Dream d3520-s: Nine Places and the Road After

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where Lano had gone ahead before I finished folding the last sheet. She was already on the road's first bend, nose down in the verge, and I could see the white of her in the gray light before the rooflines had properly separated from the sky. The square lay behind me. I did not turn to look at it again.

The sheet I left was a date and a place and nothing further. I had pressed it into the recess below the notice board at the square's north corner, where someone had already set a flat stone to weight whatever was placed there. The stone was waiting when I arrived. The entry-keeper did not watch me set the sheet. I put it under the stone and walked.

By the time I reached Lano, Dunnesquare was a sound more than a shape: a door drawing open somewhere past the bakehouse, a shutter pulled back on its pin, the particular quiet of a square that has done its holding for the night and is releasing into morning. The sheet would still be under the stone. Whether the keeper saw it, whether anyone read the date or recognized the name of the place in the printed line, I had no way to know from the road. The square would keep the sheet the way such places keep what they have not asked for: out of the weather, going slowly the color of the corner, folded into the ledge.

The notebook rode against my hip on the left side. Its clasp was cold when I touched it. It had been shut for seven nights and it was shut now. The road had given no reason to open it and I had not opened it.

At the ledger-house before I left, the relay clerk had made the count aloud without ceremony: nine places carried the account now. The clerk had not asked what the account was worth. The entry-keeper had pressed the last sheet into my hand without reading it, folded it once, and gone back through the door. Neither of them said anything about the notebook.

Lano was waiting at the first tree line, ears up, watching the way ahead. She made a small sound, not a bark, and then turned and went forward into the morning without looking back.

The square stood empty behind us. The account was in nine places. The way ahead was unfinished and we walked into it.

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