No one in the valley hangs a lantern on the north side of a house after the first snow. The wall stays dark, the shutters stay latched, and children are taught to walk the south path to school even when the north one is shorter. The reason is the stone giant, which sits on the ridge above and prefers the dark to lie flat against the slope. Tamsin Orrel keeps the rule better than most, because her trade depends on it. She is a ledge-sweeper. Before dawn she climbs the Oxter Stair, a hundred and forty cut steps above the village of Orrowick, with a push broom and a sack. The giant is already there, as it is every morning from autumn to spring, sitting on the cap of the ridge with its knees drawn up. It stands roughly fourteen feet when upright, though no one in Orrowick has seen it upright since Tamsin's mother's time. Its skin is the gray-brown of cut slate, split in fine seams across the shoulders, and moss grows in the seams on the north side.
She sweeps the grit it sheds. A giant this size drops a bucketful of gravel and flaked skin every night, and the stuff slides down onto the roof of the dye sheds if nobody clears it. Tamsin pushes it into the sack, hauls it to the lip, and tips it into the cart of the brickmaker, who pays her in firewood. The giant does not watch her. It looks east, where the valley opens, with its heavy brow low over eyes the color of wet flint.
At midmorning it does the one thing Tamsin has ever seen it do. It lifts its right hand, turns it over, and scratches the back of the wrist against a boulder, three slow drags, as a horse rubs against a post. Then it lowers the hand and goes back to looking east. There is nothing in it. She eats her bread while it happens. By noon she is down at the Pellowmere road, the other settlement under the ridge, where the name comes from a surveyor who wrote "pale water" for a place that has none. Nobody corrected the map. Tamsin delivers a sack of sorted gravel to the road mender there and gets a jar of pickled turnip. Old Hob Garrick, who keeps the mill, says the giant has never harmed a roof, only shaded a few, and that is all he has to say on it.
In the evening she checks the north wall of the shed, finds it dark, and goes in. The giant is still on the ridge when she looks back, a long shape against a sky going gray. It has been there since before the Oxter Stair was cut, and the stair was cut by people who were already sweeping. What it is waiting for in the east, or whether it is waiting at all, no one has asked it, and nothing has ever answered.
- Classification
- Giant, stone-skinned hill dweller
- Habitat
- Exposed ridge caps and quarry cliffs
- Danger
- Moderate
- Size
- 14 ft standing, 20 ft seated height
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Highland ridges of quarry country
- Binomial
- Gigas lapidarius
- Diet
- Lichen, rain pools, scree minerals
- Temperament
- Stolid, watchful, rarely moves