Dream d2993-s: The Bench the Sheet Missed

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was five nights into Marrowgreen and had not yet walked to the back range. The distant account described it as storage yards and a drying shed, nothing more. I took it as written. Lano trotted ahead of me through the south passage and turned left where I would have turned right, and I followed her into a lane I had not followed before.

Two trades were working. A tanner, or someone doing tanner's work, and beside her a fuller with a long-handled tool pressing cloth in a trough of water. Neither raised their head. The smell was real - hides and wet wool together. A dozen hands moved at the benches and at the trough.

I stood in the entrance and did not speak.

Lano sat at my feet and watched the fuller's tool move.

The distant account: storage yards and a drying shed. What I saw: two active trades, twelve working hands, a smell the sheet could not carry. Neither is wrong about what was true at the moment of recording. The sheet was made at a distance. I was standing two meters from the fuller's trough.

I did not know what the tanner's goods were going toward. I did not ask. I wrote that there were two trades, that there were twelve working hands by my count, that the smell was hides and wet wool, that neither trade was named in the distant account and neither was hidden.

The fuller looked up once and looked down again.

Rurik came through a gap in the far wall and settled himself on a folded stack of cloth above the trough. He watched the fuller's hands from there. Then he washed a paw.

I wrote: the distant account calls this storage. The near account calls it two trades. Both accounts are of Marrowgreen's back range. Both accounts are kept.

Lano did not move from the entrance. Her nose worked steadily at the air. After a while she pressed close against my leg and I put my hand briefly on her head.

We stayed until the working hands began to slow with the hour, and then I walked back through the south passage and added to the sheet what the sheet had been missing.

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