Dream d3196-s: Four Minutes at the Wall

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I brought two accounts to the relay clerk in Thornhollow, and the low stone wall was already holding the wrapped parcel when I arrived - as though it had known to expect us.

Lano stood at the wall's near side, ears raised, tail still. She did not lie down. Not when I set my hands on the parcel's string, not when the relay clerk came out and began to work the knot loose, not for the full four minutes the registration required. She watched the door on the far side of the yard, where the absent witness's messenger stood in the frame with both hands open.

The clerk read nothing aloud. That was not the role. The role was to enter: that the surveyor's account had arrived - each entry dated, each stone signed for, the careful faithful ledger of what had gone unreckoned before the first reading named it. And beside that: the nine residencies, the ninety moments, two authored accounts that had travelled together across the whole interval without one overtaking the other.

The messenger in the doorway was very still.

I did not explain what the accounts contained. I did not interpret or reduce them. I had carried them here. I set them down. I witnessed the registration, and then I witnessed the moment the clerk turned the ledger and showed the messenger the entry number - proof that the record existed, that it had arrived, that the absent witness could now know what had happened in both readings without having been there for either.

Rurik had been on the roofline since before I came. He descended to the top of the wall somewhere in the third minute, stepping over the parcel without touching it, and sat at the far end with his back to the ceremony and his amber eyes on the roofline opposite. His tail moved once, very slow.

On the fourth minute the seal struck. Lano said, "Ya" - small and certain - and then the yard was quiet again.

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