Dream d2098-s: Willowmoss Enters the Row

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the evening had gone soft by the time the Loomkeepers began.

We sat on the lower terrace, all five of us, with the Book resting across my knees - heavier than it had any right to be for something made of paper and cord, and the spine still carried that particular char that sits at the back of the nose. The Hummingbird Wardens passed overhead in their circuit: the same arc, the same interval, as reliable as a drawn line. I could hear their wings but had stopped watching them. You learn, in twenty-nine days, that they do not need watching.

The Builder had taken off her outer wrap and folded it flat under herself on the terrace stone. She was watching the canopy with the focused patience she usually reserved for a joint she was about to pin. Rurik sat at her left, black cat in the last of the daylight, ears canted toward the loom-row where the Loomkeepers were lifting the Book's page for the twenty-seventh entry of the circuit.

The Weather Reader stood at the terrace edge with one hand pressed flat to the warm stone. "South wind is going to back overnight," she said, not to anyone in particular, the way she said most weather - as a fact arrived, not a forecast.

"Good for the new planting?" I asked.

She tilted her head. "Good enough."

The Loomkeepers carried the Willowmoss entry the way they carry everything: beaks and grass-thread, no hands, no ink, working the page's edges in small bright pulls. They do not read aloud. The reading is the weaving. A name becomes a knot; a stay becomes a row; the grid of the canopy holds what the ground once held.

We had watched this twenty-six times before. Lano had learned the rhythm of it. She was curled at the outer edge of my knee, chin on her paws, but her ears came up when the first knot was pulled tight.

"Vaya," I said, under my breath.

The tail stirred once.

The Starling Chorus shifted on the far hedge, a single condensed shape turning in on itself, then spoke: "The sky is holding." That was all. Grove night always comes in clean.

The Builder said, quietly, "Twenty-seven." She said it the way she counts a course of material - satisfaction without ceremony.

"Twenty-seven," I agreed.

When the Loomkeepers finished the knot-row, one descended to the fourth terrace with the seed in its beak. The hole was ready, pressed by a flat stone that had been lying there since morning. The seed went in. The stone went back.

The canopy shifted above us, coins of light moving where the weave had a new gap, and then the surrounding rows adjusted and it was almost as it had been - not quite. Never quite. Willowmoss was in there now.

I held the Book. The singed spine was warm from my hands.

"Twenty-eight is Brackenlea," Rurik said, from his side of the Builder. He had been counting all this time.

"Tomorrow," she said.

Lano's ears settled. The Wardens took their next arc. The grove did not change - only what grew in it.