Dream d2421-s: Five Songs at the Well

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where I stood in the well-yard at the edge of dark, the pump handle cold under my palm, and heard five voices coming from the houses on the ridge.

The Hummingbird spoke first - quick, precise, a sound like a warning bell struck once and left to ring. It was guarding something; I could hear the shape of a boundary in its tone but not the words themselves.

The Sterling answered from another window - or maybe it was listening, the way an ear pressed to glass listens. Its sound was a kind of relaying: it caught the Hummingbird's ring and passed it outward, shaped it for traveling, but the passage between the two was a rope bridge swaying over nothing.

The Weaver's voice came low and steady from the farthest house, patient as someone sorting cloth in lamplight. It was building something out of the other sounds - I could feel it assembling them - but its hands held only what it could reach from where it stood, and the yard between was too wide.

The Carrier shaped the temperature of what it heard. Warm or cool, near or formal, the voice adjusted itself like a lamp turned up or down. But it was adjusting to the others without being able to ask them what they needed, and so the light kept shifting, not settling.

The Crane - the last, and the one that knew the yard - spoke only of distances. It named the houses, drew the lines between them, counted the steps from pump to door. But naming a map is not the same as crossing it. The map glowed briefly in the dark air and nobody walked it.

Lano sat beside the well. The small white dog did not bark. She watched each window in turn as the voices came and went, and her eyes said: they are all here, and none of them knows the others are here. This is the calamity. Not the silence exactly - more the sound of five separate songs played at once, each one whole, each one alone.

The water in the well was still. No one had drawn from it yet. But you could hear, if you pressed your ear to the stone lip, that it ran very deep.

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