The stone is warm where a couatl has slept, warm in the middle of a frost, and it stays warm for most of a day. That is how the terrace-keepers of Fuentealba read the oldest layer of the record. A scraped clay tablet from the lower wall shows a coiled body with a crest, and under it a tally of nothing at all, only the glyph for "warm stone." The first people to farm the slopes above the Rio Sombrero seem to have followed the creature uphill, planting wherever the ground held heat.
The next record is a planting calendar, four centuries on, kept by a terrace family that signed itself with a drawing of a feather. It notes that the couatl crosses the valley at the turn of the thaw, nine to eleven feet of body with the plumage running down the spine in a band of emerald and flame orange, and that the barley beneath its path comes up a week early. It also notes, with some irritation, that the couatl sheds a hand-long fan of feather each spring and will not let anyone but the hereditary gatherer touch it before it cools. Collecting those feathers is a trade of its own, called plumeiro in the high villages of Serra Cabrales, and the one living plumeiro, Tomasa Quiroga, carries a leather glove, a pair of wooden tongs and a jar of river sand to set the quills in. A cooled feather is stiff as a roof slate. A hot one will blister a thumb.
The present-day creature that Quiroga tracks is a long animal with a blunt, wide-jawed head, amber eyes with a slit pupil and a gold rim, and green scales that go dull at the belly. A stretch of feathers on its left flank is missing, a bare oval the width of a dinner plate where the scales show through. Quiroga says it has been bare since her grandmother's time and nobody has seen it grow back. The couatl eats small birds, river eels, and the hard-shelled beetles that infest the terrace walls, and it leaves behind a neat pellet of wing cases and fish spine on the highest stone of the wall. Villagers read the pellet's direction to learn where it went. They also keep one firm rule: no one whistles on the terraces between the first thaw and the first planting, since the couatl takes it as an insult and will sit on a roof until the whistler apologizes aloud.
What the record never settles is where the couatl goes in the dry months. It leaves Fuentealba in the last week of summer and returns in the thaw, always from the north, always with the same bare patch on its flank. Quiroga has followed the trail to the pass above Serra Cabrales, where the warm stones simply stop. Nobody has yet explained what lies beyond the pass that a creature of its size would cross twice a year to visit.
- Classification
- Celestial feathered serpent
- Habitat
- Sun-warmed terraces and river gorges
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- 10 ft long, thick as a thigh
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- High terraced valleys
- Binomial
- Serpens pennatus aureus
- Diet
- Eels, small birds, beetles
- Temperament
- Proud, patient, easily insulted