"Who feeds it when it doesn't rain?" a boy asks me on the church step at Ivenmas, and his mother pulls him back by the coat collar without answering. Garrow Pell is already forty feet up the tower stair with a bucket and a hooked scoop. The question stays on the step. Pell clears the gutters of St. Ive's for the parish, as his father did. The morning is moss and pigeon feathers, a black paste of both packed into the lead channel along the nave roof. He works on his knees on a folded sack and drops each scoop into the bucket without looking. By ten it is full. He lowers it on a rope to his nephew, who carries it to the midden behind the sexton's cottage and sends it back empty.
The channel ends at the northwest corner, where the gargoyle crouches on its ledge with its jaws open over a thirty-foot drop. Pell pushes the scoop down its throat and draws out a plug of fine gray grit. The creature is four feet of green-gray limestone with a frog's wide mouth, a long neck and a left horn broken to a stump. After rain the lichen on the ledge is scraped clear in a half circle, and three-toed prints cross the slates, each as wide as a spade blade, dry where everything around them is dark. Pell sweeps the grit into a pail. It scours moss off slate better than anything sold in town.
Noon he spends at Pancris, the huddle of houses at the foot of the hill, buying solder from the plumber and eating bread and raw onion on the churchyard wall. Pancris keeps a habit older than anyone can date. In the first rain of March a crock is set on the grass under the spout, and what it catches is poured over sprained wrists wrapped in dock leaf and over the front doorstep, so the roof above that door will hold through the year. Nearly every house owns a crock with a chipped lip kept only for this.
By two Pell is back on the roof, resetting three cracked slates with a mouthful of nails. At dusk he returns to the northwest corner to take in the ladder. Pell says it drinks only when nobody is looking at the spout. Whether the stone is warm or cold when it moves, I have no means of saying, because no one has ever put a hand on it in the rain. In last August's drought the throat was wet every morning, though the sky held nothing for weeks. Pell asks it of the empty roof as he climbs down: what fills it? Nobody has told him.
- Classification
- Animated stone spout-guardian
- Habitat
- Church towers and wet roof ledges
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- 4 ft long, crouched
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Stone, slate and rain
- Binomial
- Ombrolithus stillans
- Diet
- Rainwater, lichen and lime
- Temperament
- Sullen, territorial, patient