Rain fills the air with sounds. The rustle and patter of the drops and the whispering of leaves caused by the light breeze passing through the trees was very peaceful and relaxing. Harold Moser stood at the end of the small gravel driveway used for parking the horses and buggies of visitors to Leila's house and looked around, seeing and listening, before turning left to start the trip to Mrs. Blandford's house. He was without his hat, having left it behind at Leila's house after being spirited away by Joe Russell to Heal their cow of mastitis, and he had been denied access by his daughter Marcie upon his return. Leila was apparently with a patient and couldn't be disturbed for confidentiality reasons, but Marcie had shown him the appointment book, which stated that Mrs. Blandford was having problems with blight on her tomatoes and that Miss Keystone's dog had cataracts that needed to be dealt with.
Rain fills the air with smells. Magwitch in the latter half of May offered green everywhere he looked, and the smells of the soil, of plants growing, and of lilacs offered themselves to his nose. He walked away from the main north-south street and started a two-block walk eastward. The soothing patter of the rain on his Ward that kept him dry, combined with a comfortably full belly from the generous brunch that the Russells had given him, caused his mind to start wandering almost immediately.
Rain fills the mind with memories. He had too many memories for a man about to turn 55 in September. A wet, muddy battlefield on the plains before Carcosa wanted to be remembered, but no, no. Not that memory. The therapist had said to override the negative memories with positive ones. The regular tapping of his staff on the road brought to mind memories of how he had acquired it at the start of his fourth year in Mage School on his eighteenth birthday. It was a story that he'd shared with only a few people, Leila among them.
Karaoke bars, where people in various stages of inebriation get up on a stage to sing popular songs, usually badly, had been an entertainment staple in the Capital for years. Some luminary had gotten the bright idea of doing the same thing, but for wrestling. Even after she'd come down from whatever substance she'd been consuming at the time, it had still seemed like a good idea simply because it was unique. Harold had never been one to make a big deal of his birthday, which was in early September and coincided with the start of school. He was going to keep it quiet, but his friends knew, and since 18 was the legal drinking age in the Kingdom, they had dragged him out to a new bar near the Magic School and managed to talk their way past the bouncers at the door. They had passed the area where the prizes were on display, and the ash staff with its carvings had caught his eye. They had been shown to a table in the second tier around the ring and had ordered a pitcher of a locally-brewed beer. Harold had discovered the hard way that he and alcohol were meant to be only casual friends, so he had nursed his mug carefully, while noshing on the various edibles they had ordered and watching the action in the ring.
His reverie was interrupted when a horse and buggy with two people in it turned the corner ahead of him and came towards him at nearly a gallop. The hiss and wash of the rain were drowned out by the rapidly-increasing volume of the clopping of hooves on the compacted gravel road and the rattling of the buggy. The man was driving and the woman looked like she was hanging on for dear life. He had to hastily hop onto someone's lawn as they raced by, and he wasn't able to get a good look at their faces. "What's the emergency?" he asked himself.
"Sorry!" the woman called back over her shoulder. He waved at them, turned, and continued to the end of the second block, where he turned right.
Two tables to their right had had a hen party of five female Mages from the sixth and seventh year, who were vaguely familiar to Harold and his group of three other guys, who were just starting their fourth. That their noise could be heard over the general din of the place indicated that they had been having a good time. When the call for fresh meat for the large guy in the ring had been spelled out on a big sign on the far wall, one of them had been pushed to her feet and herded to the ring. People from the Northlands tend to be on the large side, with blonde hair and blue eyes, and she was no exception. Dana Magnussen also had had curves in all of the right places and had vamped it up for the audience and her opponent. When the bell had rung, she had become all business and proceeded to throw him around like a sack of potatoes, as he had done with his previous opponents.
"I can see why she's the Captain of the Women's Wrestling Team," Harold had remarked, watching her moves as closely as possible.
"She's every guy's wet dream," Mark had replied.
"Seeing how she's beating up that guy, not for me," Alan had shuddered. Five minutes after it had started, Dana's opponent had been pinned and then dragged from the ring. Harold could see that most of her moves were from the non-lethal version of the basic hand-to-hand combat system that had been designed to make such encounters short. Unlike most of the others, he had taken a special interest in it and in the quarterstaff training, and had gotten extra training with a local Army unit whose barracks had been (and still were) across the Grand Park from the Magic School. Three opponents later, she had been hardly breaking a sweat, and his friends had suddenly propelled him to the ringside, signed the injury waiver, and shoved him into the ring.
She clearly hadn't recognized him, the number of Mages in the room had masked his status, and his show of looking nervous and uncertain was successful in getting her off her guard. When she had grinned and charged to body-slam him, he had done a classic grab, pivot, and toss so that she had landed hard on her back and had the wind knocked out of her. A quick shoulder pin and three-count secured the win. "I want the staff, please," he had told the ref in the absolute silence of the large room. "Gotta run now before she gets up!" he had added hastily.
"Not so fast, bub," Dana had growled, clamping a vise-like grip on his left ankle. "Best two out of three." The crowd had erupted and the fight was on. Twenty minutes later, they both had been on the mat, battered and bruised and unable to stand, so it had been declared a draw. Best Show of the Night had earned him the staff, which he had used to hobble to the School with Mark, Brett, and Alan for a visit to the Infirmary, where Dana and her friends had shown up shortly afterwards. Once they had been Healed, she had claimed him, taken him back to her small apartment, and he had finally gotten to see that her body had been everything that he had imagined, and then some.