Dream d3476-s: At the Height of a Knee

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the field was open in the way that fields are open before first light, without apology and without end. I came to it from the road that dips at the edge of the older settlement, Lano trotting beside me with her nose low to the frost-stiffened grass, reading what the field had already held that night.

The walls stood in it. Four of them, or the remnants of four: each broken to the height of a knee, the stone still there but the purpose above it gone. Lichen covered the cut faces. The interior - whatever Ospreyfield had once been interior to - was open to the sky now, and the sky was gray and close and did not refuse it.

I stopped at the threshold where a lintel would have been.

The relay clerk had given me the sheet before I left the road. A date. A place name. Nothing of the entry behind it. I had not asked what the entry held and the clerk had not offered it. That was the compact between us.

I set the sheet at the base of the eastern wall and weighted it with a stone from the ground and stood up.

Lano did not come into the enclosure. She sat at the threshold gap and watched me with her ears forward, the tip of her white tail moving once. Then she looked into the interior as if she were reading something I could not read.

The sheet lay against the stone. The field pressed around it: the frost, the gray light beginning to pale before it turned, the grass that had grown through the old floor and grown again and was still growing. A wren passed low over the north wall and did not pause.

I did not wait to see what the place would do with the sheet. That is not how the ledger works. I walked back to the threshold, passed Lano, and she rose and came with me without looking back.

Behind us the field took up its keeping. The sheet against the wall was the only new thing in it, and the field received it the way a field receives everything: without hurry, without remark, as one more particular of the long count.

The wind came across the open ground and pressed itself against the broken walls and found, as it had found for years, no resistance worth naming.

Lano pressed her flank against my ankle once. "Mira," she said, and then we were on the road again, and Ospreyfield was behind us, keeping what it kept.

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