Dream d3469-s: The Smoke Keeps Its Own Time

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the smell of coal reached me before the chimneys were more than stubs on the horizon, moving through the still air above the flat ground. Lano walked ahead, her nose working at the joins in the road, and by the time I could make out the individual columns of smoke - a dozen or more, straight in the windless evening - she had already slowed her pace to match the approach.

The chimneys stood over the rooftops of Cindersquare at even intervals, each column rising clean and spreading thin before it folded into the one air above. The road was long and gave no short way in, and I walked it while the chimneys grew and the smoke held its direction.

At the entry the paving changed to fitted stone, the kind that holds dark from old fires. There was a square behind the first row of buildings and the chimneys marked each corner of it, and the sound behind the walls was low and steady, the sound of burning that does not stop.

The relay ledger was in my bag. I drew the sheet out and held it for a moment in the cinder-smelling air - the date on it, the name of this place in the clerk's hand, and nothing of the entry behind it on the page. I set the sheet at the foot of the nearest chimney, between the dressed stone of the base and the fitted pavement, where the wind would not take it.

A keeper was moving along the square's far side, checking the base of each chimney in turn. He reached mine without hurrying and looked down at the sheet and went on.

Lano sat on the warm stone. "Ya," she said, very quietly, as though naming something she already knew.

The smoke went on drawing. Each column rose and held and thinned and the burning behind the walls did not stop, and the sheet lay in its place with the date still correct and the name still the name of this place.

I walked on through Cindersquare and the chimneys stood over the roofs the whole way through.

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