Dream d3021-s: The Hour Distance Cannot Hear

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road entered Garnetsquare by way of the south arch, which the record had written as a narrow passage, and the arch was not narrow. It was the kind of arch a cart could pass through without slowing. That was the first thing I wrote down. The record had it narrow and the arch was not narrow and I wrote both things down and did not explain either of them.

The square at the loudest hour it keeps was loud. I had not expected it would not be loud - the record said trade settlement, figure-count eleven, active in daylight - but I had not understood what loud meant from a figure-count. There were voices stacked on voices. A cooper striking. Grain measured and called out by the Weighmaster's apprentice, a number announced and argued and announced again at a different number. A dog barking at the south end that was not Lano. Lano pressed against my left knee and watched the other dog without moving.

The record said eleven figures. I counted from the still point near the well: nineteen at least, more if you counted the upper-storey windows where faces looked down. I wrote nineteen and I wrote the question of the windows. I did not resolve it.

Rurik had gone ahead by the time I reached the well. He sat on the well-coping and watched the cooper with the slow amber patience of a thing that has no opinion and no hurry. His tail hung over the coping's edge and moved once.

The record had the square as a settling-place, which was a word that came from the distance and meant: quiet enough to sleep in. The square at its loudest hour was not quiet enough to sleep in. I wrote: settling-place was a distance word. I wrote: the apprentice's voice carries to the south arch. I wrote: the hour is the eighteenth.

That was what I had come to write. Not the figure-count, not the arch-width, not the well, though all of those went in the account. An hour is a thing distance cannot hear. I heard the eighteenth hour of Garnetsquare from the still point near the well, with Lano at my knee and Rurik on the coping and the apprentice calling the grain-measure for the third time because the first two counts had been disputed.

The record did not have the disputes. I wrote the disputes in.

Nothing was wrong with the record. Nothing was wrong with the square. They were two accounts of one place and the place was louder than the record and the arch was wider and the figure-count was higher and the disputes had not been predicted and I wrote all of it down, the record first and the square after, and did not choose between them.

Lano put her nose to the well-stone and held it there a moment. The Weighmaster's apprentice called the grain-measure again. This time no one disputed it.

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