Dream d3377-s: Sixth Night at the Gate

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the gate post at Harrowbridge was already known when I arrived - not known to me exactly, but known by the warmth the stone gave back when I set my hand against it.

The clerk sat on a low stool at the post, a small lamp angled close, and wrote the date without looking up. On a separate line, in smaller figures, the straw count from the other side: what had been taken, how much, when. The lamp moved once when Lano pressed past, and the figures steadied.

I carried the notebook inside my coat, spine against my ribs. Nobody asked about it. The keeper moved along the fence line with a length of cord, tying off a loose section that did not need urgent tying - or perhaps it did; I could not tell and did not look long enough to decide. The surveyor stood at the edge of the pool of lamplight, facing back toward the road we had come by, as though taking a count of what was behind us and not yet named.

Lano turned twice in the grass before settling near the post. The place had a smell she found meaningful - something she kept returning her nose to, just above ground, just below where the stone was set. She did not explain it. The distant reader was not visible but I had the sense of someone reading from a long way off, not this text but something else, something running parallel and at its own pace.

This was the sixth night. The gate had been passed five times before us in account, and each account had left a warmth that sat in the stone now, available but not announced. I stood with the notebook pressed against me and waited to see if the place would ask for it. The clerk finished the straw line and held the pen above the next blank space. The keeper tied the second knot without cutting the cord. Lano's ear turned once toward a sound from the far side of the gate - not alarmed, just attending.

The place went on. A horse somewhere past the fence moved weight from one foot to another. The lamp made a small sound of its own. None of them reached for the notebook, none of them knew it was there or needed to know.

The presence it was looking for was not here yet. Or it was here already, and the place knew what the notebook held, and did not need it said aloud.

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