Dream d3479-s: The Keeper at the Far Edge

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where Lano found the stone before I did.

She had gone ahead at the wall's end, her nose low along the ground, and I followed the sound of her moving through the dry grass until the fallen stone appeared: broader than I remembered stones being, flat in the way of a lintel rather than a foundation, its upper face pale with three clusters of crustose lichen, one of them the color of old bone.

I set the dated sheet at the center of the pale face and took the shard from my coat pocket. The shard had come from the wall itself, its one curved edge fitted to a rounded corner I had not measured, its weight enough. I laid it on the near corner of the sheet and stepped back.

Lano did not step back. She stood at the stone's edge with her nose pointed toward the far side of the field, and I looked where she looked. A keeper moved along the ditch line, keeping to the low ground, not approaching. The figure did not stop. The movement was the movement of someone who had already noted the sheet and the shard and was continuing on a route that predated both.

I did not call out.

The sheet lay with its date facing up. The damp of the stone came through it slowly. One of the lichen clusters grew at the sheet's edge, and where the paper touched it the lichen was still. Nothing read the sheet. The shard held.

A moth crossed the pale face of the stone, passing from the eastern cluster toward the ditch. It crossed the sheet without settling. Lano watched it until it was gone.

I counted the ribs of the central lichen cluster: three in the disc, seven along its outer margin. By the time I finished, the keeper had moved through the ditch line and into the treeline at the field's north edge. Ospreyfield went on. The sheet stayed a sheet. The date on it remained the date.

Lano pressed her flank against my calf.

"Bueno," she said, very quietly.

I did not reply.

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