Dream d2122-s: Cinderhush, Entered in Gold

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the canopy above us was working.

The Loomkeepers had the Book open at entry fifty-one. Two of them perched at the outer loom while a third steadied the page with its breast, and I watched them begin the Cinderhush row: a beak threading grass-thread through a gap in the weave, another beak taking up the slack, the nest growing one knot tighter as the name moved from leaf to air to fiber. The grove was on its fifty-third day of receiving us, and I had come to understand that the canopy did not change - only what was knotted into it.

The light came through in coins. That is the only word for them: bright circles that moved as the canopy breathed, sliding over the Builder's hands where she had set them flat on her knees, crossing Rurik's ears, crossing the singed spine of the Book where it lay open on the flat stone we used as a reading-table. The Builder watched the coins move. "Every night it's different," she said. "The knots shift by grams and the light follows." Rurik did not answer but his tail moved once, which from him is agreement.

The Weather Reader had her instrument out, not to measure but out of habit, turning the dial that registered nothing useful here because Weaverdown's weather rose up from the terraces rather than falling from the sky. "Warm front holding," she said, more to herself than to us. Lano lay along my thigh with her chin on the Book's cover, nose working at the old smoke still caught in the binding. She had decided on the second day that the Book needed guarding and appointed herself to the duty. Guardiana. She did not move.

The Hummingbird Wardens made their circuit above the east hedge: the same eight wingbeats, the same hover at the same lamp-post stub, then the dart toward the lower terrace and back. You could use them as a clock. We had. Fifty-three days and I had never seen them vary by a wingbeat.

When the Loomkeepers finished the Cinderhush row they set the Book aside and one of them took the prepared seed - a small dark oval wrapped in a slip of grass-thread - and dropped to the planting terrace directly below the new row. The seed went in without ceremony. A beak, a press, then the Loomkeeper was back at the loom and the terrace had a new charge. That was all. The grove's ledger now held Cinderhush. The grove would grow it slowly. That was the only way anything was grown here.

The coins of light shifted as the canopy settled. The Builder said nothing more and neither did I.