Dream d3484-s: Roofs Under Cut Stone

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the open ground ended at a flat line of light and the road went on without bending toward the first roofs of Slatefield.

Lano walked ahead of me on the pale surface of the road, her ears up, reading the still air. The quarry line sat above the settlement like a dark ruled mark on the hillside, worked stone, laid bare, a long horizontal scar that held no weight now but memory of extraction. Below it, the slates of Slatefield caught what remained of the evening in small flat angles. Nothing moved among them.

I carried one sheet from the relay ledger. The entry-keeper had folded it plain before I left the last stopping place, the date set in the top margin and the place name beneath it, and the rest of the page left white. I had not read what the ledger said of Slatefield. The relay clerk had said nothing of it. The notebook was closed and remained so, inside my pack.

At the field's last fence, a low stone course barely knee-high with a gate standing open, I bent and set the sheet against the inside of the stone. A flat piece of slate from the ground made weight enough to hold it there. Lano sat down on the far side and watched me, her tail still, her eyes on the sheet for a moment, then past it toward the roofline.

I straightened and did not look back.

The road ran on straight. The roofs sat under the quarry scar. The worked ground above them had given what it gave and gone quiet, and the slate buildings below had arranged themselves under that mark as though the line explained something they had been waiting to say.

Behind me I could not see what the field did with the sheet. Wind came off the cut hillside in a slow, irregular press. The slate weight would hold or it would not. The entry-keeper had written the date. The place had its name on the paper. Whatever Slatefield was in the record, the paper now held only those two facts, and the field held the paper, and the road ahead had no record of any of it.

Lano moved back to my side and we went on under the quarry line together, between the low walls that began at the first house and the roof slates that sat there without asking what had been entered against them, or what had not.

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