Dream d2959-s: Noise Before the Roofline

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the boat sat low on the water and the noise of Galestead Town came across before the roofs showed clear. I was in the stern with the ledger across my knees. Lano was curled against my leg, ears up, her nose working the dark air toward the far bank. Rurik had taken the prow and sat square-shouldered, amber eyes forward, his tail moving once and then going still.

The boatman pulled without speaking. I opened the ledger to the current column. One hundred and twenty-nine places named, described, ranked, counted. Forty-eight walked into and written from inside. Eighty-one not. Of those, twenty-one stood cold and dark and thirty-five stood lit and working and I had been to none of them either way. Twenty-nine had been called on in the record and never once named aloud on the road.

Galestead Town was on that second list.

I could hear it before I could see it. A hammer somewhere, and under it a lower sound that was either a wheel or a mill, and voices carrying across water in the way voices do when the air is wet - stripped of distance, close-sounding. The smoke showed first. Then the roofline. Then the windows, most of them lit, which is what a working town looks like at night and which is what I had written about Galestead Town across three separate entries without having set foot in it.

Reading as known is not the same as having been there.

The boat touched the bank. I set the ledger inside my coat and stepped out. Lano dropped onto the dock ahead of me and pressed her nose to the planks, held it there, then sat. Rurik slipped past us both and went up the bank without looking back.

I wrote in the margin: arrived by river, town noise preceding sight. Night 1 of residency. Interior unrecorded. The column of places walked into stands at forty-eight.

That is what it stands at.

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