Nobody in Sumbrel agrees on what the robot is for, and each of them has stood close enough to be sure. Vorrin Hask, who keeps the sluice gate, says it is a clock that learned to walk and now hunts for something to wind. Vanya Orlet, the charcoal burner, says it is a smith's grudge, hammered into plate and left running after the smith died. Vell, an eleven-year-old who would give no second name, says it is lost and knows it.
I lay the three against what I saw myself. The robot is a hunched wedge of riveted iron plate, green at the seams, about seven feet tall, with arms that hang to the knees. Its right hand is twice the size of its left. Its head is a narrow box with two round glass eyes, and the left lens is cracked and patched with a flat river pebble. An oilcloth apron is riveted across its shoulders and chest, stiff as bark. Hask's clock theory rests on the sluice. Each dusk the robot climbs the dam at Sumbrel and turns its big right hand against the gate wheel, a quarter turn, never more, then climbs down. The gate has not stuck in nine years. Hask admits this. His complaint is that it has straightened every crooked fence post in the valley except his own, and he takes that personally.
Orlet's grudge theory comes from the burn clearings above Oskavar, where the robot stacks cold logs in neat ricks and pulls nails from the charcoal sheds. Nothing with an edge is sold, lent or left out within sight of it. It takes the tool, sharpens it on its own forearm until the blade rings thin, and returns it by morning, too keen to hold. Nobody there says the smith's name aloud near it either. Trackers find it by its footprints: oval, deep at the heel, filled with green flakes of verdigris and a smear of lamp oil.
Vell's account is the shortest. The robot stands in doorways at dusk with its head tilted, the cracked eye dark and the whole one amber, and waits as if it were expecting to be called inside. Nobody calls it. It stays until the lamps go out. I leave Sumbrel by the dam road before light. The gate wheel has been turned its quarter. On the last gatepost, level with my shoulder, there is a single handprint pressed into the damp wood, the size of a dinner plate and still warm to the palm.
- Classification
- Iron construct, self-winding
- Habitat
- Dams, sluices, charcoal clearings
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- 7 ft tall, arms to the knees
- Activity
- Crepuscular
- Realm
- Dam country and burn hills
- Binomial
- Automaton ferrivagus
- Diet
- Lamp oil and cold charcoal
- Temperament
- Patient, fussy, unreadable