Dream d3443-s: Loud Without Walls

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road widened without announcement. I felt it before I understood it - the shoulders of the path pulling apart, the verge giving way to packed earth, then to stone sets that ran forward until the distance took them. Lano moved to the center of the road and stopped, her nose lifting into air that carried the city before the city carried itself into sight.

Sound first: a sustained note made of a hundred smaller notes that had forgotten their separateness. Cart iron on stone. Voices in argument, in transaction, in greeting. A hammer's repeat somewhere high. The low drag of a load moving slowly. All of this before a single roof.

I had the notebook. I had not opened it in three days of walking. The entry-keeper walked at my left, not consulting her own record, not asking to see mine. The relay clerk was farther back, marking the distances in her own way. We did not speak about what we were doing.

A keeper of the place came from the verge ahead - not to meet us, just walking the same direction at an angle that would cross ours. He had a sack over one shoulder and moved like someone at the end of a long morning. He did not look at us with recognition or with wariness. He looked at us the way a gate looks at everyone who passes through.

Lano watched him go by.

The sound grew. The smell changed - coal, something sweet, the warm must of a place where people had been living for a long time. The first roofline appeared above the gradual rise: a tower, its top half only, floating in the grey air before the walls gave it a base.

I knew this city. I had been here. Not in memory - in the record, where it appeared and was given its name and its condition and then was called on again and the calling was not answered with a dream. Twice something was witnessed here and written. The rest was silence in the account.

The road stayed wide. We walked on it.

Lano put her nose to the stone sets where something had been spilled, then straightened and moved forward. Her tail moved once. She was not waiting for me to catch up or for me to say anything. She was already going into the sound.

The entry-keeper did not record our arrival. The relay clerk did not announce it. I carried the notebook in my coat and felt its small weight and did not look at it. The city grew louder. The first walls showed. The place went on, as it was going on when no one was here to write it down, as it will go on after this.

---