Dream d3442-s: The Record and the Road

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the gate at Nettlemarket stood open to both directions and I understood, standing just inside it, that it had not been closed in some time.

Traffic moved through in both currents. A man with a cart loaded flat with roof tiles came from the east and passed without looking. Three women with baskets went west, two talking and one watching the sky. A boy leading a brown mule moved east again before the dust from the women had settled. None of them paused. None of them turned their heads toward the entry-keeper, toward the relay clerk, toward the keeper of the place who leaned against the gate stone with the ease of someone who had stood there long enough to become part of its architecture.

Lano sat at my heel and watched the mule until it was gone, her nose following the scent out of sight.

I had the notebook. I did not open it.

The entry-keeper had her ledger on a small folding stand near the inner wall. She was recording something, the scratch of her pen quiet under the sound of wagon wheels on stone. A cart with baled cloth passed while she wrote and she did not look up. The relay clerk stood two steps to her left, saying nothing, holding nothing, watching the traffic with an expression of easy attention.

The keeper of the place peeled a strip of moss from the gate's lower arch and looked at the wall behind it. The stone was sound. He let the moss fall.

A woman carrying a child on one hip and a basket on the other went east. An empty cart, its driver slumped and half-asleep, came west. The traffic did not form itself into a procession or a pattern. It simply went.

Lano stood and padded a few steps toward the road, then stopped. Her tail moved once.

The light was midday and colorless, the sun high enough that nothing cast a shadow worth measuring. The moss on the gate stones was the color of old water. Umber dust had settled in every groove of the stonework.

The entry-keeper turned a page.

I stood at the gate and held the notebook and watched the road run both ways through Nettlemarket and out again, and I did not try to stop any of it, and no one needed me to, and the place continued at its own pace in both directions.

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