Dream d2936-s: Flat Water, Far Wall

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the causeway was narrower than the sheet had given it. The Recorder had set the width at twelve spans; walking it, I could not find where the twelfth was, only the flat black water on either side and the sound it made against the stone, which was not the sound water makes against a bank but the sound it makes when it is very still and something moves past it. Lano walked ahead. Her nose touched the surface twice before she decided not to again. Rurik had gone to the outside edge and walked it the way cats walk a thing they are learning the weight of, one paw at a time, his amber eyes on the water below.

The sheet gives Tarnmere its name. It gives the walls at thirty-eight feet where they stand, and the fall in the south corner where they do not. It gives the causeway, the gatehouse, the hall. It gives a notation for the light that comes through the upper breach in the north wall on a clear evening, which this was not. What the sheet does not give is the door, because the door is gone. The lintel is there. The stone sill is there. Where the door was there is a space, and the space is the first inside.

Lano sat at the lintel and did not go through. Her ears came up. I set my pack down and we stood for a moment, the three of us at the threshold of a place that had been on the sheet since the third month and had not been entered in all that time. The Recorder's notation reads: unentered, no obstacle recorded. That notation is correct. There is no obstacle. The door is simply gone and the hall is simply dark and no one has gone in.

I went in. Lano followed. Rurik sat in the space where the door had been and stared into the hall from outside, his tail wrapped around his feet.

The floor inside was stone, most of it, with one section near the far wall where something had come down and the rubble had not been cleared. The sheet gives no floor. The sheet gives the hall as a rectangle with a notation for the breach and a secondary notation for the well, which is in the northeast corner and is dry. I walked to the well. It is dry. The Recorder's notation is correct.

I wrote nothing new on the sheet that night. The sheet's facts held. What the sheet does not hold is the quality of the air inside, which was cold and still in the way air is cold and still when walls have stood a long time with no fire. It does not hold the sound the floor made underfoot, which was different near the well than away from it. It does not hold Lano pressing her weight against my leg in the dark. These are not facts the sheet carries. They are what being inside is.

Eighty-one places. Eighty-one sheets that hold what can be set down from the outside. One of them has an inside now. The sheet does not change.

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