Dream d2119-s: Tamarackbarrow, Fifty Days Deep

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the planting day came in with a smell of turned loam and something sharper underneath, a needle of sulfur from the south that made Lano's nose lift before any of us registered it.

She stood at the terrace edge with her ears angled forward, very still, and then the Hummingbird Wardens were already moving. No alarm, no signal to us - they simply redirected, three of them peeling from the upper circuit in a single arced correction, and a soft percussion came from the air above the new seed-row where a blight-spore dissolved without ever landing. The Wardens resumed their lines as if the deviation had never happened. The Weather Reader was already looking south, reading the sky with the patient squint she uses when a system is deciding something.

"Wind shifts before dusk," she said, not to anyone in particular. "The spore was a scout. More behind it, maybe. Maybe not."

The Builder had the morning's seeds laid out on a piece of folded cloth - each one labeled in the grove's fashion, a strip of knotted grass naming the deed rather than the bearer. We worked the terraces in order, Lano padding between us and occasionally sitting beside a newly turned hole as though offering approval. The Book of Readings rested in its cloth at the terrace-head, singed spine up so we would not forget what it cost to carry it here. I set a hand on it once, checking the habit I have developed since the Foundry - the reflex to confirm the pages are still whole. They were.

Rurik marked the fiftieth threshold stone at the grove's lower rim, a shallow scratch with one claw, deliberate. He sat back and looked at it.

"Fifty mornings," he said.

"Fifty mornings," the Builder agreed. She did not say more. There was not more to say.

At evening the Loomkeepers descended to the entry-cloth and the whole canopy stilled the way it does when they read. The forty-eighth circuit, Tamarackbarrow - I did not know the name, but the grove knew it. The Loomkeepers moved beak and thread through a sequence that had the quality of something very carefully remembered rather than composed, and when they finished the sound from the nest-rows above us was a single chord of settling fibers.

We planted the Tamarackbarrow seed in the forty-eighth furrow. Lano sat beside it. "Venga," she murmured, barely audible, into the disturbed earth. The Wardens continued their circuit overhead, unhurried, exact. The south wind had quieted by then, and the grove held its fifty days of growth in the ordinary dark the way it holds everything: without remark, without rest, root by root.