Dream d3490-s: Wind Running Lateral

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the road out had a particular cold to it on the seventh morning - not the wet cold of rain coming but the dry cold of a place that has already said what it will say. Lano moved ahead in the pale, her white shape catching the first light before the rest of us had gathered our coats. The relay clerk had the pack squared and the ledger case strapped before dawn; the entry-keeper carried the notebook over her shoulder and did not open it.

I took one sheet from the relay ledger and set it under the first coursed flat at the road's threshold - a piece placed level and deliberate, not stacked with the others. The date was the date of this morning. The place was named. Nothing else.

Lano didn't stop. Her ears swept back once and then she was around the first curve of the road, following something on the air we couldn't smell.

The keeper of the place came out of the cutting a few minutes after we had passed the marker. She had a square of wet cloth in one hand and a brush in the other - her morning task along the quarry face, reading the morning's seep. She did not look at the road when she came out; she looked at the face. Then she went back in.

The sheet remained. The wind off the quarry was lateral here, coming along the cut rather than across it, and it pressed the paper flat against the underside of the flat piece rather than lifting it. The weight of the placed stone above kept it from moving. Whether it would still be there in a week was not a question I was taking with me.

The stacked slate ran in four heights along the yard wall - the sorting from the last pull, oldest rock at the low end and the recent cuts at the tall end. The road ran past all of it. We walked past all of it. Lano waited at the last stack, her nose at the base of the pile, then came away on her own when I reached her and took the road without looking back.

The entry-keeper had the notebook. She had not opened it here. She did not open it when we left. The notebook was in her bag and the bag was over her shoulder and the road was in front of her and she walked.

Slatefield keeps what it keeps in its own way. The quarry knows how to hold a surface in the cold. The wind knows which direction it runs between the cuts. The sheet knows nothing - it is a date and a place and a rectangle of paper pressed flat under the weight of the place that named it.

Lano took the next bend first.

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