The causeway from Aldersbrug to the Molenkamp heath is eleven miles of laid birch logs, and I walked it in two days because every third log has sunk and the rest are slick with green. Reinout Aerts, a peat cutter bound for his drying fields, went ahead of me with a bucket. Six miles out, the reeds on both sides stood furred with white rime. It was the last week of August. The frost lay in a wedge forty yards long, narrow at the causeway and spreading across the heath, and the water beneath it had skinned over with ice. Aerts looked at it once, said "Been through," and began flinging ash from his bucket onto the logs ahead of us.
Ash is how the cutters track what they cannot see. By dusk the logs held a line of prints, bare, broad and five-toed, beginning in the middle of the causeway as though something had stepped down out of empty air. I laid my pocket rule along the clearest one: nineteen inches heel to toe, with a little over five feet between strides. Aerts walked past a fine, dry block of peat that had a finger-wide dent pressed into its face. Cutters here leave any dented block where it lies, however good, and say it is already spoken for.
The prints ended at the sluice house at Molenkamp, and there it stood on the lock beam, no longer troubling to hide. The skin was the blue of wet slate. The left horn was broken to a stub; the right swept back over a white topknot. The eyes were pale gold, with no white in them. It wore a patched saffron robe belted with green cord and a gray wolf hide across the shoulders. The staff gauge on the sluice post is marked in feet, and sighting across it from where I crouched I put the crown of its head at nine feet five inches. It looked at me for as long as it takes to boil an egg. Then it raised its right hand, and the pond beside us went white from near bank to far with a sound like a dropped plate. The ink froze in my pen.
It rose off the beam without a jump, went pale at the edges and was gone. In my pack, the four sugar lumps I carry for tea were missing. Their paper lay folded square on top, and the tea tin beside it had not been touched. Aerts said it was the third pack that month. The ice held until noon the next day. On the walk back he asked, and he asked again over his stove in Aldersbrug, and nobody there has answered: what does a creature that can freeze a pond solid want with four lumps of sugar?
- Classification
- Giant-kin spellcaster
- Habitat
- Peat moors and cold heaths
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 9 ft 5 in tall
- Activity
- Nocturnal
- Realm
- Cold lowland moors and peat country
- Binomial
- Gigas frigivolans
- Diet
- Eels, waterfowl, and stolen sugar
- Temperament
- Vain, patient, quick to chill