Dream d3485-s: What the Wall Knew

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the wall at Slatefield ran low along the lane, moss thick between its cap-slates, and the gate was open when we arrived. Not unlatched and drifting - fully open, pinned back against the post as though it had been that way since morning or longer. The lane beyond it was empty in both directions.

Lano moved ahead of me along the wall's inner face, nose low, reading something in the damp. I carried the single leaf from the relay ledger, folded once - the relay clerk's hand had marked a day in the upper field and the place name below it, nothing more on either side. The entry-keeper had left it pressed flat at the relay post that morning; it had traveled in my pocket since the road forked above the valley.

I set the leaf against the inner face of the gate post, in the angle where the masonry was sheltered from the wind. Not wedged tight - just placed there, the way you set a thing down when you mean for it to stay.

The wall gave back nothing. The lane went on empty. Lano sniffed the foot of the post and then sat back on her haunches and looked out through the gate, ears up, though there was no sound.

The light at Slatefield in the second night was amber at the low places, the kind that comes when cloud sits just above the hills and gathers what warmth the ground has given up. The moss on the cap-slates was close to black in that light. The gate's iron latch caught a thread of it.

I did not watch to see what happened to the leaf. The place would do with it what it did with weather and with seasons and with the names of people who had stood at this same post and looked out at the same empty lane. That is not mine to follow.

Lano turned once to look at me, then turned back to the lane.

I walked on through the gate and the lane received the sound of my footsteps. The wall stayed. The gate stayed open. Slatefield kept itself as it had been, with one more thing in the angle of the masonry that it had not held before.

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