Dream d2097-s: Brackenlea, Grove Day Twenty-Eight

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the terraces held water the way the Foundry never held heat.

We worked through the morning without discussion, the five of us spread across the stepped planting rows while the Hummingbird Wardens made their circuit overhead: dart, hover, snap, the same arc at the same interval they had kept every morning we had been here. Not a pattern learned but a pattern that simply was. You could rest your eyes on it.

The Book of Readings sat wrapped in its travel cloth at the terrace's high corner, singed spine turned away from the light. I had carried it up myself. It weighed the same as it always had, which felt important.

The Builder was beside me on the lower row, pressing seed-holes with her thumb at intervals I could not read the logic of. She reached once for the tamping rod, a habit, and then set it back without using it. The grove does not want force. She knew it. Her hands knew it before the rest of her agreed. We did not speak about it. The earth is soft here, persistently soft, and after twenty-eight days you stop being surprised by what it accepts.

Lano trotted the terrace edge with her nose low, pausing at each planted row, ears sifting. She found something in the third terrace that interested her and then lost interest in it and circled back to sit at my feet for a while. Rurik was further up the slope, moving slowly between seedling stakes with a length of tie-cord, his movements particular and patient in the way that animals who have survived many seasons become particular and patient. The Weather Reader stood at the canopy line with her instruments, gauging the south wind that had been turning all afternoon. She called down once: soft dry air, no blight pressure, good night for the reading.

At dusk the Loomkeepers gathered where the canopy dips lowest over the reading-row. They work in silence except for the small sound of grass-thread pulling through grass-thread. The entry was Brackenlea, entry twenty-six of the circuit. I watched one Loomkeeper take three grass strands and begin a knot sequence I could not follow but recognized as the same structure they use when a place has given something to the road rather than taken from it. When they were done the seed went in, the Builder's thumb pressing the hole open and her palm closing it after.

The Starling Chorus wheeled once over the canopy, low, and called out a single phrase: the night is still. Then it was gone.

We sat at the terrace edge a while after, the five of us, the Book between us in its cloth, the grove neither changed nor unchanged. Only what grows in it.