Dream d3438-s: The Road Still Raked

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I was already past the arch when I heard the rake.

Not stopping. I knew the sound - the dry drag of tines across the lane behind me, the same rhythm it had kept for the eight nights I had slept under Umbermarket's lintels. Someone was raking the square. I did not turn.

Lano sat at the base of the arch. She had not followed me through. She faced back into the market, her ears lifted, her small white shape set against the stone like a marker someone had placed and meant to leave. I stood on the unpaved road beyond the arch and waited to see if she would come. She did not. The rake went on.

The notebook was in my pack, its cover pressing through the cloth. I had stopped carrying it in my hands the day before yesterday. It was not that I expected less of it, or expected more - only that I had stopped expecting. Whatever the entries called on, they called on without my doing. Thirty-nine places in the record, never once named aloud by the place itself. Umbermarket was one of six I had witnessed. It had its dormant condition. It did not explain itself, and I had stopped asking it to.

The entry-keeper was somewhere behind me in the market; I had seen her at the far table as I left, running a hand across a line of figures without reading them. The relay clerk had not come for the notebook. The keeper of the place was the one raking - or someone was raking on behalf of someone who tended things. I could not see. The arch was between us.

I sat down on the road's edge and put my pack beside me. The stones were still warm from the day. Lano padded through the arch at last, crossed to me, pressed her nose to the side of my knee, then sat down in the dust facing back toward the market. The rake moved. A door opened somewhere and did not close.

I did not take the notebook out. The road ahead was unfinished in the way that all roads are unfinished - another village farther on, another night, another column in a record I was not the author of. Umbermarket would go on doing what it did. The rake would reach the end of its row and begin again, or the person holding it would set it against a wall and go inside, and either way the square would look the way it had looked before I came.

Lano lifted her head. After a while I stood, picked up my pack, and walked.

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