above that count. I left the column for the next night's measure empty, because the face is re-cut each time and tonight's entry is only tonight's.

Lano had gone some paces ahead toward the path that curved behind the hedge. She sat there in the dark and waited, watching back at us, ears up.

I closed the ledger. The Keeper returned the box to the bench. The Registrar folded the Charter and lifted the stones from its corners and set them back on the path where they had come from.

That was the whole of the evening's work.

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