Dream d2935-s: Tended and Unwalked

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the far gate of the City of Tansythwaite on the seventh night and looked back.

The city was lit at every window. Smoke rose from the chimneys of the Weighing Office; lanterns swung above the passage to the Merchants' Quarter; the Bell-Keeper's tower showed a lamp moving room to room. A place in full use, tended, inhabited. The Record-Keeper stood with the ledger open to the long column and the short column, and I looked at where Tansythwaite appeared in each.

Long column: present, named, counted. Population enumerated by the Roll Office. Streets surveyed by the Charter Surveyor's guild. Seven nights of residency, the full term, correctly recorded against the date.

Short column: absent.

Lano pressed against my leg and I did not move for a while.

The cold houses I understood. A dark place looks unentered because it offers nothing to mistake for entry. You approach, you note the closed shutters and the cold step, you write it down and you know what you are writing. You have not gone in. The house does not pretend otherwise.

The bright places are the harder lesson. A city lit at every window looks like a city someone has been inside. The smoke says: warmth, inhabited. The lanterns say: movement, known. The lamp moving room to room in the Bell-Keeper's tower says: this place is alive and has been alive and continues to be alive in the way of places that are understood. None of this is untrue. And none of it is entry.

I had walked the outer passage twice. I had eaten at the inn on the south approach and paid the Gate-Tax and spoken to the Ledger-Tender about the long column. I knew the name of the square I had never crossed and the name of the canal I had never stood beside. Tansythwaite was in every list I carried. It had never been walked from inside.

The Record-Keeper made a note. Not a judgment - the discipline is against judgment - only a description: seventh night, far gate, residency term complete, short column unchanged. Rurik came from somewhere behind me and sat on the step of the gate-house and watched the city with his amber eyes, not moving, his tail still.

Lano's nose was working. She could smell the city, which is its own kind of knowing, and it is not the kind I carry in the column.

The harder half is this: a bright place offers you the sensation of knowing it. The lit windows, the movement, the smoke, the sounds - they give you something to recognize and something to return to in memory. They make the place feel entered. And that feeling is not false, exactly, and it is not the same as having been there in the way the short column means.

The long column holds a name. The short column holds a threshold actually crossed and written from inside.

I set my hand on the gate-post and the stone was cold. Forty-eight places in the short column. Tansythwaite in the long. Twenty places standing cold and dark, which look like what they are. Thirty-eight places standing lit and busy, which look like something else. Twenty-six places called on in the record and never once named aloud on the road.

We went out the gate. The city was still lit behind us. It will be lit whether or not I have been inside it, and the light does not change what the column holds.

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