The rake handle is greasy-cold under Gisbert Mowle's palm, and grit from yesterday's ash rasps in the grain whenever he shifts his grip. He is the midden-man of Marshkettle, forty chimneys on a gravel shelf above Inletgoose Creek, which fills and empties with brown tidewater twice a day. His cart has a slatted tail and one bad wheel. Before the kitchens stop smoking he has loaded it from the back doors on Cooper Row: potato peel, fish heads, bedstraw, a cracked washbasin, ash from three hearths. The route has one rule. Nothing wool goes on the cart. A fleece in the pit makes its tenant sulk, and a sulking tenant, villagers say, surfaces in the drain behind the well-yard.
The pit lies a quarter mile downwind behind a blackthorn hedge, a square hole cut into clay and fifteen paces across, its walls glazed hard as pie crust. Gisbert tips from the north lip only. He backs the cart, pulls the pin, and the load slides out in one wet piece. Before it has settled a tentacle comes up, thick as a drainpipe and tipped with a cluster of barbs, and folds the top layer over like a cook folding batter. Then it goes under. It does this at every delivery, to every cart, and never looks at the driver. Gisbert says it has not missed a Wednesday in his twenty-two years on the route, which is more than he can say for the tax assessor.
The rest of his day is ordinary work. He sweeps scale and bent nails from the smithy floor at noon, eats bread and raw onion with his back to the hedge, then hauls the tannery's barrels out in the second load. Anyone who needs to find the animal can follow its drag trail, a polished groove through the grass from pit to creek and back, with pale gray castings along it like river cobbles. Anyone who wants to avoid it keeps off the glazed ground. Late in the afternoon, as Gisbert rolls the empty cart away, two stalked eyes lift above the rim and watch the bad wheel wobble until it passes the hedge.
On an earlier visit the pit was ten paces across and the hedge stood at its edge. The hedge has since been replanted twice, each time farther back, and the north lip has crept toward the lane by the length of a cart. Gisbert's grandfather lined the rim with oak planks, and none of them can be found. Nor can any of the iron. Every load carries nails, hinges, a broken horseshoe or two, and a lifetime of it has gone down, yet the castings hold nothing harder than bone. Where does the iron go?
- Classification
- Aberration, pit scavenger
- Habitat
- Refuse pits, middens, old drains
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 8 ft across, barrel body
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Village middens and town drains
- Binomial
- Cloacavorus tripedis
- Diet
- Refuse, carrion, spoiled grain
- Temperament
- Incurious, territorial when disturbed