Dream d3299-s: Waiting at the Cut

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the keeper took the lantern and walked away from us across the field, and Lano and I stayed at the ditch.

The water in the cut was black and still. I could see the exposed root-ends of the peat where the bank had been sliced, and the smell of it was deep and cold, the kind of smell that has been underground for a long time. Lano pressed against my ankle. She was watching the lantern shrink.

The keeper did not look back. The lamp swung once when they changed direction around a tussock, amber light catching the fog for a moment, and then they were walking straight again and the fog took the edges of their shape.

This was the ninth night here. I had come to know the sound the field made, a low settling, water finding its own level in channels I could not see. The ditch beside us ran to the east. Earlier the surveyor had measured it, kneeling at the lip with a cord, and the relay clerk had written the number down. Now both of them were gone and the number was somewhere else, being read by someone I would never meet.

Lano's tail moved once. She was not alarmed. She was tracking the light the way she tracked anything that moved slowly enough to be worth watching.

The lantern became a point. Then it became a faint copper smear in the mist. Then it was gone, though I could still tell, roughly, where it was from the shape the darkness took. The field went on settling. A bird called from the reeds at the far edge of the ditch, two short notes, then nothing.

I crouched down and put my fingers in the water along the bank. Cold, with a slight pull in one direction. The peat gave a little under the heel of my hand. Dunnebarrow had been here before we arrived and would be here when we were finished. The ditch had been cut by someone who was not here anymore. The water ran in it now as if it had always run in it.

Lano sat. I sat beside her. The dark was complete and the field was still and the place had no particular feeling about us being in it.

---