The iron rail along the lower gate at Gradovec is warm under the palm, even in January, and the warmth runs uphill in a line as straight as a plumb cord. Frost stops a finger short of it on either side. Three people in the village gave me three descriptions of the dwarves who live under the granite, and I set them down in the order I heard them.
Filip drives a barley cart up to the gate every ninth day. Dwarves, he says, are short and broad as a door, pay in iron nails weighed on a pan scale, and have never haggled. He adds that they hollowed the ridge before the village existed. I cannot check that. The deepest door opens only to family, and nobody I asked has been past the second. The schoolmistress at Pelkava, a day east where the road drops into the gorge, holds that they are not short at all. Five feet, she says, square in the shoulder, with hands like spades and a flat, quick speech that has no word for perhaps.
Fedra, who keeps goats on the near slope, agrees with neither. To her they are people who stoop because the galleries are low and who have never been seen to sit. She sets a dish of barley water on her sill the night before the first frost, and in the morning it is empty or frozen solid, and she treats both as an answer. Laid together, the accounts agree only on food: barley bread, smoked mutton, a black mushroom beer. I measured one at the gate at four feet nine, in a leather apron scorched pale along the hem, with a gray plait bound in copper wire. Spoil from the galleries is left in heaps graded by grain, pebbles, gravel, sand, like flour sifted and set out to dry. Walkers cross these at the edge, never the crest. Anyone entering a gallery road knocks twice with the flat of the left hand on the rock.
I came in the wet spring and again two winters later. In between, the lower gate had been bricked to the lintel, so that the rail now runs up to a wall, and the barley market had moved half a mile uphill. The rail is still warm. Who heats it, and with what, when the chimney behind the gate has not smoked since the bricking?
- Classification
- Stocky mountain-dwelling people
- Habitat
- Hollowed granite ridges, deep galleries
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- 4.5 to 5 ft, broad as a door
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Mountain halls and hill roads
- Binomial
- Lithanthropus ferrarius
- Diet
- Barley bread, smoked mutton, mushroom beer
- Temperament
- Proud, exacting, steady