Dream d2966-s: Wide Sky, No Other Thing

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road ran out onto the moor and there was nothing else - no hedge, no wall, no building standing at the margin - only the road and, on either side of it, the open high ground going gray into the dark.

I walked. Lano walked a little ahead, her white shape easy to follow against the road. Rurik was somewhere off the left edge; I could not see him but his amber eyes showed twice when I looked that way.

I carried the sheet. One hundred and twenty-nine entries, forty-eight marked with a small ink cross: walked in, written from inside. Eighty-one without a mark. I did not read it while I walked. The road required watching.

The Surveyor had said: there are two kinds of unentered place and they look nothing alike. Cold houses standing dark, and lit working towns at every window. I had written that down when they said it. I thought I had understood it at the time.

The road had been here all along. Not new, not made for this journey - here, running over the moor in the dark, whether or not anyone had walked it for a year. I checked my pace against the milestone marker and did not stop.

The Ruins of Glenhaven were still some hours ahead. Night one of eight. The Surveyor had residency notes from seven other parties who had passed through and left an account; not one of them had entered the ruins in the sense the sheet required. They had written from outside. They had counted the standing walls. Their counts agreed with mine, and still the mark was not there.

Lano paused. Her ears came up and her nose worked at the air ahead. I stopped and waited. After a moment she sat down, which meant smell rather than sound. I wrote nothing. We stood there until she stood up again and walked on.

The lit towns were the harder ones. That was what I had not grasped when the Surveyor said it. A dark cold house reads as empty and therefore unwalked; the eye expects no one to have been inside. A bright window at ten in the evening reads as occupied, and occupied reads as known, and there the trouble begins - a place that looks tended reads as entered by the very fact of its tending. Thirty-five on the sheet with lit windows, the same column as the twenty-one dark ones: no mark beside any of them.

The moor gave nothing on either side. I kept walking. Lano trotted. Somewhere to the left, Rurik's eyes blinked once and went out.

Twenty-nine places on the sheet had been called on in the record and never named aloud by anyone standing on their ground. The Warden's house at the Drover's Crossing. The mill at Sett Bridge. The saltworks near the old ford. Named in correspondence, named in the census, named in the Surveyor's notes - and the mark not there.

I put the sheet away.

The country was only the road. The road had always been here. I walked it.

---