"Which eye does it sleep with?" the girl at the Marn gate asks me, and her father tells her it has only the one. She says that is what she meant. The cyclops of Ide Hill stands eleven feet when it straightens, slab-shouldered, with a brow ridge that shelves out like a lintel and, under it, a single eye the size of a soup plate. The iris is pale gold. A white scar runs from the middle of its forehead down into the upper lid, so that the lid never quite closes on that side. The hair is coarse and slate gray, and a clot of amber pitch is stuck to one braid above the left ear. Across its chest it wears a sheepskin, belted with a length of wagon chain.
Marn has argued about the stones for as long as it has grown turnips. The cyclops lobs flat slabs from the top of Ide onto the village side, and they land in the beds, on the shingles, and once in a butter churn. Bodil Rask, who keeps forty ewes below the hill, holds that one eye cannot judge distance, so every stone is a bad throw. Her neighbor Bram Tolley says it judges distance well enough and is aiming at his roof. I counted its throws across three seasons. Of forty-one stones, thirty-eight came down within a yard of a gray stake on the common, which marks the old line of Ide before the village moved it downslope. It aims, then, and not at Bram. His roof is only beside the line. Bodil is wrong about the eye and Bram is wrong about the roof, and neither has thanked me for saying so.
When it comes down to the common, everyone at Marn shuts one eye and keeps it shut until the cyclops is out of sight, on the theory that it counts only what looks back with two. It eats mutton, river mussels and turnips, but only turnips with the dirt on. Scrubbed ones it sets in a row along the wall, untouched, and Bodil now washes a single row each autumn for the pleasure of seeing them lined up. Its print is twenty inches long with the left heel dragged, and it stacks flat stone wherever it has rested.
When I first came, the cairn at the foot of Ide reached my knee. It is now taller than Bram, and the stones have been faced, flat sides turned out, though no one has seen it done. At dusk it stands before the quarry wall to the north with the gold eye wide open and the scarred lid trembling, for an hour or more. Bodil asks what it expects to come out of the rock. Nobody has answered her.
- Classification
- Giant, one-eyed hill dweller
- Habitat
- Hill pastures and abandoned quarries
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 11 ft tall
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Pasture hills and quarry country
- Binomial
- Unioculus lapidator
- Diet
- Mutton, river mussels, unwashed turnips
- Temperament
- Grudging, territorial, precise