Dream d2918-s: The Ledge Stands Empty

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood in the far courtyard on the sixth night, at the edge of a long gathering that had been running eight nights and would run two more. The gate was ahead of me. Lano sat beside my left boot and pressed her flank against my ankle, warm through the leather. The air was still and cold. Rurik had taken the top of the gatepost, a black outline against the dark sky, his tail hanging loose.

The record was laid on a stone ledge by the gate. It was a wide book, hand-ruled, holding what the gathering had set down about itself: who was present, what orders of deed they carried on their persons, and wherever a fitted face had moved against a measure. I had been writing in it since the first night. The Clerk of Arrivals had the pen now. She worked down the column without hurry, checking the night's count against the standing tally.

The house counted nine orders. Of the nine, seven had a face fitted to them, re-cut each night from the trial scores. Six of those faces sat against their measure with nothing to record. The seventh did not. I watched the Clerk copy that line: four trials passed of eight, against a column of guests who had passed more, and one station in the house listed as closed to it. She wrote the number. She did not annotate it.

That is the house's practice. A struck medal is struck once, on witnessed evidence, and then it sits. Nine hundred and fifteen medals sit across nineteen guests, and not one has been re-struck since it was laid. A fitted face is different. A face is re-cut from trial each night and can move. When a face moves and the medals behind it have not moved with it, the record notes the gap and leaves it open. No explanation is sought. No cause is assigned. The gap is real and the gap is written and the gap is what it is.

Lano's nose went to the base of the ledge and she sniffed the stone, then sat back and looked up at nothing I could see. Rurik blinked slowly from the gatepost. The Charter was folded at the back of the book, seven rulings written in a hand older than mine, none of them touched since they were entered.

The Clerk closed the book. She set a ribbon at tonight's page and drew the clasp down. She lifted it from the ledge and held it under her arm. This was the transfer: the record was hers to carry until the seventh night, when it would come back to the ledge and be reopened. Whatever was left standing in it, the mismatch between the moved face and the unmoved medals, would still be standing then, because nothing had happened to close it.

I held the gate. She walked through. Lano trotted after her a few steps, then stopped at the gate's edge, ears up, watching the Clerk cross the outer yard. Rurik dropped from the gatepost without a sound and was gone into the dark. I let the gate close.

The courtyard held only the empty ledge, and the cold, and the fact of the book being carried away to the seventh night with the disagreement still written and still unresolved inside it.

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