The Rain of Man

It was said of Waiting’s clouds that they had never met a fit they couldn’t throw. This was not a particularly elegant or descriptive witticism but was, as it happened, simple fact. Mr. Parker, the village thatcher, spent most of his days and nights on an endless round, fixing holes in ceilings made not only by snow and hail, but also by beavers, chairs, and once, a hail of unicycles. [1]

On one particular Thursday morning, Jaya, a small flock of sheep, and Tarnish the shepherd looked up from their various labors in the sheep pastures to discover that clouds had congregated overhead. Normally, signs of inclement weather sent the prudent under such sturdy shelters as were available to them, but the week had been full of unreasonable weather and the villagers, whether rightly or no, had determined en masse to boycott sense. “Can’t be letting them clouds think they’ve the upper hand on us,” Mr. Jarvis the greengrocer had said, darkly, and heads around the Quill and Pot had nodded in ale-inspired agreement.

“Heavens,” Jaya had said, when Mr. Parker had told her of this collective defiance. “What if they actually have the upper feet? Imagine the difficulty of finding them all shoes.”

From time to time it seemed to the villagers that Jaya did not take things as seriously as she ought.

It was a frustration born of unrelenting inconvenience. On Monday, it had rained a cranky mix of water and peregrines in the high hills behind the village.[2] The next day, the clouds had shifted south and deposited a gentle patter of snakes, none of them poisonous, all of them astonished and exhilarated to find themselves airborne just prior to a messy, unjust death. Wednesday was made interesting by a shower of dwarf hamsters, most of which had landed in the village pond and spent the next twenty-four hours battling the blacksmith’s ducks to the death.

One could not be forever rushing under cover simply on the off chance that a sprinkling of bite-sized rodents would descend on one. Jaya and Tarnish, busily lowering a pair of lovesick sheep from the shepherd’s roof, hastily secured their hats on their head and hunched their shoulders. After all, Jaya reminded her doubtful companion, there was always the off chance that it might actually rain water.

She was destined to be disappointed. It rained a man.

“How unfortunate,” said Jaya, watching him fall. “I believe he’ll hit one of the sheep.”

“Mmf’n,” said Tarnish.

The clouds were unevenly humped over the pasture, and sunlight made the plummeting man blaze for a moment of gold and white splendor before he landed in a puff of sheep guts and mud in the meadow. The surviving sheep were too accustomed to such arbitrary calamities to evince much excitement. One or two screamed out of sheer principle, but even from the hut, Jaya and Tarnish could tell that their hearts were not in it.

“As I said,” she said, and let go of the rope in her hands. The ewe tied to the other end of it squeaked as it fell the last five feet and landed in a fuzzy ball of thwarted concupiscence and offense. The ram still on the roof peered over the edge, bawling forlornly after his erstwhile lover.

“G’wan, you,” Tarnish said, slapping the ram on the rear end. His reason for staying on the roof now gone, the animal snuffled and jumped neatly from rooftop to log pile to ground.

Jaya said mildly, “You make an unexpected matchmaker, my friend, but they’ll thank you for all the same someday. And now, I think, we should perhaps investigate this new arrival.”

“Like to be a heathen,” said the shepherd, which was his invariable reply to all visitors to the village, no matter their mode of transportation.

That it was not the strangest means of arrival that Jaya had ever seen was sad fact; it was not even the most lethal, an award that had gone to Absalom the baker, who had come piecemeal in the mouths of a feral pack of raptor-beaked baboons some six years back. She climbed down from the sloping roof with the shepherd a morose shadow behind her, and pausing only long enough to detach the ewe from the rope that had lowered it, followed the pair she had so recently rescued into the fenced pastures.

Curiosity had prompted the remainder of the flock to form a soggy donut of reproach around the man. Jaya and Tarnish waded through the bodies to the shallow crater made by the falling man and his victim, and stopped at its edge to regard the remains.
They were silent for a long moment.

Tarnish spoke first. “Grendel,” he said, and prodded the sad remains of the dead sheep with his toe.

“Indeed,” Jaya said. She did not question him. One was always best off trusting the shepherd in such matters, and not inquiring too deeply into why he had the ability to identify individual ewes on the basis of a scrap of rump and a pert tail.

“Agin,” said Tarnish.

“Again?”

“Fourth time.” The shepherd spit into the mess, then appeared to consider. “Fifth,” he corrected. “Got et by that wolf last year, aye?”

Jaya said solemnly, “Truly, she must be the most unfortunate sheep alive.”

“Not alive,” Tarnish said. His shoulders shook slightly, for this was what passed for shepherd humor.

“Certainly not at the moment.”

“She’ll be days pullin’ ‘erself together, like.”

There were few things more discomfiting than watching one of Tarnish’s sheep reconstructing itself after a particularly nasty accident. Bits and pieces that had been digested by assorted animals and insects would spend days working their way back to the pasture, whereupon they would build themselves up again like a vulgarly moist jigsaw puzzle. Mutton was occasionally served in Waiting, but never twice in the same household. The villagers had a high tolerance for the unusual but, as Mr. Baubel had once said in the Quill and Pot, there was unusual, and then there was feeling bits of supper twitching about in one’s bowels, trying to get back to that madman Tarnish.

“Aargh,” Tarnish said, plunging into gloom. He thrust his hands in his pockets and hunched his shoulders around his ears. “‘ll be no livin’ with her when she’s done, either.”

Being of sound mind and eminent practicality, Jaya chose not to ask any of the more obvious questions. As none of which were likely to produce anything she would wish to remember, it was the better part of prudence.

While the shepherd muttered to himself and began a shuffling, sideways jig to scrape bits of sheep together with his boots, she stepped over Grendel’s gaping rib cage and squatted down next to the missile that had flattened it.

The man was naked under a thick coating of mud and gore, his face half-buried in a viscous puddle of rain water or urine. His skin was a pallid white against the darkness of the dirt, the ridges of veins clearly visible in webbed lines of blue. He was almost skeletal in his gauntness, though there were ribbons of muscle around the bones; plainly he was not in the habit of eating regularly or well, though no stranger to physical exertion. He was tall, certainly. She placed him at a healthy 70, or an unhealthy 60. It was difficult to gauge under the mess.

She sat on her heels and touched him. He did not move, but the slow rise and fall of his back proved that he was breathing — no matter what damage he might have suffered, for the time being, at least, he was alive.

Around her, inquisitive sheep stared at her with shiny, expectant eyes. She looked back at them, then up at Tarnish. “Certainly, he cannot take up a permanent residence in the pasture. For the time being, at least, he is alive. I will undertake to have him removed.”

Wordless though the sheep were, she was given the distinct sense that they approved of this housewifely decision.

Tarnish, skeptical as ever, stooped over the man to poke him with a thick, callused finger. “Likely he’s a heathen,” he said again. “Aye, and he hasn’t any wings, so how’d he drop from above, then?”

“The lack of wings could very well explain that.”

“Doesn’t explain how he’d start up there,” argued Tarnish, who had, despite five years of life in Waiting, still to be convinced that some elaborate trick did not lie behind the vagaries of the local weather.

“One might ask similar questions of all of my neighbors,” she suggested with a small smile, straightening to stand. “One might, perhaps, wonder aloud how a certain shepherd and his sheep arrived in Waiting, not so very long ago. One might wonder how it is they sprouted like radishes over the course of two days in the center of the main road, at great inconvenience to traffic.”

“Happen it’s no secret,” he said, and squinted up at the sky. “Happen everyone knows it’s cranes bring new people.”

She waited, absent-mindedly patting the head of a small ewe that had insinuated itself under her hand. It wagged its tail and assayed an experimental bark.

“Anyone knows will tell you, sheep’re too heavy for a bird, less’n it be a big one. Bigger than a crane, see.”

Jaya raised her eyebrows. “So they are conveyed by—?”

“Moles,” Tarnish said simply. He caught sight of her expression and elaborated, squaring his hands at a descriptive distance apart. “Big moles.”

Jaya laughed quietly, giving one last pat to the sheep dog, and left to seek out assistance.

There were those in the village who darkly expressed the opinion that Prince Timtam’s clockwork men were no better than they should be, a statement that was generally understood to mean that they would incur less annoyance if they were less handsome or more inclined to wearing clothes. Jaya had never found them objectionable; indeed, barring the curious personality quirks that rode them like forest ticks, she found them among the most useful of her neighbors.

It was with their assistance that she brought their wingless new visitor down from the pastures. In her absence, Tarnish had found an desiccated gunnysack to protect him from the inquisitive tongues of his sheep. It smelled strongly of manure, but performed its part in the cause of modesty. One of the clockwork men slung the old man like a babe in his arms and bore him down from the high hills, while the other assisted by composing gratuitous haiku on the anatomy of ducks. The recipient of both these services did not rouse.

He did not awaken during his subsequent bath, provided by the obliging clockwork men in Jaya’s tub, nor did he waken when they deposited him between the sheets in her bed. “And should he awaken,” she said to the clockwork man known as Other, when they had tenderly folded the blankets up around his neck to fend off a chill, “he may experience all the masculine chagrin of waking up naked in a strange woman’s bed, with no clear memory of how he arrived there.”

The old man’s cleaned features were haggard and tired, the eye sockets sunk deep in shadow, his nose hooked and large enough for leftovers. Sometime in the distant past, he had been a handsome man. Now he looked the part of an intellectual escapee from a refugee camp.

Other, quiet at the best of times, stood at the foot of the bed in the perfect stillness of the inanimate. He looked at the old man with incurious attention. “Is this unsought by your kind?” he asked.

“That depends greatly on which representative of our kind you’re referring to,” Jaya said, and left them to tend to her guest while she went in search of clothes for him.

[1]  An inquiring villager, Mr. Hemlock, had once suggested that making the roofs out of sturdier material would prevent such accidents to begin with. He had immediately made the experiment of replacing his thatching with a roof of heavy timber and tile — only to regret it the day after he finished by waking up to a heavy hail of cows.

There was, after all, a basic practicality to the choice of thatching as roofing material. Thatching was easy to replace when the inevitable happened and one had to repair a hole in the roof. Timber required more effort, for what was essentially the same quality of protection. Lumber may confer upon one a comforting feeling of solidity, but no layer of fired clay and planked wood will stand up to a puzzled, 1600 pound Black Angus cow falling 120 miles an hour through one’s ceiling.

Mr. Hemlock had been an engineer in his past life. Despite this, he possessed a rare gift for seeing the obvious. He restored the thatching and quietly joined the village’s growing population of vegetarians.

[2] This was a tremendous boon to the villagers, who were still suffering from the hail of titmice that had fallen the previous Saturday.

How Waiting Prevented Giants

In a small village called Waiting, where the clouds were as likely to drop hedgehogs on one’s head as they was to drop rain, there lived a giant killer named Jaya.

Giant killer was her title, rather than what she did. Other villages, less well ordered, had such things as mayors and vicars and shepherds — but mayors do not go about their towns mayoring, just as vicars do not bustle about vicaring, Shepherds, it is true, spend their time shepherding, but this should not be held against them, as it is widely acknowledged by wolves and other such creatures that shepherds perform a very valuable service. Without shepherds, one might not know where to go to find one’s dinner; whereas if there is a shepherd around, a peckish wolf could say to himself, Aha! Dinner will be hereabouts, if I follow this gentleman with the crook and strong stink of whiskey. And so it usually proves. Thus the wolf is happy for having found his dinner, and the shepherd is happy for having performed his function. Nobody has recorded how the sheep feel about this arrangement, but it is to be supposed that they are happy to be of service to both the wolf and the shepherd.

Very accommodating animals, sheep.

Unlike shepherds, giant killers do not, as it happens, lead wolves or anything else to giants, but they are valuable enough in their own way. All truly well regulated villages have an official giant killer to round out the roster of necessary people. Any villager knows that there is never a giant killer about when one is being eaten by a giant; thus, it stands to reason that if a village had a giant killer, there would never be any giants about to molest it.

There had never been any real question about who in Waiting should take on the responsibility of being the giant killer. It was widely acknowledged that out of all the residents who came and went in that most impermanent population, the one who could be most depended upon in any circumstance was Jaya. It was true that Prince Timtam, served by two terrible and indestructible clockwork men, owned a sword, the only one in the entire village. However, he was young and prone to moods. As the cobbler pointed out, he could not be relied upon not to fly into a temper and disappear on some mad adventure, and where would they be then?

Jaya may not have owned a sword, but she was possessed of uncommon common sense. This made her unique in the village, and further conferred on her the distinction of being the person that everyone in the village turned to when their troubles had no ready answer. It was she who had settled the quarrel between the blacksmith and the (then) Red Knight, when the former had accidentally painted the latter’s horse a bright green. It was she who had solved the question of the stink in the village square, and convinced Dia’s son to move his suicides to the bottomless chasm instead of the village well. It was also she who had realized that Mistress Berry’s chicken was a hen born in a rooster’s body, and coaxed it out of a crippling depression by sewing it a small pink dress.

(Some of the villagers, having haled from more conservative realms, were doubtful about the propriety of her last solution. Mistress Berry, however, professed herself well pleased; no longer was she roused at odd hours of the night by the rooster’s wails, and she was now commonly believed to own the best layer in Waiting.)

It took very little discussion and even less argument for the village to come to a consensus on the question of their new giant killer. That their vote was unanimous should have gratified their appointee, and very likely did, though she was not known for an excess of enthusiasm.

“And what am I to do if a giant does appear?” Jaya had asked, when the news of her new title was brought to her.

The cobbler, who had been the messenger of the tidings, was disconcerted by this question. The idea of the giant killer, as the village and considered it, was to play a purely preventative role.

“Ah, well,” Jaya had said, for she had by now a comfortable familiarity with the way her neighbors’ minds worked. “I’m sure to think of something.”

“Something,” the cobbler had said, relieved, and coughed delicately. “Of course, there is the question of suitable compensation…”

“One might pay me for each giant that does not come to the village,” Jaya said quizzically. “Which would make as much sense as the rest of it.”

The cobbler had looked anxious at this. “Of course, we are not a rich people.”

“Save in character,” murmured Jaya.

“But we have our pride,” said the cobbler. “And though you are relatively new to our village, having lived here less than ten years, we would have you know that we are honest, as well. We will recompense you in goods, if this would meet with your approval. I, for instance, will be pleased to make you a suit of clothing.”

“Such exquisite tact,” said Jaya, amused. She was a tall woman at six feet, dark of complexion, with black hair and dark brown eyes. The village seamstress, accustomed to petite, golden-haired women, stubbornly persisted on producing for her a series of inappropriately frilly, doll-like dresses that suited Jaya ill and caused the most sensitive of her neighbors to take to their beds.
“As a sign of gratitude,” the cobbler assured her, and manfully avoided shuddering at the pink, lace-covered dress she currently wore. “For surely a man would have better understanding of what attire would be appropriate for hunting giants.”

Jaya regarded the cobbler, a tiny, bird-like man who peered short-sightedly at the world through pince-nez. “Surely,” she said gravely. The cobbler puffed up with pride.

“A suit in dark green tweed,” he said, lighting up with professional enthusiasm and the air of one who has given long thought to the problem already. “With your height, which is a man’s height, though to be sure you wear it with the grace of a woman, you would be best served with a waistcoat and trousers, a frock coat, a hat—”

“A man’s dress,” Jaya said, still amused.

“A good dress,” said the cobbler, injured, and adjusted his glasses. “Perhaps uncommon for a woman, but there could be no objection. After all, you are the giant killer.”

“After all, it would be inappropriate to go poorly dressed into a meeting with a giant,” Jaya said. “Particularly if one wished not to meet the giant at all.”

The irony of this eluded the cobbler, who was a straightforward soul who believed everything he read, but he was aware that the giant killer had made a jest, so laughed appreciatively.

Years passed. People came and went. Dia’s son died sixteen times. Prince Timtam rescued four maidens and one effeminate young man from various monsters. The cobbler, who was also the village hatter and tailor, made Jaya a frock coat, a top hat, and a pair of high-heeled boots, all of which she accepted with appropriate expressions of gratitude and wore on special occasions.
No giants came. As Jaya often pointed out, no giants had ever been seen or even heard of in the history of Waiting, but this did not devalue the worth of their giant killer in the villagers’ eyes.

She was, they held, the best giant killer they had ever had.

Since they had only ever had the one, this was nothing but the truth.