A furrow cut straight on Monday bends by Thursday, and the plowmen of Ochtermoor no longer blame the horses. The cause is a mandrake: a forked, pale root the length of a forearm, fourteen inches from leaf to toe, with a turnip-knob head wrinkled like a thumb and small orange eyes. In October it works at night, pushing the heavy clay aside a hand's width at a time until the line suits it. It drinks what the rain has pooled in the ruts and takes a pinch of soil from the churchyard wall at Ilfynnan, which it carries home in the root hairs of its left claw. By morning it is sunk to the neck, with only a crown of broad dark leaves showing. New farmhands take the leaves for parsnip tops and the body for a forked parsnip, and reach for a spade. Dilys Rhydderch, who has plowed the Ochtermoor clay for thirty-one autumns, says a parsnip has never once glared at her and she leaves alone any root that does.
In November the rain is steady and the mandrake is at its most active, and its sulking is at its most visible. Laugh at one and it turns in the soil until its back is to you, then stays that way for days. Children at Ochtermoor test this on purpose and are scolded for it. One leaf on most of them is torn straight through, and locals say it happened in a quarrel with a crow. Nobody can say whether the crow won.
By January the ground is iron and the mandrake grows wary. It stays down through the day, rising only on nights of hard frost, and the place where it lies is easy to find: a thin ring of white in the furrow, a hand wider than the root, where its breath has crusted the clay. On Ilfynnan Ridge the rings cluster in the shadow of the gallows post. Diggers keep one rule. They go in on the first still morning of the thaw, never on a windy one, and never without a dog. A loop of horsehair braid goes around the ankle, the other end around the dog, and the digger walks away and calls from the far side of the field. Roots that have survived a dig carry the frayed remnant for the rest of the winter. An uprooted mandrake is vengeful. It comes out mid-lunge, arms flung wide, shouting, throwing clods, and the tether snaps taut behind it. Most people stand well back and wait for the shouting to stop.
In February the leaves push up green through the last of the frost, and the furrows begin to bend again. No one at Ochtermoor or Ilfynnan has ever found a mandrake flower, a seed, or a seedling smaller than the span of a hand. Every root arrives full-grown, already angry, already standing in ground that was bare the week before. So who plants them?
- Classification
- Root-bodied sylvan fae
- Habitat
- Gallows ground and heavy clay fields
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- The length of a forearm, 14 in.
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Fae and Sylvan Folk
- Binomial
- Radix clamans
- Diet
- Rainwater and graveyard soil
- Temperament
- Sulky, wary, vengeful when uprooted