Metal sits on the tongue a full minute before the storm giant clears the shoulder of Rennick Scar, a taste like a sucked penny, and the fine hair on a forearm leans toward him. He stands fourteen feet tall and is the blue-gray of wet slate, with a chest like a cask and hands too large for the rest of him. A scar branches across his left collarbone in the shape of a fern, pale and raised. He wears a kilt of oiled sealskin and a cloak of stitched goat hides, and he lives on goats, gull eggs and a gray lichen broth he boils in a hollow of rock. People on the Scar will not say the word "calm" while he is above the cloud line. They say "quiet" or nothing.
Three people told me what he is, and none of them agree. Marit Dunmore keeps sheep below the pass and calls him a neighbor with a bad temper. She has watched him raise one palm at a hailcloud over her fold and seen the cloud turn east, grudgingly, like a cow. Mogens Tarr, a mason from Ullyot Tor, says he breaks things. Three lintels the mason had cut for a chapel cracked in one night, and he found black glass in each crack and a footprint the length of a door in the wet below. Mhairi Lusk cuts peat on the south slope and holds that the giant is not interested in anyone. She says he walks the ridge with his eyes shut, and she has passed within forty feet of him, close enough to see the lids twitch, without being noticed at all. I have set the three accounts against each other and cannot cross out any. Her cloud did turn. His lintels did crack, and the glass is in my sample case. And the lids were closed when he went by me, though his stride did not hesitate at the cairns.
The glass is the one thing on the Scar that changes between my visits. Where he beds down, the rock fuses under him to a black glaze, and when I first measured it, it was the size of a kitchen table. Now it covers a threshing floor and has crept down the slope toward the lowest cairn, slick enough to skate a boot across. Shepherds track him by it, following the drips of glass downhill like the trail of a leaking pot.
Leave anything iron at the lowest cairn, they say. Buckles, knives, nails in your boots, all of it. Go up with empty pockets and wait where the glass begins.
- Classification
- Giant, weather-bound
- Habitat
- High coastal scarps and stony tors
- Danger
- High
- Size
- 14 ft tall
- Activity
- Seasonal
- Realm
- Storm-cut highlands and sea cliffs
- Binomial
- Gigans tempestarius
- Diet
- Goats, gull eggs, lichen broth
- Temperament
- Aloof, volatile, indifferent to people