Dream d2947-s: The Afternoon It Took

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was on the fourth night of seven in Ashstead, and in the afternoon I found the stair.

It runs between the house of the Assessor's Office and the old granary building, twelve steps of worn stone, and opens onto Lime Court a full street-and-a-half ahead of the long way around. Everyone who lives in Ashstead knows it. I did not know it until the fourth afternoon, when a woman carrying a bundle of cloth turned into the gap between the two tall houses and I followed at a distance and came out on Lime Court and understood.

I wrote in the register: Stair, Assessor's side to granary side, Lime Court shortcut. Walked: afternoon, day four.

That is what it needed.

Lano had found the stair before I did. She was sitting on the top step when I arrived, nose lifted toward something the stone was holding. She had been through already. I had not. I climbed past her and she fell in behind me.

In the evening I sat with the ledger open. The left column is long. The right column is short. Ashstead: one hundred and twenty-nine places named and described and cross-referenced, some of them for months. Forty-eight walked into and written from the inside. The stair is narrow and is not a room, but the Ledger Officer's instruction says to record what the walk found, so I wrote it in the right column: the stair between the tall houses, Lime Court shortcut, everyone else's shortcut, learned by the walker on afternoon four.

Rurik came in from the landing and took the far end of the table where the lamp was brightest. He settled, blinked once toward nothing in particular, and washed a paw.

The note takes four lines. The stair took an afternoon. Both of those are what happened and I have written them down.

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