Dream d2995-s: Twice as Long, Half as Certain

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we walked out the far lane from Marrowgreen on the seventh evening, the Surveyor's satchel heavier than it had been that morning, and Lano trotting ahead at the verge with her nose down, catching whatever the lane gave up in the cooling air.

The cost was entered in the ledger by the Surveyor's hand, against the column marked half a day, and beside it in the remarks: description twice the length, certainty halved. That is the arithmetic of entering a place rather than counting it from the ridge. The Surveyor had written Marrowgreen down some weeks back from the high ground and had called it cold and small and the rooftops a little sunken. At the doorway the cold was less and the sunken was more complicated: two rooftops only, one settled badly, one settled deliberately over a low room that wanted its ceiling to press close. Both were entered in the revised sheet. Neither cancelled the first account. The Surveyor drew a bracket and wrote alongside it: ridge-account, doorway-account, and did not choose between them.

Lano waited at the last building on the lane, a front that had been called a store-front at the ridge because of its sign, and that turned out not to be a store-front but a workshop with a sign it had not yet taken down. She sat and watched the door a moment, ears up, then moved on when I moved on.

Rurik had spent the afternoon perched on a low wall at the near end of the lane, watching the Surveyor go in and come out. He came down at dusk and pressed once against the Surveyor's ankle, then walked ahead of all of us to the bend in the far lane, and sat down there. The bend is not yet a named place. Tonight it had a cat sitting in it.

The lane goes past three more settlements before the map edge. The Surveyor's notes say so. What those settlements are like from inside is not in the notes, because we have not yet gone in. Marrowgreen took half a day and gave back a description twice as long and half as certain. That is written down exactly that way. Neither account is wrong and neither is finished and the bracket holds them together on the page.

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