The salt pan below Grozhava is cracked into hexagons every autumn, and in the first week of the season one hexagon in every hundred is missing. The hole is clean-edged and wet at the bottom, and the water in it is sweet. Nothing has been dug. The crust has been lifted out whole, like a tile from a floor, and the tiles are never found. This is the earliest sign of a marid on the flats, and the only one that does not frighten anyone.
By the first autumn rains the marid itself can be seen, though only at the edges of a puddle or a channel full enough to hold its outline. It is a tall column of standing seawater, roughly the height of a haywain stacked with barley, with a faint spiral running through it as if a rope were being drawn slowly upward inside glass. It has no face until it turns toward a person. Then a pair of hollows opens at the height of a man's eyes, and the water behind them goes dark and still. Routine occupies most of its day. At low tide it walks the length of the Rzeva channel and pulls the silt off the sluice gratings, one grating at a time, and lays the silt in a neat ridge on the north bank. It does this every day without hurry and without any interest in who is watching.
In winter the behavior changes. Frost locks the shallows, and the marid withdraws into the one deep pool the cold cannot seal, a drowned quarry behind Rzeva Mill. It sits low there, barely taller than a barrel, and the ice around the pool thickens in rings that are always exactly spaced. Kasimir Dobran, who keeps the mill, hangs a pail of fresh river water on the quarry fence each first hard freeze and does not look to see whether it is gone by morning. It is always gone. I have not been able to confirm the claim, repeated all along the flats, that a marid was once a person who drowned owing a debt of water, and I note it only because every old woman I asked told it the same way.
Spring floods bring the marid out in force, and then it is wide, loud and quick, heaping the channel banks into long smooth wedges that turn the flood aside from the pans. Its tracks in the mud are broad hollows that fill as you watch, with a fine ring of white salt dried around each rim. These can be followed for a mile. They end at the sea wall, where the stone is slick to a height of eleven feet, and that is the measure the salt-rakers use to judge how high the next tide will come.
- Classification
- Water elemental, djinn kind
- Habitat
- Salt pans, tidal channels, drowned quarries
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- about 12 ft tall when fully risen
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Brackish shallows and sea walls
- Binomial
- Aquaris pelagodjinn
- Diet
- Silt, brine and river water
- Temperament
- Aloof, tidy, slow to anger