Dream d2945-s: What the Gate Has Already Done

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood at the north gate of Ashstead before proper light, and the carts were already four deep ahead of me, their drivers standing at the heads of their horses, breathing into the cold. The gate had been doing this every morning on the sheet: queuing, waiting, letting through, queuing again. I had written the name of the city thirty times in the register. I had noted its north gate, its charter, its market frequency. I had never stood here.

Lano pressed against my left boot and held still. Her nose moved.

The sheet has two columns now. The long one runs to a hundred and twenty-nine names. The short one has forty-eight, and I was about to make it forty-nine. A cold house announces its own emptiness. A city at dawn with its carts queued and its gate officer warming his hands at a brazier and its first light showing on upper windows reads as known. It is doing so much that the eye slides off it. The eye says: yes, this. Known.

Rurik had gone ahead to the gatehouse overhang an hour before light. He sat on a beam above the officer and watched the queue with his amber eyes, and when the gate opened he was already inside, tail low, picking his way along the base of the wall.

I wrote in the register while I stood in the queue. North gate. Dawn. Four carts deep. One officer, one brazier. Upper windows lit. Smell of horses and smoke and bread coming from somewhere inside the wall. I wrote it in the queue because a place begins to be entered the moment the pen touches the line, and I did not want to lose the queue itself. The officer looked at my token and at the ledger page I held open and did not ask why I was writing while waiting. He has seen the surveying office before.

Ashstead: night two of seven. Still lit. Still queuing. First walked into this morning at the fourth bell.

Lano went through the gate ahead of me. Allá.

The short column moved.

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