Chapter 1: A Bluebird On A Tree
A bird lit upon the olive branch. Its dusty orange beak began combing through its royal blue plumage searching for tics and parasites. It spent several moments in this act of grooming before it was satisfied that its pert body was pest free.
Ruffling its feathers, it increased its size twofold. The dark green eyes now took the time to slowly glance around at the world beneath its lofty roost.
It was not the forest savage that stretched out into a vista below it. It was a settled community, neatly arranged in long avenues that intersected at nice, regular intervals. Along these avenues were countless bungalows of every color imaginable. Reds, indigos, yellows, blues, turquoises and blacks all impressed their flamboyance upon the bird’s eyes.
Around these homes were cloistered clusters of sycamores and ashes. Here and there, standing as protective guardians over the cozy town were giant fig trees with long gnarly branches that reached out as far as they could to give the community as much cover as possible from the oppressive sun of these high latitudes.
There was virtually no spot in the shaded town that was not touched upon by wood. It was a village of wood. Wood was at the heart of this colorful town.
As the bluebird’s eyes lifted toward the village’s outskirts, it noted that the multifarious array of trees gave way to vast acres of groves of fruit trees and vineyards. These were tended orchards and they seemed to stretch out as far as the distant mountains with peaks hidden by snow and cloud.
The bird’s focus returned to that that was near. It regarded the tree that gave it its perch – an olive tree. It was one of many such trees in the vicinity, all of which were rippling with the small, green fruit that was so bitter to the taste. The bluebird was hungry from its long, arduous flight but it would not eat the fruit of its roost.
It noticed that this olive grove that it found itself in sat upon the gentle sloping crest of a rather steep cliff that fell headlong into the valley below. It was in that valley where the shaded village was nestled – protected as it were by both land and tree.
The bluebird had seen all manner of community in its laborious migrations over the continent. It had seen the bilious Manchester with its forges burning relentlessly day and night. It had seen foggy London and gay Paris. It had flown over Napoleon’s armies as they stormed over the Alps toward Prague, Budapest and Sophia. It had wafted over dancing Vienna where the music curled the air with excitement. It had sailed the aerial currents over countless villages and hams. Yet this shaded village below that sat like a sleeping frog on a lily pad was somehow qualitatively different from any cluster of buildings that it had ever seen before.
The bird did not know how this was so. On first appearance, the village seemed the same as any alpine community cradled within a forest. There were the rows upon rows of squared homes that tried to sparkle with individuality yet still got mixed into homogeneity. There was the little white church with its oversized steeple that made home for bats and pigeons. There was a schoolhouse where the trees were cut down to make a playground for the little children. Several shoppes and markets were bunched together for profit near the town center. At the fringes of the town, the homes grew bigger and fewer. The wealthy and the well-to-do of the village lived along this fringe area just as they do in every hamlet upon this war-threatened continent.
Yet with all these surface similarities, there was still something fundamentally different about this town. Had the bird a finger it would have been hard-pressed to put it on what it was that made this shaded village stand apart from the others. Had the bird a spoken language, the words would have been at the tip of its tongue as to explain the discrepancy.
But the bluebird was a bird and was thus inflicted with a bird brain. It would never be able to figure it out.
** ** **
“Look up in the tree over there! What kind of bird is that Pappy?” a young, squeaky voice piped.
The shrillness of the voice set the bluebird to alarm. It wrenched its head fully backwards in the neck-breaking pattern that only a feather creature is able to do without snapping all the bones that hold its head aloft. At the twisted foot of the olive tree stood two queer figures.
They looked human enough in that they had the gross body features generic to the species that had come to dominate the world. They stood upright and they had two arms dangle at their sides. Although one of them had whiskers it could not be said that they were hairy beasts. But the bluebird could not be too safe in this assumption for the creatures below it bore tunics and pantaloons and thus had most of their bodies concealed. All manner of hair could be sprouting forth beneath the clothing for all that the bluebird knew.
The one feature that made the bird unsure of whether these two creatures could be classified as human was their rather diminutive size. The bluebird in its travels had seen great variances in the sizes of man. In Africa, it had seen the Watusi people, human beings that stretched in length to almost giraffe like proportions. It had also seen in the rainforests of West Africa pygmies that were as small as adult human being could be. Until now. The pygmies would have towered over those two little fellows below it.
The bigger of the two, the one with the shaggy orange whiskers, could not be more than a yard in height while the other one with the smooth clean features may have been two feet in height at the most. The bluebird had never seen human beings so small.
And there were other things about the two beings that appeared odd to the bluebird. Their faces bore slanted eyes that were not narrow such as seen on the Mongol people that frequented the outskirts of the Carpathian Mountains. The little people below had very wide, luminous slanted eyes and could not be mistaken for Asians. The Mongols had yellow skin and blue-black hair while the two creatures below it had orange, almost yellow hair and very fair skin that made their dark eyes even more magnified. And there was a quality in their eyes that the bluebird had never come across in all the variants of mankind. It did not know how quite to describe what it saw but the words ‘sparkle’ and ‘glowing’ seemed to be leading in the right direction. These diminutive beings appeared to be blessed with a sharp vision that exceeded that of any of their human cousins. There was something of the cat in their eyes – something that told the bird that they could see it better than it could see them.
“I’m going to try and catch it Pappy!” the smaller one declared. All at once, the little manling started to scramble up the twisted and rough bole of the olive tree.
Alarm whistled through the bird. It was ready to abandon its roost and to take wing. But then the bigger one, the one called Pappy, threw out a quick hand that clutched the smaller one by the collar of the tunic and brought him back to the ground.
“That is not the way an elf deals with nature, Ho. An elf respects nature and all of its beings,” the one called Pappy chided the one called Ho. Pappy’s voice was much rougher. It held more age and more body than Ho’s. But still compared to the rest of humanity, Pappy’s voice was higher. It had an almost squirrel-like quality to it.
The bluebird folded its wings along its flanks. It felt secure that its roost would be a protective haven for it while it catches up on its much-needed sleep. It had still many, many miles to fly before it reaches its nesting grounds where it could mingle with others of its kind. Being a bird meant having a very hard, difficult and dangerous life. Still, the bluebird would not have any other life for being a bird meant that it could fly.
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