Dream d3445-s: Hundred Roofs Below

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the smell of cooling bread reached the bench first, carried from somewhere three streets over and already faint by the time it arrived. I was sitting with the record open across my knees, the page blank, the last of the light coming not from above but from the windows across the square, yellow and domestic, nothing to do with me.

Nettlemarket at the end of the seventh night. The stalls had closed, the square had thinned. A keeper moved along the far side, latching something, not looking over. The relay clerk had finished some time ago; I had not seen which way they went. The entry-keeper had come earlier in the day and gone without asking what I was doing there.

Lano sat at the foot of the bench, her chin on her forepaws, watching the square the way she sometimes watches a door: not expecting it to open, just keeping it company. Her ears moved once when a cart went down a side street. Then she settled.

I held the pen over the page. The entry that Nettlemarket carried in the record had been called on before I came, and in the seven nights I had been here no one had named it. Not the keeper, not the two people who passed the bench and nodded without slowing, not the clerk who read the column and moved on. The square went on without requiring it.

I closed the notebook. Not a decision, more like something already happening that I was the last to notice.

We took the stair. I went first, Lano's nails tapping the stone behind me. Halfway down there was a landing and a gap in the wall and the town came into view below: rooftops pressed together, chimneys, a line of wet washing someone had left overnight going grey in the dark. Smoke from one chimney and none from the others. A lamp still lit somewhere down in the market. I stopped. Behind me on the stair, Lano sat and looked where I looked. A hundred roofs below and none of them named and none of them needing to be.

I kept going. She followed. Nettlemarket was already above us.

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