Dream d3482-s: The Road That Crosses Once

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood on the ridge at the seventh night and the walls of Ospreyfield were far below, small in the open field. Lano sat at my heel. The road ran straight across the ground and crossed the field once and did not return.

The relay clerk had stayed below at the last village and the entry-keeper had taken a different path down. I carried the sheet alone.

I could count the broken courses from here: three walls still standing to the height of a shoulder, one reduced to rubble, and one that held a lintel stone over nothing. That was new to see - the lintel stone. I had not looked long enough on the other nights to find it as its own fact, a stone that remained in position when both walls beneath it had fallen away, bridging the air between two absences.

I descended. The field was wet underfoot and the road had a sound to it, a soft creak of old gravel under the mud. Lano moved ahead and then stopped at the base of the first wall and turned back once.

A keeper of the place was there by the lintel stone. Not waiting, not watching - he had been working with a length of rope, a field repair of the kind that tends no particular thing. He did not stop when I came near.

I set the dated sheet inside the angle of the lintel, where the stone made a shelf of itself. The wind came across the field and the sheet did not move.

The keeper glanced at it once. He did not pick it up. He returned to the rope.

That was what Ospreyfield did with it. The lintel held the sheet against the wind. The keeper glanced and did not ask. The dormant field went on being dormant in the last of the evening light.

Lano circled the base of the fallen wall once, nose down, and came back to stand beside me.

I stayed long enough to see the sheet flatten against the stone. Then I climbed back to the ridge and the road below became a line again, one pale line crossing the wide field, and the lintel stone was too small to find from that distance.

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