The people of the mountain village had offered Andar a house to live in. It was an unexpectedly generous act for a drifter like himself. The people who usually lived there were away, they explained, and it would be better for them to have someone care for the house than to leave it empty.
So there he was, Andar, first elder, living in one of the unfamiliar wooden houses of the mountain village. The people here used wood all through their homes. They had plenty of trees and a lack of wood-eating insects, so they could use as much wood as they wanted. The houses were built of hand-carved timber on the upper floors, with walls at the base fortified with earth and animal dung. The livestock lived under the house, and part of Andar"s work in his borrowed house was to take care of the single co
