Dream d3301-s: The Keeper's Exact Green

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the lane arrived before the settlement did, or that was how it seemed arriving at night. The grass on either side was cut level with the path's own edge, no blade past the threshold, and Lano moved along beside me with her nose low, finding the seam between the mown and the unmown wherever it ran.

The keeper was already at the gate when we came to it - not waiting, exactly, but present in the way that people who belong to a place are present: already turned toward us before we were close enough to be heard. She carried a lamp, and the amber of it held steady in air that was not moving.

The surveyor walked the lane's perimeter once before she came inside. I watched her take nothing out, no instrument, only move along the cut edge and come back with the same unhurried step she had started with.

At the near end of the lane there was a post with a notch cut into it at a particular height. I did not ask what the height recorded. The clerk stood beside it and wrote in the still air, and the ink was the color of the shadow at the post's base.

Lano stopped at the lamp's pool of light and sat. Her ears were up. Her eyes moved from the keeper to the lane's far end and back. She did not go further into the dark on her own.

Inside - through the gate, past the first row of buildings - the ground held the same care. Short. Level. Every edge where it had been placed. The place went on, and what had been sent from here had traveled without leaving a mark of its going. Nothing here had loosened since.

The keeper said nothing to us. She led and we followed, and the lamp moved ahead along a path that knew exactly how wide it was.

I carried the lantern I had brought for the walk in. Its light did not interfere with hers.

The distant reader did not come through the gate. She watched from there, and the gate stayed open behind us.

Lano pressed herself flat against the first building's wall the way she does when a place is new and not alarming. She let out one breath - quiet, animal, nothing in it.

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