A pegasus can strike fresh water out of bare rock with one hoof, and it does this mostly by accident. The farmers of Ellwand Cross, a stepped hillside of barley terraces above the slate town of Lathe Reach, have lived with the habit for nine generations. They have learned to treat each new spring as a gift that arrives with a flood attached.
The encounter runs the same way each time. First comes a downdraft, cold enough to lay every lamp flame flat in its chimney, though the night air is still. Then a dry clatter on the roof slates, like someone dropping a sack of walnuts. The animal is the size of a plow horse, dove-gray and barred along the neck, with wings folded wet and heavy against its ribs, and it lands with more enthusiasm than grace. It skids, scrabbles, and throws a forehoof out for balance, and wherever that hoof meets stone, the stone opens. Its wings are white tipped with slate, and its long silver mane is flecked with moss from some high terrace. One forehoof carries a pale split in the wall, which the farmers take as a signature.
Vesna Harrow, who keeps the highest terrace at Ellwand Cross, says the animal always looks as delighted as she is. She has watched one from her kitchen window, ears pricked, stepping back from a jet of water that rose a yard into the air and fell back hissing on its own feathers. It drinks, shakes itself, and sneezes. Then it opens its wings with a crack like a wet sail and lifts off the ridge, leaving the spring running behind it and a smell of crushed mint in the cold.
By dawn the springcappers arrive from Lathe Reach. The trade exists only because of the pegasus: a crew of four with clay, oak plugs and a hand drill, who bore the new vent down to a trickle before it undermines a terrace wall. They charge in barley. Each household meanwhile follows its own habit, tipping the first cup of the new water over the doorsill and keeping the second for the kettle, so that the house has taken the gift before the hillside takes it back. Nobody drinks the water raw for three days. On the roof above Vesna's kitchen, a single flight feather stands upright in the mud of the vent, a hand's length of gray and white, slowly filling with water.
- Classification
- Winged horse
- Habitat
- Slate roofs and high terraces
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- 16 hands at the shoulder
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Moorland ridges and hill farms
- Binomial
- Equus alipennis
- Diet
- Barley, wild mint, spring moss
- Temperament
- Curious, eager, a little clumsy