Fine red grit crunches between the teeth for a full minute after a myrmidon has crossed the claypan upwind, and any fence rail it has leaned on stays warm to the palm at midnight. The creature is a construct the size of a draft ox: a wedge of packed clay and fused sand on six stilt legs, with a pinched waist, a jug-shaped abdomen and two black slag jaws, each as long as its head. Its eyes are lumps of amber glass. They never move, so the whole head turns instead.
The earliest account comes from a clerk at the Scarpwren copper works, who wrote that a red ant "big as a hay wain" had hauled collapsed timbers out of an adit and stacked them by length. He did not say who had sent it. Some eighty years on, the tile potters there reported that one had walled in a dead kiln with a single course of fist-sized stones and left a gap exactly the width of the firing door. Later still, surveyors for the new road found heaps of gravel sorted by grain on every claypan between Scarpwren and Jackalbluff, and stopped trying to move them. No one has found a maker, a mold or a mark of manufacture. The myrmidons simply continue.
Nothing sweet crosses the claypan. Ruan Tolliver, who fires roof tile at Scarpwren, carries figs and honeycomb the long way round by the road, because a myrmidon turns toward sugar and will follow it to a doorstep. It eats nothing itself. What it leaves is sorted gravel, heaped by size, and a track of six pits per stride, each pit deepest at the rear edge where the foot pushes off. Trackers press a hand into the nearest heap. Damp underneath means the creature passed within the day, since a myrmidon sweats a thin red water when it works.
On Jackalbluff I have watched one individual across two summers. In the first, its mound stood east of the road and its body was the orange of a new flowerpot. In the second the mound had moved west of the road, and the body had faded nearly to straw, with hairline cracks across the thorax where dry grass had rooted. The left jaw is chipped at the tip and mended with a seam of white lime. I could not learn who applied it. To measure the mound I laid a ten-foot ash pole end to end around the base. It came to 190 feet the first summer and 210 the second.
- Classification
- Clay-and-slag construct
- Habitat
- Dry claypans and abandoned kilns
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- the size of a draft ox, 9 ft long
- Activity
- Diurnal
- Realm
- Dry uplands and kiln country
- Binomial
- Formica argillacea
- Diet
- None; hauls and sorts stone
- Temperament
- Methodical, hostile near sugar