The lillend matters most in the weeks of the olive harvest, when the pickers on the terraces above Ojeruela spread their nets and begin to hum. That is the season the lillend comes down from the rock shelves. Three accounts of it reached me over one harvest, and I set them side by side here because no two agree on what she is for.
The first comes from Vicente Arruda, who keeps the press at Ojeruela. He says she arrives the morning the first net is laid and sits coiled on the press wall, her serpent tail wrapped three turns around the stone, while a woman's torso rises from it, copper-skinned, with a pair of green wings folded at her back. She plucks a small gut-strung lute across her lap. Vicente says the pickers work faster to it, and that the oil from those weeks tastes of pepper. He will not press a single olive while she is silent. Each evening she drinks a measure of the first pressing from a shallow clay dish left on the wall, and the dish is always empty by morning, with a pale smear of scales at the rim.
The second account is from a goatherd's daughter at Gaviotal, a hamlet two ridges east, who says the lillend is the best thing that ever happened to the goats. She sings to them and they follow. Twice that autumn the daughter lost a kid on the cliff path, and found it standing calm on a ledge, unharmed, facing the sound. The girl keeps a rule her grandmother taught her: never answer the song with your own voice. Answer, and the lillend learns your pitch and uses it for weeks. The girl hums only through a closed mouth, with a thumb pressed against her lip.
The third account is mine. On the ninth day I stood beneath the Gaviotal shelf with a knotted surveyor's cord and measured her tail where it hung over the rock, fourteen feet and four inches, while she slept in the sun. Her routine never varied. At midday she shed a little dust from her scales, scratched her back against the same hollow in the stone, rearranged her coils twice, and dozed. Her wings are the green of oxidized copper, her hair is the color of wet rust, and a crack runs through the lute's belly, mended with a strip of birch bark. Vicente calls the song a blessing. The goatherd's daughter calls it a lullaby. Neither has ever seen her leave. The press dish still sits on the wall at Ojeruela, rim crusted with dried oil and one curled scale.
- Classification
- Winged serpent-bodied minstrel
- Habitat
- Sun-baked terraces and rock shelves
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- 14 ft long, torso human height
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Upper terraces of the olive hills
- Binomial
- Serpenta harmonica
- Diet
- Olive oil, honey, ripe figs
- Temperament
- Idle, musical, quietly proud