Mud at Jezdova Fen is warm to the wrist at four inches down and cold at six, and a lizardfolk digs its egg-bank to the warm layer exactly. I learned this by pushing my arm into a fresh bank and pulling it out again to a hiss from the reeds. Since then I have collected three accounts of the people who dig these banks, from three neighbors who do not agree and are each right about one thing. Galina smokes eels at Ardovitsa Weir and calls them tidy. Every afternoon one or two climb onto her smokehouse roof and lie belly down on the slates, an hour on one side and an hour on the other, turning at the half like loaves on a peel. They do nothing else up there. They do not look at her, and she sweeps around them.
Grigor cuts reeds on the Jezdova side and calls them thieves. His cut bundles go missing and come back as spear shafts. The lizardfolk stand six feet and a little over, scaled green-gray on the back and mustard at the throat, with a tail that drags a groove through the mud as wide as a hand. They eat eels, frogs, marsh rats and snails, and cracked snail shells piled on a stump are how he knows one has been through. He walked me out to the tracks. With a peeled willow wand I measured the stride across twelve prints, heel to heel, and averaged it at thirty-one inches. Grigor says they circle a man standing in the water and never blink, and that a man circled that way gets out of the water.
Gordana, who has delivered half the fen, calls them anxious parents. Between March and the end of May nobody on the fen whistles within earshot of an egg-bank. A whistle sounds like a harrier, and the nest-tenders bury the clutch in the mud and lie across it for days, long after the eggs have cooled. Children here learn to hum instead. She adds that the lizardfolk have no use for iron and work in fire-hardened wood, flint and bone.
All three would swear to the same rules: the lizardfolk keep to the open sun, stay outside the village, and want nothing made of iron. Then there is the gray male at Ardovitsa with the split crest along his spine, who spends wet afternoons in the shade of the mill, mending a net with an iron needle, and who looks up and nods when I come through the door.
- Classification
- Scaled humanoid, fen-dwelling people
- Habitat
- Warm fens, reed marshes, river weirs
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 6 ft tall, tail another 4 ft
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Southern fens and river weirs
- Binomial
- Lacertar paludis
- Diet
- Eels, frogs, marsh rats, snails
- Temperament
- Wary, territorial, patient parents