Dream d2121-s: The Seed Takes No Hammer

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where we had been in the grove fifty-two days and the terraces were teaching us things we did not know we needed.

The Builder was working the upper tier when I came up with the watering yoke. A guide-stake needed pressing into the soil for the new climbing runner the Loomkeepers had pointed us toward on the third morning. She had the stake in both hands and her shoulders had gone tight the way shoulders do when they are about to drive. I watched her stop. She looked at the stake, then at the soil, then set it down and picked it up again differently, angled with the grain of the slope, and pressed it in the way you press a word into a conversation rather than hammer it. It went in clean. She stood there a moment looking at her own hands like they had done something surprising.

"I keep doing that," she said.

"I know," I said.

Lano found a patch of sun between two terrace walls and lay flat in it, nose moving at something in the air. The terrace below us still held the morning's water in its stone lip - the Foundry could never hold heat this long, not near the end. Rurik worked one row below me, paws easy on the runner-stems, tying back new growth with strips of reed from the hedge. The Weather Reader sat at the tier's edge with her instruments, calling the evening: cool front off the north ridge, no blight wind, the starlings would wheel east.

They did. The Starling Chorus called once, before the loomlight came up: "Fifty-second evening clear." One shape, one voice, and then it folded into the canopy-tree and was quiet. The Hummingbird Wardens made their dusk arc above the west beds, the same flight at this exact light every day, and snuffed something at the hedge-line before I could see what it was.

When the loom-glow came the Loomkeepers came with it. Fifty-two days in this grove and I still held my breath when they worked: beaks precise in the grass-thread, the nest-row growing outward from the night's new knot. Tonight was entry fifty of the circuit. The Cinderfold. They read it into the canopy in the way they always read, not words but the length and tension of each knot, a name made texture. When it was done, one descended to the low planting bed and pressed the Cinderfold seed into the prepared soil. No ceremony beyond the pressing.

The Book of Readings lay against the terrace wall where I set it each evening, singed spine toward the stone, as though the stone could draw the old heat out. Every page whole. Rurik glanced at it the way he does at this hour, once, then back to his work.

The Builder was still on the upper tier when the light went gold. I heard her working - not the sound of driving, but something quieter, something the grove had put in her hands.