Dream d3462-s: Where the Hedge Gives Way

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the path turned at the juniper gap and I stopped because the village was simply there, beyond it, unannounced. No post, no lintel, nothing hung or latched. The hedge pressed in on both sides and the gap between was the width of a wagon, maybe less, and the juniper smelled of resin and old rain.

Lano went through first. She did not wait at the gap or look back; she crossed into the amber light of the village lane and sat in the middle of it, nose up, reading something in the air that I could not reach.

I took the sheet from the ledger roll - one sheet, dated at the top in the relay clerk's hand, the place name below it, and nothing after. I folded it once. The entry keeper had given me the method: a single fold, pressed flat, set at the base of what marks the threshold. Here the threshold was the earth where the hedge roots widened and the turf thinned and the gap began.

I set the sheet at the root of the left hedge-post, where the juniper had grown a low knee of bark, and pressed it into the crook there so the wind would not take it immediately.

The village went on. Smoke from a chimney beyond the first wall. A gate further along the lane standing open in the ordinary way of a gate that has been open all morning. Lano had moved; she was sitting now near a water trough, watching a cat cross a roof on the far side of the square. The cat was not Rurik.

I did not go in. The dream kept me at the gap.

The sheet rested in the bark crook. A moth landed on it and then left. The juniper above released a scatter of dried needles that crossed the white paper and did not cover the date. The warmth of the place was not the warmth of the sun, or not only; it was something the village carried in its stones and its mortar and had been carrying longer than the ledger had been marking names.

The sheet would stay until it did not. The place did not ask what the entry said. It held the date and the name against the bark, and the afternoon leaned on it without reading, and the bark did not need to know.

I watched until Lano came back to the gap and sat at my feet. Then the path continued and we went.

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