Dream d2090-s: Green Against the Anvil

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we did nothing, and that was the work.

Grove day twenty-one. The Book of Readings sat closed on a terrace stone, its singed spine catching the gold loomlight so you could see exactly where the fire had reached. I had not put it down in three days without opening it. Today I did. The Weather Reader set her barometric glass beside it and did not pick that up either. Rurik stretched out on the warm flagging with his tail curled over his nose, and Lano, small and white among the roots, lifted her face to whatever moved in the canopy above.

"The forge made noise from the inside out," the Builder said. She was watching a Loomkeeper work a loose knot back into a nest-row overhead, beak and a single length of grass-thread. "This place makes noise from the outside in."

I listened. She was right. The sound the grove made was not a sound of exertion. It was the pull of a fiber through wet soil, the press of a frond finding the terrace lip, a patience too slow to call a sound at all. Every noise the Foundry had made was an argument against the next moment. Every noise here was a bet on it.

The Loomkeeper finished the knot without stopping. Pull, loop, set. No hurry in it. Rurik watched with one eye open and then closed it again.

The Hummingbird Wardens made their afternoon circuit at the same light they always made it - the dart through the gap in the east row where ember-blight spores sometimes collected, the snap, the gone-before-you-saw-it return. Exact. No deviation. I had stopped trying to track them by now and just waited for the absence that meant the pass was done.

The Starling Chorus crossed above once, its body folding tight, opening, folding again, and called once: "The west row is taken." A bed of seedlings already spoken for by someone who arrived before us and was now gone. The grove does not change, only what grows in it.

At dusk the Loomkeepers assembled at the south row. Entry nineteen. Marrowwharf. I had read that passage twice in the Book and recognized the shape of it when they began: a long silt flat where ships came in by lung and rope, where every freight receipt was bartered four times before the weight was counted. They set it beak by beak into the canopy cloth, a knot per name, a row per stay. No ceremony. Just the deed going into the weave where it would hold.

The Weather Reader pressed the tip of one finger into the soil at the terrace edge, where the Marrowwharf seed had gone down.

Lano padded over and put her nose to the same spot. She breathed out slowly - bueno, or something close enough to it.

The Book stayed closed all evening. We let it.