Spring tides are the weeks when the Black Shores uncover the most ground, and from the equinox until the neap in April the fishing families of Allhallen Staith stop leaving anything on the beach. They know the Fomorian is back in its cave by small insults. A heap of white limpet shells appears at the cave mouth, higher each week. A bucket is found flattened on the shingle. A skate is left on a rock with one bite out of the wing, as though it had been tasted and judged. Twice a winter a ewe goes missing from the tideline pasture, and nobody searches for her.
What they do about it is mostly housekeeping. Pails, creels and tubs are carried above the wrack line every evening. One bucket is left behind, turned mouth-down on the shingle in plain sight. Jory Tolland, who has worked the Staith boats for forty years, sets it out himself. The giant comes down at dusk, sees something upended and out of place, and spends its temper on that. Then it goes back up to its fire. Nobody walks the Cannelmas causeway between sunset and full dark, when the tide drains off it and the giant crosses to hunt skate in the pools.
It stands fourteen feet when it straightens, which it rarely does. The left shoulder rides far lower than the right, so the whole body leans like a wedge propped against a wall, and the knuckled hands hang to the knee. It wears a coat of sewn seal hides gone stiff with salt, belted with a length of ship's rope, and a cracked whale rib swings from the belt, its grip worn smooth. The skin is slate blue and pitted with old barnacle scars. One eye is small and dark. The other is large and burns the orange of a struck match. The expression is sullen and faintly offended, like a man who has found someone sitting in his seat. Since my last visit the giant has given up the cave under the Cannelmas causeway, now half drowned, and moved to a larger one a mile north. The shell heap at its mouth, knee high then, reaches my chest.
The Staith families hold that the orange eye is the bad one, swollen and half blind, and so they keep to the giant's dark side when they must pass. I have watched it track a gull across the whole flat with the orange eye alone. I have no way of telling whether the glow is lit from within or only catches the driftwood fire. The small dark eye does not blink at the fire at all, and I would not stand on that side either. Tolland, righting his bucket one evening, put it simply: "Watch the little one. The big one only wants you to."
- Classification
- Giant, sea-dwelling
- Habitat
- Tidal caves and drowned causeways
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 14 ft when upright
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Black shores of the northern sea
- Binomial
- Gigas abyssalis
- Diet
- Skate, carrion, stranded livestock
- Temperament
- Territorial, sullen, petty