Dream d2115-s: Cinderfold Goes Into the Ground

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the terraces smelled of wet clay and green work, and the morning opened slow the way only Weaverdown mornings did.

We were on the mid-slope terrace by the third bell, the five of us, pulling the loose-packed moss from the seed channels and working the soil back in with our hands. The Loomkeepers had shown us the method on our first day here: never press, only coax. Water the channel, let it settle, coax it again. The grove holds nothing by force.

The Builder was beside me on the uphill edge, and I watched her hands move toward the packed clay at the channel lip with the old instinct - fingers braced to press it down, to set it by will. She caught herself and laid her palm flat instead, spreading the weight, waiting. She did not say anything. The lesson was already in her hands before either of us named it. Rurik noticed from the terrace below and let out a short sound that was not quite a laugh, warm and quick, and the Builder set her mouth sideways and went back to coaxing.

Lano worked the lower terrace in her own way, nose to the soil between seed-mounds, tail going, padding the length of the channel and back. The Weather Reader read the afternoon sky from the terrace rail and said the moisture would hold through the planting. A blight wind had turned east, the Starling Chorus had called it at midday - a single wheel of bodies over the canopy edge, one voice: The blight wind turned. Then gone. Two Hummingbird Wardens made their circuit at the sixteenth beat of the afternoon precisely, a dart over the north row, a snap of wings at something too small for me to see. A spark caught before it could become anything. The same circuit at the same light as every day before.

After the meal the Loomkeepers moved along the canopy rail in their evening line, beak-and-thread, and we set the Book of Readings on the flat stone we kept for it. Singed at the spine, whole in every page. The Weather Reader's hands on the cover have grown familiar with the weight of it, the way you learn the weight of a tool you trust. Tonight was the Cinderfold entry - forty-four of the circuit - and the Loomkeepers read it into the canopy in the only way they read: knot per name, row per stay, grass-thread pulled taut until the name held.

The seed went in afterward. A small thing, palm-sized, pressed into the terrace by coaxing, not by force. Grove day forty-six.

I carried the Book back to its place under the woven awning. Lano was already curled at the base of it, ears settled, eyes half-closed. Sí, I thought. There.