A hiss like sleet crosses the water from a sky with no cloud in it. That is the herring, thousands of them breaking the surface at once, and the fishermen off Kattermas learn to stop their oars when they hear it. Behind the hiss comes a second silence: the gulls quit crying, and the cod lines go slack because the cod have left the ledge. The shoal is running from something that has risen out of the cold trench beyond Gudlemas Ledge.
Bertil Soames, who has mended nets on the Kattermas mole for forty winters, has seen it come up eleven times. The crimson mantle breaks the surface first, sixty feet of it, ridged and glossy, with moonlight sliding off the top. Strangers take it for a capsized hull. The old Admiralty chart marks a Gudlemas Rock at that exact spot, and the rock has moved at least three times. Then the arms spread, up to a hundred and twenty feet across the swell, and the turquoise spots start up in rows along each one, lighting the water from underneath. One amber eye opens, heavy-lidded, the look of a sleeper who has been prodded. Two clubbed tentacles go snapping up after the leaping herring, and the shoal goes into the air in a silver sheet and comes down on nothing.
It does not hunt boats. It has no interest in them. A splintered mast from a wrecked fishing boat floats near the ledge, and the kraken has wrapped one arm around it every night for three seasons, neither crushing it nor letting go. The mast is useless to it. Bertil says this is the most human thing about it. The third left arm carries a clean half-moon notch, and a lump of green bronze sits wedged at the root of the right front arm, where it cannot reach. It spends a good part of each surfacing trying.
Kattermas keeps one rule. Nobody says the animal's name past the end of the mole. On the water it is the Neighbor, and a boat that speaks the other word goes home with its nets empty. The lamp on the mole stays lit all night, and nobody lends it out, not to a cousin, not to a ship in trouble. What it leaves behind is scales in drifts on the tideline and rings of pale sucker scars on any timber it has held. It stays up an hour, perhaps two, then folds itself down into the black, slowly, the way a heavy door closes. Bertil records one exception. On a gray afternoon in February, in full daylight, it crossed the shelf faster than a gig under oars and slid beneath a drifting dory. It ignored the herring. It lifted the dory clear of the water, turned it the right way up, and set it down again twenty yards from the rocks.
- Classification
- Giant deep-water cephalopod
- Habitat
- Cold shelf edges and deep trenches
- Danger
- Extreme
- Size
- mantle 60 ft long, arms up to 120 ft
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Northern sea shelves
- Binomial
- Brachiomorus abyssalis
- Diet
- Herring shoals, cod, occasional whales
- Temperament
- Slow, territorial, indifferent to ships