Dream d2922-s: No Mark Beside the Name

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the outer wall of the Ruins of Umberhythe with the record book open on the stone, torchlight making the columns barely readable. Lano sat at my feet, her nose working the dark air, ears angled toward the fields below the wall. I ran my finger down the left column - the long one, the column of names - until it stopped at a line I had passed over a hundred times without stopping.

The name had been there since the third month of the survey. Carried through every recount. No mark in the right-hand column at all.

I set the book flat on the wall and wrote the date in the short column beside the name. Nothing more. The date, and the word walked. That was the whole record.

Lano pressed against my leg, then stepped away to sniff the base of the wall. Above me on the broken stonework, Rurik had taken a perch; I could see the two amber points of him watching down, still as set stone.

The country holds a hundred and twenty-eight places in the long column. Forty-eight have a date in the short one. Eighty do not. Of those eighty, twenty stand cold and dark, no hearth, windows black. Thirty-seven stand lit, busy, tended at every hour - and those are the harder ones, because a place that reads as tended reads as known, and the short column knows otherwise. Twenty-five have been called by name on the road and never once walked into, which is a different kind of absence from the dark houses but sits in the same column.

Umberhythe had a name. Now it had a date.

I closed the book. Lano looked up, tail held level, waiting to see which direction. I turned back toward the interior of the ruin and she followed.

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