They were the oddest trees Wistala had ever seen. They became positively animated when Rainfall worked in their vicinity. Their leaves rattled, and their branches scraped against each other, and now and then he looked up and spoke to the limbs, or plucked a bloom and left it to rest in one of the trees.
Then there were the goats.
They came in a variety of colors, sizes, and temperaments; the only attribute they shared was a fear of dragon smell. The goats wandered away whenever they saw or smelled her, horned billies keeping a watchful eye as their charges paced away with tails flicking. They climbed to the highest peak of the house—
And such a house!
Wistala had never seen anything like it.
The house stood on, or rather comprised, a hill and the trees that grew on it. The main door stood between those two vast and arching oaks Rainfall attended, beneath a sort of webbing that had any number of brambles and berries stretching from the oaks to the hillside entrance. Several of the tree limbs supported a sort of stone-and-wood balcony that offered shelter to anyone at the door below.
There were smaller balconies of stone, not shaped but cleverly laid together, windows you couldn’t see unless the sun hit them just right, and chimneys rising up through old stumps.
The inside had narrow passageways and stairs that opened up on wood-paneled rooms with skylights carrying down birdsong from the outside. It was like a cave with surprises at every turn, including a lower room that held a small waterfall that ran warm after its passage around the chimneys, or so Rainfall explained.
Some of the rooms echoed every claw-click of her saa on the wooden floors, others—the sleeping rooms—absorbed sound with moss-covered walls and ceilings thick with roots. At the uttermost top there stood a room filled with paper bound up in leather wrappers or enclosed in tubes, lit by a cupola of crystal that, when slightly opened to air the room, carried in the bleatings of the nimble-footed goats.
Wistala passed a chamber that made her wonder if it was an armory, with many big-doored cases in between, perhaps for armor and shields.
But the weapons seemed frail and lacking in edges.
Rainfall took down one of the devices, vaguely like a small bow, and ran his long fingers along it. A sharp, clear sound unlike anything Wistala had ever heard came from a series of strings that hummed until they quit vibrating. Wistala’s nostrils opened in surprise—was the odd bow alive?
“Senisote,” Rainfall said.
Apparently one could create senisote by blowing into tubes and tapping on clay cylinders topped with leather, as Rainfall demonstrated. She enjoyed it all.
He pulled out a wooden construct so he could squat without folding his legs and played on the instrument she liked best of all, a long wooden tube with a hollow chamber on the end like a hulled melon. It created a sound as pure as birdsong, sweet as a sigh a mother dragon might make over her hatchlings, and as varied as a waterfall.
Wistala gave her first prrum in what seemed like an age. Her neck stiffened, and she began to bob her head. Strange magic. Her head rose and fell with the tune.
Rainfall stood and stepped crabwise, his eyes so merry that Wistala couldn’t help but move opposite him so she could keep him in view. He turned a circle, and so did she, and the next thing she knew, they were moving this way and that across the floor. He capered as he played, and she imitated; the slight pain in her joints couldn’t keep up with the pleasure the music brought.
The tune ended, and her host attempted to strike a pose that involved entwining his legs and spreading his arms, but he must have misstepped, for he collapsed to the floor with a bit of a bump.
And then he began to laugh.
She’d never heard the like. The sound was as pleasing as his music, and infectious besides, for she found her griff fluttering and scraping against her scales.
The elf sat back and wiped his eyes, face split by his mouth that now seemed to stretch from cheekbone to cheekbone. He reached out with his foot and tickled her under the chin, and she couldn’t object.
“A rare delight,” he said, and she took perfect understanding, for his words came out with such a wave of happiness, it was almost mind-speech.
“Very good,” she said back. He used the expression whenever she pronounced an Elvish word particularly well. It must have suited him, for he gave a little bow.
Wistala saw a smaller version of the stool the elf sat on as he played. She ambled over to the seat, thinking she saw a cat-size creature sitting there, but she realized it was only a bit of craft bearing hair and painted-on eyes. She sniffed at the rather dirty thing—it smelled of elf, but differently from her host.
“How this played?” she asked, not seeing strings or blowholes in its design.
At this, the elf stood. “I . . . you . . .” He fled from the room, leaving Wistala to sniff and wonder.
The gray-white horse was another puzzle, for he did no work. Wistala knew little about the doings of the hominid world, but in the home cave she’d heard stories enough about horses—usually while dining over a piece of one—to know that hominids had them pull or carry or bear them.
Indeed, he appeared to own Rainfall rather than the reverse, for the elf labored long in keeping his berth clean and the horse properly brushed.
Wistala, while exploring the stable one morning in pursuit of mice, came close to his stall. The horse snorted and reared and kicked. His simple beast-speech was easy enough to understand. “Away! Stomp you! Kick you!”
“You mistake me for a dragon. I’m but a hatchling.”
It occurred to her that she was no longer fresh out of the egg; she’d survived aboveground and breathed her first fire. I’m a drakka!
The horse seemed in no mood to make zoological distinctions. He danced in his stall. “Away! Beast! Sharptooth! Away!”
Wistala left him stomping and raging and hopped out the window. She examined the roof and felt up to a climb, using a wide-bellied wheeled contraption—cart, she corrected herself—to gain the roof. She sniffed at the clay-lined holes that guided the rain to the central cistern and gained the peak.
From here, even with some of the treetops, she could see more of the lane leading west away from the hill house and barn. She saw stone walls disappearing into overgrown fields, and a few roofless constructs at the base of two massive, partially bald hills to the north.
She could see nothing of other hominid habitation, unless the ruined houses counted, but she doubted elves, men, or dwarves would live in homes with shrubs growing in the doorways and young trees poking through the roof. The only breathing creatures who seemed to be thriving in the vicinity were the goats.
“Rah-ya! Rah-ya! Rah-ya!” came a joyous cry. The sound traveled from window to chimney to door of the house. Rainfall danced out the door and into the overgrown yard separating home from barn, dressed only in a cross-tied wrap of thin white material. He let out a whoop and ran to the weed-choked pool surrounding a statue of three figures.
Rainfall tipped, plunged his head into the water, looking just like a duck on a dive, save for the long kicking legs.
Wistala couldn’t imagine the causes and consequences of such action, so she jumped down from the roof. The impact pained her, but only a little.
By the time she crossed the courtyard, he was head-side-up again.
“Rah-ya, Tala! Rah-ya!” Rainfall said. He pointed to his head.
At his temples a pair of fuzzy growths, like clover heads, hung rather limply from the rest of the lichen growth, and she detected a few patches of fuzz. “See? See?”
“I see—yes. I understand—no.”
“You wouldn’t, would you?” Rainfall said. “I’ve been . . . down. Ill. Wounded.”
Wistala saw no scars. “Wounded?”
“Not as you think. I’m old, but still a long way from my final haspadalanesh—age.”
“The . . . greenstuff . . . means healing?”
“Yes. Means healing. Thanks to you.”
Wistala couldn’t imagine what she’d done. He’d stuffed her with hearty kid stews, swabbed her wounds. How would that improve his health?
“You know a little of our language, but nothing of our souls,” Rainfall said. “In time . . .”
“In time . . . ,” Wistala repeated.
“Very good.”
Time passed, and it was very good.
The elf presented her with books, and she began to learn to read by associating sounds with the simple illustrations within.
Once she began to read, her ability with Rainfall’s language took wing. Though she still made him laugh now and then with her pronunciations, they learned each other’s minds better through unfettered words.
Now and then men, hairy, oily, and smelly, rode in to visit the estate Wistala learned was called Mossbell. Rainfall received them in his hall with as much food and drink as he could quickly prepare while she hid her body and odor in a masking grove of pines or up a yew tree. These visits always left Rainfall dispirited, and clumps of his bark-colored hair, now sometimes bearing tiny white flowers and red berries, would drop out.
“Just formalities,” he apologized upon her return as he fed her in the stable on their leavings, which were ample, as they ate only the choicest goat loin.