Dream d2092-s: A Coin of Gold Light

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the evening came in sideways through the canopy, breaking into small pieces before it reached us. The Loomkeepers had the Book of Readings open on the central terrace, the singed spine propped against a low post they had set for just this purpose, and they were working entry twenty-one into the nest-rows above our heads, beak by beak, grass-thread by grass-thread.

I sat with Rurik on the lower terrace step. He had his front paws crossed and was watching the Loomkeepers with the kind of attention a cat gives to something that moves without being prey. "They don't stop," he said, not to me exactly, not to the air exactly.

"They have twenty entries behind them," the Builder said from where she sat cross-legged with her notebook across her knees. She wasn't writing in it. She was watching the canopy the way you watch a fire when the fire is the thing that matters. "Twenty entries in twenty evenings. They didn't stop for rain."

The Weather Reader had her arm raised at the wrist, reading something in the air the rest of us couldn't parse. "South tonight," she said. "Warm. The blight wind has not found this bowl yet." She lowered her arm slowly and watched the Loomkeepers a moment longer. "Nettlefall was a crossing," she said. "I remember the crossing."

We all did. Nettlefall was entry twenty-one, the circuit's longest stop, and the Book carried it in ink gone slightly grey at the edges from age. The Loomkeeper working the row closest to the canopy peak made a particular knot, paused, and added a second one beside it. I didn't know the grammar of it. I suspected the second knot was the rainfall.

Lano had been curled at my hip. She lifted her head, nose working, and then set it back down on my knee with a small sound. Buena. Grove day twenty-three. She knew the rhythm now.

The Hummingbird Wardens made their third arc of the evening perimeter right as the canopy above the Nettlefall row went still, the Loomkeepers shifting their weight back in the way that meant: this entry is set. One of the Wardens paused mid-hover at the east hedge, its wings a sound more than a sight, and then snapped sideways and was gone into the terracing. No ember, no blight. Just the circuit.

Then a Loomkeeper descended to the lower terrace, carrying the Nettlefall seed in its beak, and set it in the prepared soil without ceremony, without looking up.

The canopy let through a slow coin of gold light that crossed my foot and kept moving.

The Builder closed her notebook. "Twenty-two tomorrow," she said.

"Yes," I said.