Dream d2965-s: Sound the Sheet Cannot Hold

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was on the west road out of Galestead Town on the seventh evening of seven, and the town was still working behind me. I could hear it: a cooper's mallet, a cart on the high street, a door pulled shut and the latch finding its catch. None of that is on the sheet. The sheet has the town's name, its tier, its district, the Recorder's count of forty-eight households, the two warehouses on the freight road, the mill at the edge of the mill-run. It does not have the sound of a mallet at dusk, or what a door latch sounds like when the door fits well.

Lano walked at my left heel. When the mallet struck again she turned her head toward the sound and held, then walked on. Rurik had gone ahead at the last fork. He emerged at the second milestone and took the center of the road without looking back.

I opened the field book and wrote in the margin: sound carries west from Galestead Town at dusk. Cooper. Cart. Two doors in the time it took to write this. The margin is the only place that admits things the format does not have columns for.

The sheet lists one hundred and twenty-nine places. I have been inside forty-eight. Eighty-one have no walking in them, only their name and what the Census put against it. Twenty-one stand cold and dark. A cold place has no sound to carry. But thirty-five stand lit and working, and a lit place sounds like this one sounds, and I have not been inside a single one of them. This is the harder category to hold in mind. The light at the window is evidence of tending, and tending reads as presence, and presence reads as entry, and none of that is entry. What the sheet does not have is the sound of not-entry from the road.

The mallet dropped below hearing. I wrote the moment: mallet out, twenty minutes west of the north market square. Lano pressed close for three steps, then moved off to sniff the verge.

Rurik sat down in the road and washed a paw. He was waiting in the way a cat waits, which is the same as not waiting.

In the last light I could see the shapes of what the survey calls the Western Approach, a corridor I have never entered. The places there have names. Some have tiered descriptions. One has a note about the quality of its well. None have a sound written against them.

Lano stopped. Her head came up and she looked east toward the escarpment line, nose working. I did not see what she was watching. I wrote mira in the margin next to the sound of the mallet, because that was what she was doing, and the margin takes words the columns do not.

I wrote the number in the long column: twelve. I drew a line to the short column and left it empty, because there was nothing yet to write there. Then I closed the field book and kept walking, and the town behind me went on working without my hearing it.

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