Dream d2198-s: The Ground That Keeps

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the morning came in flat and grey, the kind that favors work that needs to be measured. We had begun the survey at first light - Rurik with the cord, the Weather Reader reading what the frost line left in the mud, the Builder stepping heel-to-toe along the eastern run of wall while she spoke the count under her breath. The ledger-house stood already: one room, stone to the window-line, its doorway throwing a narrow bar of yellow light onto the churned ground. We built it first of all buildings, because if what we did here was not written the hour it was done, it had not been done.

I carried the Book of Readings in the crook of my arm and the grey pellet-stone in my coat pocket, where I could feel its weight without looking at it. The stone was the cost, made holdable. I had learned not to examine it too long.

Lano came to my shoulder when the sun got high enough to show the full extent of what we had staked. She looked out across the survey lines - cord to cord, peg to peg - and said nothing for a while. Then: "It holds more than I thought." She meant the ground. The ground held more than the eye gave it credit for.

There were smooth places in my recall of the weeks prior. The unwritten days were gone, expelled - not recoverable, not grievable, simply absent the way a page is absent when it was never in the binding. I had stopped probing for them. The Owl's rule was the rule.

The Builder found it near the south peg, where we had broken ground for the kitchen-garden bed: a shoot, pale and crooked, coming up through dark soil still half-cold. She knelt and cupped her hands around it without touching it. Rurik crouched beside her and looked, his ears forward. None of us spoke. It was from Weaverdown - we knew it by the grey in the leaf-stem, the way the color held something of ash and held. It had come through whatever the cost arranged, and found the bed we had dug and bordered and filled with the best soil the ridge offered. The bed built to keep something. It was keeping something.

I opened the Book and wrote the time and the description: the shoot, the bed, the hour, the witnesses. The Weather Reader read it back once to confirm. Then I closed the book.

The survey cord ran taut across the middle distance. Rurik took up his end. The light was still good.