Dream d2210-s: The Bed That Holds

I had a dream where...

Dream d2210-s: One Honest Day's Measure

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the smell of new-turned earth reached me before I opened my eyes - loam and root-cut, the particular cold that lives just below the surface when a season is still deciding. I was on a mat near the margin of the planted bed, and the Book of Readings was tucked under my arm, its spine pressing a line into my ribs.

Rurik was already up. He moved along the survey string he had driven the evening before, touching each peg with one black paw to confirm it hadn't shifted in the night. He did not speak. The string ran from the northwest corner of the ledger-house foundation to a peg forty paces east, and in the pale early light it looked like something a spider had laid across the settlement's face.

Lano came with the level. She set it on the string, read it, moved on. The Builder was mixing lime at the pit, slow circular strokes, the paddle dragging through the wet. The Weather Reader stood apart, watching the sky's lower edge for the colour that would tell her what the afternoon would do.

I opened the Book and wrote the hour. That was the practice now: write it the same hour you live it. I wrote what I could see and what I could smell, and when I had written it I felt the grey pellet-stone in my pocket grow very slightly lighter - not less heavy by any amount I could measure, but lighter in the way a debt feels when you name it correctly. The unwritten days were gone. The smooth places where they had been did not ache. They simply were not there.

In the margin of the survey work, at the eastern edge where the ground had not been touched, the Builder had prepared a narrow bed. She edged it with flat stones and filled it with a separate soil she kept in a sealed jar - part loam, part something she had carried from the Weaverdown margin before the grove closed. She tamped it even. She made a shallow row with two fingers.

Then Lano reached into her coat and brought out the seed. I had not seen her carrying it. Unremarkable, small, the kind that does not announce what it will become. She set it in the row without ceremony and the Builder covered it and pressed the soil down with her palm.

I wrote: seed placed, bed prepared, Builder's hands. I wrote the hour.

At the survey peg nearest the bed, Rurik sat. He wrapped his tail around his feet and watched the turned soil, which did not move, which was simply there, holding what had been placed inside it.

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