Dream d2075-s: Iron in the Ground

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the sixth morning in the seed-grove broke over the terraces like water poured slowly, gold and green, and I stood with the Book open in my hands while the light found the singed spine and turned it amber.

The Weaverbird Loomkeepers had been at work since before the dew lifted. They moved through the upper nest-rows with beaks full of grass-thread, knotting - each loop a name, each row a stay. I watched one anchor a strand to a post that curved outward over the third terrace, its motion no faster than necessary, nothing forced. Beside me, the Builder stood with her arms loose at her sides, and I saw the moment she noticed: the sapling staked in the fourth row, its thin trunk braced not with iron rods but with a braid of split green reed, coaxed upright and left to lean just slightly into the support.

"I would have used a post," she said, quietly.

"I know," I said.

She said nothing else, but she watched the Loomkeepers a long time after that.

The Weather Reader stood on the upper terrace with her instruments tilted to the canopy gaps, reading the morning's small pressure shifts. She reported nothing alarming: the blight wind had moved south, the Starling Chorus confirmed it with a single cry that rolled across the nest-rows like a thrown stone and was gone. She came down at midday and sat beside Lano, who had her nose pressed to the base of a new seedling, nostril working through the turned soil. The Weather Reader scratched Lano's ears. Lano's tail moved once, satisfied, and she stayed where she was.

Rurik spent the afternoon in the high corner of the second terrace, watching the Hummingbird Wardens make their circuit. They came through at the same angle every pass, same pause at the east post, same dart toward the canopy's underside where an ember-blight spark had drifted in from somewhere south. Gone before it could land. He told me later he had counted four passes and not one varied by a wingbeat.

I wrote in the Book's margin while the light was still good: the grove is a ledger you can stand under.

The singed spine pressed against my palm. Every page held.

At evening the whole Weaverbird flight gathered in the upper row. The reading began at the rim of the canopy and moved inward, one knot at a time. The Ironbrook entry - fourth of the circuit - came off their beaks in thread rather than words, each loop tightening into the weave until the row held the name, the stay, the deed. Then, at the base of the fourth terrace, one Loomkeeper pressed a small seed into turned soil, smoothed the earth over it without haste, and was gone.

The grove does not change, I wrote. Only what grows in it.