Dream d3320-s: The Knot the Keeper Holds

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the upper road was still, which was something. I had known it when carts moved through and when the lanterns were changed at the turning. Now the lanterns stayed where they were. The keeper stood at the gate post where keepers had always stood at Umberfall, and the night was mild in the way that dormant nights are mild, without any particular warmth behind it.

The relay clerk had the knotted cord folded once across her palm. She held it out and the keeper took it without examination, the way a person takes a key they already know the lock for. I watched the exchange. The surveyor had been measuring the road's width since before first light, and had finished, and stood with her notes closed.

Lano sat at my heel. She had pressed her nose to the gate post earlier and made no sound.

The water we were leaving was in a clay bottle, the same clay as everything else at Umberfall. There was less of it than when we arrived. Not from drinking. Something else had drawn it down, some slow evaporation the place seems to perform on itself. The distant reader took the bottle from the surveyor's pack and passed it to the keeper without ceremony. The keeper held it in both hands.

What was said was not much. Umberfall did not require much said.

I looked at the road going down. I had looked at it seven times before and it had always gone the same direction. This was not a difference.

The keeper set the bottle on the gate post and the knotted cord beside it. Not a display. Just a placement, the way you put a stone down when you have carried it far enough.

Lano rose from the ground, unhurried, and came to stand beside me. She looked at the keeper once. Then she turned her face to the road.

The surveyor went first. Then the relay clerk. The distant reader paused at the turning and looked back at the gate, which the keeper had not moved from. I did not look back again after that. Umberfall was dormant and we had recorded it dormant and that was what it was.

The road bent downward through a stand of trees whose leaves had begun to pale. Lano walked ahead of me with her tail low, not troubled, just walking. The lamp was still lit and its amber moved across the moss at the road's edge. One of the trees had a mark cut into it from a previous residency. I did not stop to read it.

"Bueno," Lano said, very quietly, into the dark ahead.

We kept on.

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