A Gathering Of Stones

3

The tiny meadow was stony and dry in its upper reaches. An ancient conifer had fallen to a storm a decade or so past and now lay denuded of bark, slowly rotting into the earth it had grown from. Thinner now and noisier, the Old Man’s Stream curved around the stubby root-shield and squeezed past boulders at the bottom of the roughly circular meadow and disappeared into shadows under the shivering gold leaves of a grove of aspen saplings. Korimenei shrugged out of the rucksack, set it on the dead trunk. She wriggled her body, reached high, stretching all over as she did so, stayed on her toes for a long long moment, then exploded out a sigh and dropped on her heels.

She pulled loose the thongs binding her dream-blanket to the rucksack, shook it out and spread it on the grass. Toward the end of her first year at the school, she’d bought wool in Silili Market. She dyed it and wove it into a dreampattem blanket which she kept wrapped in silk for the day she’d need it, for now. She sat on the trunk and smiled at the sharp-angled patterns and the brilliant colors. I did good, she thought, pleased with herself. She unbuckled her sandals, closed her eyes and flexed her toes; the earth was cool and silky against her soles and she had a curious sense that she was momentarily cut off from the flow of time, that she was a part of the Mountain. Her mind drifted into phrasemaking, ephemerally eternal, eternally ephemeral. The Mountain and the life parasited on it changed, died, was continually reborn. She sighed and yanked herself back to her own purposes. Settling herself on the blanket, she folded her legs and dropped her hands onto her knees. Her mind drifted to yesterday…