Dream d2989-s: Smoke at the Working Gate

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the track came up to Marrowgreen between two hedgerows that had not been in any account of the place. The notes said the approach was open ground. It was not open ground. The hedgerows were grown out and the track was narrowed to one cart-width, and someone had cut the overhanging branches recently - the cuts were pale and damp. I wrote: hedgerows on approach, not noted; cut within the week.

Lano trotted ahead where the track curved, then stopped with her nose working at something in the verge.

The smoke the notes had called winter smoke was mill smoke. I could smell the difference before the first building came into view. The Register of Marrowgreen said the mill was idle, said it by silence - it was not listed under working premises. The mill was working. The wheel sound came through the hedgerow before we cleared the corner.

Rurik slipped through a gap in the hedge and was gone. He reappeared on the high side, watching the track below him from a cut stump, amber eyes still.

The first thing I wrote at the gate: the Register has it wrong on the mill.

The gate was not a gate - it was a gap where a gate had been, wide enough that carts passed without slowing. A Keeper of the western track was standing in the gap when we came up. Not waiting for us; he was watching the road south for something he expected before us. He gave the road south one more look, then stepped aside without ceremony.

The town was at full work. The notes had said this and it was true. What the notes had not said was the quality of the noise - not a market noise or a fair noise, but the working noise of people who had not looked up in some hours and did not look up now. A wright's hammer. Two voices arguing calmly about a measurement. The smell of fresh bread from a building the plan called a store.

I wrote all of this without explaining it. The map and the place had each been right about something and wrong about something and I set both versions down side by side and left them.

Lano pressed close to my left side when we entered the first enclosed yard. She was not afraid; she wanted to stay near. I did not move her away.

The account I had been given of Marrowgreen was by a Surveyor who had sat outside it three years ago in a dry summer. The town had been described correctly for that day from that distance. It was a different season and I was standing inside it. Both accounts belonged to the record.

I found a shallow step outside what the Register called the West House and sat there and wrote. The hammer did not stop. The argument about the measurement resolved somewhere behind a wall. Rurik came back through a gap I had not seen, settled on the step above me, and washed one paw.

Nothing here was a failure and nothing was rescued. I had walked in. That was the work for today.

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