A sylph sorts wheat from chaff faster than eleven people with winnowing fans, and it has never once done the job on purpose. It cannot cross an open threshing floor without taking an interest in whatever is light, and on a threshing floor that means husk. At Jorvanda Terrace, where barley and spring wheat are beaten out on a flagstone floor facing a gap in the ridge, Esmerin Vask plans her harvest around this the way other farmers plan around rain.
Her day starts before the hens. She cuts the string on the sheaves, spreads them over the stones, and walks the flail until her shoulders loosen. By midmorning the floor is a mat of broken straw, awn and grain, and she tosses scoopfuls into the air, which accomplishes nothing while the wind is down. Then the sylph comes through the gap. It is the height of a tall boy and visible only by what it carries: a slow spiral of dust and husk in the rough outline of a slender person, with long, graceful hands. It crosses the floor in the time it takes to draw a breath. Behind it the grain lies in a clean ridge, heavy kernels first, and the husk has been combed into a drift against the north wall. Esmerin is already holding a sack open.
The rest of the day is ordinary labor. She fills forty-pound sacks, hauls them up the loft ladder, eats cheese standing in the doorway, and sweeps the drift out the north gap for the hens. Nobody whistles on the floor at Jorvanda, not Esmerin, not the children, not the man who carts sacks to the market at Ombrasel. A whistle draws the sylph into a tight circle that flings grain and husk together into the neighbor's field, and it stays away until the next day's wind. In midafternoon it passes again, higher, and lifts the fine dust off the stacked sacks without touching the floor. Esmerin does not look up when it goes over, because, she says, looking only makes it show off.
When I first came, the husk drift lay against the north wall. Two harvests later it lies against the south wall. A neighbor built a stone fence around a new orchard, the fence bent the pass wind, and the sylph now enters from the other side, left arm foremost, a dark streak of soot turning in that forearm. Esmerin propped open the south door the week the fence went up. She is wedging it now with a flail handle. "North shut, south open," she says. "It's used to the fence."
- Classification
- Air elemental, lesser
- Habitat
- Windy ridge gaps and threshing floors
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- The height of a tall boy
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Upland winds
- Binomial
- Aeriola frumentaria
- Diet
- Warm updrafts and fine grain dust
- Temperament
- Graceful, buoyant, easily distracted