Dream d3032-s: What the Line Did Not Hold

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the party sat on the outer moss with packs set down and the Recorder opened the sheet to the single line that gave Fennmoss its account. One line. The Field Register had written it three months before from a height of road, looking down into the settlement as one looks at a figure through rain. Fennmoss: cold houses in irregular arrangement, population thin or absent, no working hearth visible. That was the line.

We had been four days inside it.

The Ledger-Walker read out the tally. Sixteen houses found with roofs intact. Eight of those had doors that opened without force and interiors dry and swept, or swept recently enough that the dust had not reformed. Three had traces of last winter's ash in the grate. The cold houses were colder than a working house but less ruined than the sheet described. What the line called absence was in some cases intermittent presence. What it called ruin was in most cases vacancy, which is not the same thing.

I wrote that in the margin beside the original line, not crossing it out, not explaining it. The second account sits beneath the first.

Lano had her nose to the moss the entire time the reading went on. Her ears lifted once when the Ledger-Walker said the number eight. Then she lowered her head and went still, the way a dog goes still when there is nothing to pursue.

The Checker had the count of what the sheet called on without naming from inside: thirty-seven places cited in relation to Fennmoss, cited as reference for distance or comparison, and of those thirty-seven, not one had been entered and written from the threshold. They were cited from the same height of road that gave Fennmoss its single line. Distance cites freely.

Four days for one line. The Recorder did not say it as a complaint, only as the count.

Rurik had gone ahead at the eastern fork on day two and sat in the doorway of the seventh house for the better part of an afternoon, amber eyes open in the dim, until the Survey entered to see what the cat had found worth watching. Inside: two iron pots, a bed-frame sound enough to sleep on, a window that someone had recently cleared of its internal frost - recently enough that the clearing still held. The Survey noted all three. Rurik was gone before the writing was done.

On the outer moss the party reckoned: seventy-two places still only a name and a number in the sheet. Twenty-nine lit and working. Sixteen cold. Thirty-seven cited and never entered. Of the fifty-five walked into and written from inside, a portion had given back accounts that did not match what the sheet described, and both versions were kept, and neither was settled.

Lano made a small sound - aquí - and pressed against my knee.

I put a hand on her back. The Recorder folded the sheet into the register. The fire on the outer moss burned down to the size of a thing that can be kept through the night.

Fennmoss was one line and became thirty-one pages and is not finished yet.

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