A beholder's central eye switches magic off, and that is the only reason the herders under Wickersham Tor tolerate the thing. Whatever is enchanted and drifts into the cone of that stare goes dull: a hexed gate latch, a cradle charm gone sour, a ring that has been bringing one family bad weddings for three generations. Bertil Harrow earns his living from it. He hauls such objects up the scree on a flat sledge, props them on the lip of the ledge in the eye's line, and fetches them down the next morning. A ring costs a sack of barley, a bed frame two. The charms come back as dull as river stones. A wardrobe that used to murmur after dark now only creaks.
Ten stalks crown the sphere, thick as a man's wrist at the base and tapering like cattails. Each ends in an eye of its own color: amber, pond green, a bruised violet, and seven more I have stopped trying to name. They swivel independently, the way snail horns do, so the animal can watch a goat track and a cart road at once. I measured the longest stalk by driving a post marked in inches into the pasture and sighting past it from sixty yards while the beholder drifted alongside. It stood at thirty-one inches. The central eye, read the same way, was eleven inches across, wider than a dinner plate and set in a lid the color of candle tallow.
The mouth is underneath, wide and crooked, with teeth like chipped crockery. Sheep go into it, and goats, and in a bad winter a drayman's horse. It leaves two signs: gray pellets of wool and bone below the ledge, and a ring of bare rock six paces across where no lichen grows. Shepherds at Lovell Gap pull a feed sack over the head of the lead ram before they drive a flock past the tor. A ram that cannot see the eye, they say, cannot lead the others into it. The ewes follow the sack, and most years the flock arrives whole.
Every morning, before it does anything else, the beholder rubs its stalks clean against one hollow in the cliff. It takes them in turn, the way a person wipes fingers on an apron, and the stone there has worn glassy. By my watch the whole job runs forty minutes. Nothing about it is dangerous or strange; it has grit to clear. At noon it does something no one has explained. For a full hour it hangs motionless with all eleven eyes open, fixed on one patch of the empty north slope where nothing grows and nothing walks. What is on that slope?
- Classification
- Aberration, floating predator
- Habitat
- Cliff ledges and bare highland tors
- Danger
- Extreme
- Size
- A sphere about 6 ft across
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Highland pastures and scree
- Binomial
- Orbiculus vigilans
- Diet
- Sheep, goats, the odd draft horse
- Temperament
- Territorial, patient, coldly watchful