The first thing at a nymph's pool is a courteous quiet. The frogs stop singing one pond-length out, as visitors lower their voices at the door of a church, and past that edge the water makes only a thin tick, a single drop falling into a basin from a root. The nymph in question lives at Fonte Dorada, a spring under a cork oak on a terraced hillside, and she is the one creature I have studied that keeps a household.
She stands about five and a half feet, narrow through the shoulders, with skin the green-gray of wet slate and hair that is not hair but a fall of fine rootlets, white at the ends where they drink. Her eyes are pale amber with a horizontal pupil, like a goat's, and they are calm. Moss grows along her left forearm in a clean stripe, and she keeps it trimmed with a shell. Her feet leave no prints on dry ground. On wet ground they leave exactly one, the left, and nobody has explained why.
The pool is eleven paces across and never rises or falls, in drought or flood. A flat black stone sits at its center, and on it she lays out what she collects: a cracked thimble, three acorn caps, a snail shell, a shard of blue tile. She rearranges them each evening with great tenderness. The villagers of Dalmora Alta, two miles down the terraces, say the order spells the weather, and the old women do read it, with a fair record.
The local rules are plain. Nobody sells water from Fonte Dorada, nor lends a jug that has touched it, nor says her name aloud while carrying a full vessel. Carriers walk home humming instead. A trade exists only because of her: the stonewrights of Dalmora Alta cut the flat black slabs that people leave at the spring's edge as gifts, and Candela Ferrao, the last of them, charges nothing and keeps the chips for her garden path. Things have changed since my earlier visit. The cork oak has put out a second trunk, thin and pale, leaning over the water, and the frogs now fall silent a full stone's throw farther out, out of respect. The left footprint, formerly one per evening, has become two. On the black stone, where the thimble sat, there is now a small brass key, green with age, and no one in Dalmora Alta admits to losing it.
- Classification
- Water-bound fae, spring guardian
- Habitat
- Spring pools under cork oaks
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- 5.5 ft tall
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Terraced hill springs
- Binomial
- Naiada sylvestris
- Diet
- Spring water, fallen figs, dew
- Temperament
- Gracious, curious, devoted to her spring