"She sings before the water turns, never after," says Eulalio Pardo, scouring a kettle with a fistful of sand at the Nacedouro landing. I have found no reason to correct him. In March the undine surfaces in the spring pool only after dusk, waist deep, facing upstream. She stands about five feet. Her hair is the dark green of eelgrass and lies flat on the water instead of floating. Her ears are finned along the edge, and the left one has a notch missing, thumbnail sized and clean as a clam bite.
April rain fills the pool and she grows bold. She follows the washerwomen's buckets down the race as far as the stone sluice, a quarter mile, head low, mouth just clear of the water. The rule at Nacedouro is simple: no one dips a vessel while she sings. They wait until the pool is quiet, about as long as it takes to boil an egg. Households at Karolhos Mill, below the sluice, keep a crock of wood ash beside the well and pinch some across each full bucket before lifting it, so the water does not carry her home. I watched this done over forty buckets. Nothing followed any of them. She eats minnows and the small gray snails that crowd the lip of the pool, and wherever she has sat she leaves one wet stone on the dry bank, dark for a day. Locals step around it.
By July the pool has dropped the length of a forearm and she stops singing. She comes up in silence, and the silence is the signal. At dusk the whole of Nacedouro turns out with buckets, and carries water back up the race to the pool, one full pail after another, until the level lifts a hand's width. Nobody asked them to. She watches from the cave end, and when the last pail is poured she sings one clear note. Lantern carriers on the east path go with their lights uncovered, because she is fond of the reflections and has been seen to hold the pool still for them.
Between March and October the pool changes. A willow leaned over the east bank in spring; by October a flood has laid it in the water root first, and she sits on the trunk where the pool is shallowest, which she did not do before. September rain brings the singing back, thin at first. I leave by the Karolhos road with my pack damp from a passing shower. At the bend I look back and find one dark stone on the dry verge, a long way from any water.
- Classification
- Freshwater spirit
- Habitat
- Spring pools and mill races
- Danger
- Minimal
- Size
- 5 ft tall, slender
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Spring pools and slow rivers
- Binomial
- Hydrelia fontivaga
- Diet
- Minnows and small pool snails
- Temperament
- Gentle, watchful, protective of her pool