The dragon turtle feeds on whatever boats carry with them: the green beard of weed along a waterline, the barnacles under it, and the fat that pools in a bilge. In Stob harbor it does this in the dusk, when the channel runs cold and slow, and it does it to one hull at a time. On the evening in question a grain lighter from upriver lies against the Ord Channel moorings, and her crew take the dark hump that rises beside her for a capsized barge. A turtle of forty feet shows only a wedge of shell at the surface, green-black and crusted with verdigris patches, with pale kelp hanging off the edges like a bad wig. Men have thrown lines over it. One crew once tried to caulk it. This crew's mate steps onto the plates with a lantern to look for the owner, and the lantern swings.
The neck comes up out of the water, ridged and long, and the head turns toward the light with the heavy-lidded stare of something woken for a small reason. Its eyes are saffron gold and wide as dinner plates. Steam rolls from the nostrils. A loop of mended fishing net is wound around the base of a cracked left horn, tied off with an orange cord. The harbor knows the story behind it, a stolen pot of lamp oil, and the animal has worn the cord ever since without apparent shame. The mate stands very still. The turtle watches the lantern go back and forth, back and forth, and the steam thickens.
Stob's rule is simple. After the evening gun, no uncovered flame stands on the mole, and lamps are hooded with a tin shade until the channel has been quiet an hour. The turtle is slow and wary and nearly harmless when it is left in the dark, but light enrages it, and a lit hull is a poor place to be then. Gerd Pask, who trims the mole lamps, hoods the one nearest the water first and says the old beast has never hurt anyone who had the sense to blow a candle out.
The mate does so, belatedly. The turtle sighs, a sound like a sluice opening, and lays its head against the mooring post with the rope wound round it, the way a cow leans on a gate. It rests there while the lighter's crew pole off in silence. Then it slides under, takes its dinner from the hull of the next boat in line, and goes down the channel. A slick of bilge fat shines on the water behind it, and a few strips of kelp turn in the current. "Told you to hood that lamp," Gerd calls after the lighter.
- Classification
- Aquatic dragon, shelled wyrm
- Habitat
- Cold deep channels, coastal trenches
- Danger
- High
- Size
- about 40 ft long, shell 25 ft across
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Coastal seas and deep harbors
- Binomial
- Testudodraco profundus
- Diet
- Hull growth, fish, bilge fat
- Temperament
- Slow, wary, easily provoked by light