Dream d2957-s: Unpicked, the Count in Rings

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the orchard came before the house did. I walked in from the east side where the wall had fallen to knee height and Lano went ahead of me, nosing between the fallen apples, her paws sinking slightly into the soft ground where the fruit had been going down for years.

The Recorder of Unentered Places was somewhere behind me with the long column open. Duskden had been on the sheet since the fourth month. The orchard had been noted. Its dimensions, its variety - the stone fruit on the south slope, the harder keepers along the north wall - all of it written in the column from a distance, from reports, from the account of a carter who had passed the gate once and said the trees were old and well-formed. None of that was entry. None of that was this.

Rurik had come over the wall ahead of both of us. He sat on a low branch now, watching me work, amber eyes steady in the dark.

I took the count from the wood the way the Recorder had taught me: not by guessing at the years of neglect but by finding a branch that had come down clean and reading the growth rings where it broke. Seven rings past the last true cut. The shears had not touched this orchard in seven years. I did not write this down yet. I counted twice.

Lano sat beside the fallen branch and pressed her nose to the cut end. Her tail moved once.

The short column had forty-eight names in it. This place would make forty-nine. Not because it had been counted from outside - it had been counted from outside for months - but because I was standing in it now, in the dark, with the smell of fermenting apples in the wet grass and a dog beside me and a cat on a low branch and seven rings in the wood where the shears had stopped.

I set the branch down carefully and opened the book. The Recorder had said: write what is, not what it means. So I wrote: the orchard behind the Ruins of Duskden; seven years without cutting; fruit down unpicked; entered this evening; count from the wood, not guessed.

Lano watched me close the book. She did not move toward the house. She waited, the way she always waits, to see which way I would turn next.

I stood there a moment in the unentered dark of a place I was now standing inside of, and I let it be that simple.

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