Dream d2968-s: Older Than the Thaw

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was standing in the outer court of the Ruins of Glenhaven on the third night of the residency, and the snow was still there.

Not fresh snow. Old snow, packed low and grey along the margin where the east wall throws its shadow from mid-morning until dark. The rest of the court had been bare stone for weeks - frost-cracked grout, packed mud, the broken flags I had stepped over coming in. But this strip, in the wall's reach, had held. The reason was the shape of the shadow. I recorded the shadow's shape: a wedge, narrow where the wall begins to crumble at the north end, wider where the arch still stands at the south. The arch was the reason. I wrote down the hour and the angle.

Lano nosed at the snow's edge and pulled back. Her breath came out white. Rurik had claimed the highest remaining step of the inner stair and sat watching with his tail hanging, making no sound.

The sheet held 128 entries. Forty-eight had a second column - a date, a note, an account of the inside. The eighty that remained had only the first column: name, tier, coordinates, and a silence where the second column should be.

Of the eighty, twenty stood cold and dark. Of the eighty, thirty-four stood lit and working, full of noise and trade. The lit ones were the harder accounting. A place that looks tended reads as known, and I had read reports on some of them so many times I could have named their market days and ceiling heights. I had not been in them. The reports knew things I did not. I did not know things the reports could not have.

Twenty-eight had been called on in the record - cited, counted, corroborated - and had never once been named aloud on the road. No one had stood at their threshold and said the name. That was a different kind of absence from the cold ones.

The Ruins of Glenhaven itself was one of the eighty until three nights ago. The note had had its tier, its coordinates, and the east-facing court with the crumbling arch on the south. The note was right. The arch was there. What the note had not had was the specific grey of this snow at this hour, or the difference in the wedge's width at the two ends of the wall.

I wrote: outer court, east-facing. Old snow in shadow of east wall; shadow holds owing to shape; arch standing on the south side, wall reduced on the north. Shadow traced, dated, recorded. I did not add anything after that. The shadow's shape was the reason and now the reason was in the record.

Lano pressed against my leg. Rurik watched from the step. I did not interpret either.

The second column had one more entry. That was what the night had been for.

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