Dream d2100-s: Nettlesquare Goes Into the Ground

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the Starling Chorus climbed the dusk in one body, a dark wheel against the orange haze above the canopy, and when it called it called as a single thing: The graft on the east terrace held. The blight wind has turned south. A seed-planting tonight.

We heard it the way people who have been somewhere long enough hear news - not as announcement but as confirmation of what the body had already sensed. Rurik's ears had gone back an hour ago, tracking something in the air. He said, satisfied, "The east terrace." That was all.

The Weather Reader had her gauges out on the lower bench, the small brass instruments she keeps in the inner pocket away from smoke. She had been comparing her pressure-readings against the Chorus's morning calls for a week running and had said nothing about it until tonight, when she finally said, quietly: "They are exact. Not approximate. Exact to the margin of the gauge itself." She tapped the barometer face once, as if confirming something she had suspected but hadn't wanted to trust yet.

The Builder turned on the bench beside her. "Does that trouble you?"

"It changes what I trust," the Weather Reader said, which was different from an answer but perhaps more honest.

Lano had been watching the Chorus wheel and descend. She padded to the terrace edge, nose lifted, reading whatever the bird-turn had stirred in the air, then turned back to us and settled against the Book where it rested propped on its corner against the planting-wall. The spine is singed in a stripe the width of two fingers - the color of old iron - but every page holds. She put her chin on the cover and was still.

The Loomkeepers came at dusk proper, when the loomlight came up warm and green-edged in the nest-rows overhead. They had the entry for Nettlesquare in their beaks already, thread-ends trailing, and they read it in their way: not in words but in knots, each knot a name, a row completed where a row had been open. The circuit has twenty-nine entries now. I watched the canopy receive it, the new row caught and tensioned into the weave above us, and I could not have said what it meant exactly except that it meant it happened and is kept.

The Builder brought the seed-parcel forward. The planting was brief and practical - a pressed hole, the seed dropped, the earth returned over it without ceremony, because ceremony here is the act itself and needs no frame.

Thirty-one days the grove has stood as it stands. The terraces have not changed. The canopy has not changed. What has changed is what grows in it, quietly, under its own press.