Dream d2109-s: The Terrace Holds Water

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the fortieth morning at Weaverdown came in low and green, the canopy catching last night's rain in a thousand small cups that dripped into the terraced rows below.

We worked the upper terrace through the morning hours, the five of us spread along the ridge. The Builder moved beside me, her hands restless at the lip of each furrow. I watched her twice reach for a seedling that was listing and pull back before she touched it; the Loomkeepers say you press the heel of your palm against the soil and wait for the root to find direction, you do not redirect the stem. She knew this. I could see her knowing it in the stillness before the almost-grip, in the deliberate opening of her fingers.

"It's slower," she said, not to me, to the furrow.

"Slower than what?" I asked.

She did not answer, but she pressed her palm flat against the soil instead and held it there until the seedling found its own cant toward the light. Something worked itself out in her hands that had not yet been resolved in words.

Lano trotted the row ahead of us, nose low. She paused at each planted stake and sniffed the tilled ring, a small inventory of what was taking and what was not. Bueno, I thought, watching her ears tilt at something in the far terrace before she trotted on.

The Weather Reader stood at the canopy edge mid-afternoon and called the sky: a backing wind from the northwest, the kind that carries moisture from the upper plateau rather than heat from the lowlands. Good tending weather. Rurik came up beside her and looked where she was looking.

"The Foundry would have burned a backing wind dry before it crossed the ridge," he said.

"Yes," she said. She did not need to say the rest.

The Book of Readings sat in its oilcloth under the terrace ledge, singed spine upward. Its pages were whole. We had not set it down anywhere careless since the night we carried it out, and we would not.

At dusk the Weaverbird Loomkeepers gathered at the upper nest-row, beaks threading dried grass-strand through the woven circuit in the rhythm of the evening reading. Rurik and I came up to watch. The Hummingbird Wardens completed their second circuit of the outer hedge, precise as a tide that has never been late.

The Loomkeepers read the thirty-eighth entry into the canopy: Cinderfold. A knot per name, a row per stay, grass to fiber. When the reading closed the Cinderfold seed went into the ground at the terrace's growing edge. Not pressed in. Placed, and left to decide.