Perrin Hask has mended the Mabbott Fell road for twenty-two years, and he can pick out a hobgoblin ditch in the dark by stepping into it. The floor is flat, the walls lean at one angle, and the depth is the same every time. Human diggers round the bottom out of habit. Hobgoblins do not. In October their gangs are cutting drains along the ridge before the frost lifts, forty to a column, spades swung together. The hide is brick red going to rust at the knuckles. The faces are broad and flat-nosed, the eyes pale amber. They stand five and a half feet and carry more shoulder than any farmhand.
Snow ends the digging and starts the drill. At the stockade on Mabbott Fell they march a stamped gravel oval at dawn, turning on a clipped syllable from the oldest of them. Before that, every morning, they scrape the yard clear of ice with flat boards and carry the scrapings to the ditch. It is done without hurry or ceremony, like sweeping a shop. Drovers crossing the causeway below Thrale Tor break step on purpose. A stranger who falls into rhythm with a column, the saying goes, has enlisted, and will be handed a spade. Hask holds that each company buries its dead upright beneath the drill yard so the living can march over them. I have no way to confirm this. No one has dug there.
On my return in February the stockade gate had moved from the south wall to the east, and the old gap was filled with fresh-split larch. The yard was a few paces shorter. Nobody in Thrale village could say why. The shutters stay closed from dusk, and smoke rises from the same two chimneys all night. They eat barley porridge thick with mutton fat, and the middens beside the walls hold little else.
The thaw sends them back onto the roads. Their tracks are easy to follow: hobnail prints in paired rows, three nails to the heel, spaced so evenly the column looks stamped into the mud. They do not hunt travelers. They do object to damage. A farmer at Thrale Tor plowed across a drain line in April and woke to forty spades planted upright in his field, handles all leaning the same way. He has not plowed there since. In May I walked the Thrale road and measured each cut I passed. There were forty-one, and every one was eighteen inches deep.
- Classification
- Drilled goblinoid of the uplands
- Habitat
- Stockaded fells and ridge roads
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- about 5.5 ft, yoke-shouldered
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Upland fells and moorland roads
- Binomial
- Gobelinus castrensis
- Diet
- Barley porridge, mutton, dried peas
- Temperament
- Orderly, literal, quick to enforce