Ledger of the Hollin Flats Drainage Board, entry for the ninth of March: "Ridge behind Illtyd's Rise has lifted four inches since Candlemas. Ditch dry. Surveyor Aled Pryce advises moving the sheep." The ridge is the back of a tarrasque. The Board has made nearly the same entry, in different hands, for as long as its books survive. The jaw comes first in any survey, because it is wider than the animal has any right to carry. The head is small, no bigger than a hay wagon, and the jaw hinges out past it on both sides and hangs a little open even in sleep. Heavy lids sit above it and give the face a sullen look, like a man called to the door at dawn. When the eyes open they are the orange of a kiln at full draw. Pryce measured the whole animal at sixty feet, about a grain barn laid on four pillar legs, with a flat paddle of bone at the tail.
The shell is slag gray, in plates that overlap like roof slates. Along the spine a green lichen has taken hold, and it is the lichen that fools newcomers. Shepherds on Nantwen Ridge call a hill "bearded" when the moss runs in a straight line down its crest, and they will not graze it. Between the plates, in the seams, a dull orange shows through when the clay below begins to warm. Families on the flats lay a wet dishcloth across the doorstep each night. If it is dry by morning they pack the cart, and the cloth goes in on top.
In the dormant years the tarrasque does one thing, and it does it without menace. About once an hour it lets out a long slow breath through the cracks in its shell, and the ground above it exhales warm. The women of Ember Gap hang their wash along the ridge on that account. Sheets dry there in forty minutes. A second trade lives on the animal too: the ridge-listeners, hired by the Board, who drive a clay pipe into the soil and lie with an ear against it through the night, noting any change in the rhythm of the breath. They are paid by the season and are never thanked, since a quiet season gives them nothing to report.
One front plate is cracked clear across. The crack has been mended with a glaze of fused clay, glassy and a brilliant teal, from some old waking when the heat of its own seams vitrified the soil around the break. Children chip it for souvenirs and are scolded for it. The scar measures eleven feet.
- Classification
- Colossal armored sleeper, unclassified
- Habitat
- Clay plains, buried under ridges
- Danger
- Extreme
- Size
- the size of a grain barn, 60 ft long
- Activity
- Seasonal
- Realm
- Hollin Flats and Ember Gap
- Binomial
- Tarrasca perpetua
- Diet
- Anything in its path
- Temperament
- Dormant, then relentless