The Gifts of the Seas ---&RPaward

[Erulisse]

Ely edit 6 June 2023:

1-6 qps, depending on length and quality.

Potential +1 qp: if part of a series: x

Total: 7 qps

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The rain sleeted down in leaden sheets, whipping in shore on the force of icy winds off the Aryth. The leather coat Erulisse had stolen was cut for an adult and hung to her knees, impeding her progress as much as the darkness and the tangled lantana she was forced to climb over. Thick storm clouds veiled the skies, the only light the reflected glow of great fires at the point and upon the heights on the other side of the bay. She mopped rain soaked hair from her face as she pulled herself to the top of the rise, catching the full blast of the winter storm as she crested. Rolling gray waves crashed ashore on the broad shale beach below. The scene was given a hellish aspect by the illumination of the great fire roaring on Cadger’s point. Out at Breaker’s Rock the biggest ship Erulisse had ever seen was dying. She was enormous with massive fore and aft castles of a style she had never seen. What rigging was still aloft, and that was little enough with her sticks ripped out by Breaker’s Rock, was square and heavy, utterly alien to these waters. Erulisse wondered if the ship was from Tear, though she made the guess solely because it was a big ship and her Uncle’s said that the Stone of Tear was big.

The death cries of the ship were audible even over the roar of the wind, the boom, boom, boom, of timbers being repeatedly smashed upon the murderous sea rock. Chains of men and women stretched out into waves, handing wreckage and flotsam ashore. Strong men were up to their shoulders in the surf, passing in land where younger men and women hauled the sea’s bounty ashore and piled it in heaps. Older folk stood watch over the piles, a mix of different families to prevent anyone from carrying items off before a fair division was made. There were no children present, it was forbidden, though all of the village children contributed sticks and grass for the beacons as part of their childhood ramblings around the headlands and inlets. Two long boats were hobby horsing over the stormy chop, carrying lines of heavy twisted hemp to the wreck. Erulisse knew there should have been a third, but the storm might well have over topped it in such savage surf. Men drowned trying to harvest the wrecks, and not just the sailors on the doomed ships that great fires lured to the murderous rock.

The vista blurred as the salty droplets stung the girl's eyes, and she slid over the crest and down the lantana covered scree, the leather coat catching and snagging as she went. It wasn’t difficult to proceed unseen, every eye was turned to the plunder being plucked from the ocean. Erulisse had plenty of practice, having been thrashed more than once for stealing apples from the Panhec’s orchard, or poking around the ruins north of town where the Wisdom said it was bad luck to go. She slid down into the shelter of the creek where the old stream fell from the heights to carve a shallow trench in the loose shale. Erulisse had spent long hours here in the summer months, stacking flat stones to create makeshift dams which the autumn rains washed out. She moved along the creek bed, ignoring the icy water on her bare feet in her excitement to see and explore. She crawled on her belly up beside a wind whipped clump of seagrass that poked through the shale.

An excited cry sounded from the beach and Erulisse lifted her head to see. A pair of boys were dragging something white from the surf. It took a moment for her to realize it was a woman. She was naked, her clothing ripped away by the force of the storm. Erulisse had seen corpses before of course. Old man Coling all yellow and reeking, Jan Standar when her birthing had gone wrong, Malar Gros when the horse had kicked him in the neck and the blood just kept coming and coming. In a fishing town on the Sea of Storms, death by drowning was common enough that even a nine year old girl could easily recognise the pale flesh and cyanotic blue lips. The corpse was not the cause of excitement. Silver flashed at the dead woman’s neck, bright and molten in the firelight and intermittent lightning. The boys pulled at the corpse, excited but not quite fighting, until old Graun clouted one of them under the ear and made a gesture. The corpse was tossed without ceremony onto a pile. It landed with a wet thump on a mound of corpses, back bent and bare breasts forced skywards by an arched back that rigor hadn’t yet set. Erulisse felt a frisson of horror at the sight. A half dozen bodies piled as carelessly as Bran Socl’s firewood, arms and legs flopped in all directions. As she watched, two old women pulled one of the bodies free. This one was a man and was still clothed, armored in fact, in shining metal. How in the Light he had washed ashore rather than being dragged straight to the bottom Erulisse had no idea. The women began stripping him, unbuckling leather straps with fingers well used to working old and much patched fishing net. They piled clothing and armor alike on a wet blanket before casting his naked corpse aside like the bones of a picked chicken. They moved on to the next corpse with no more ceremony than selecting the next carrot to peel.

Further commotion from the beach dragged Erulisse’s eyes away from the macabre scene. A man was struggling from the waves. The sides of his head were shaved and he wore fine silks, how he had managed to swim ashore against the murderous current she had no idea. Judging by the way he staggered, the effort had all but killed him. The sailor lurched towards one of the villagers, calling out something that was lost to the wind. Erulisse wondered where the man was from, her fertile imagination conjuring adventures in strange far ports. Perhaps far off Shara or the fabled Isles of Tremalking. What places he might have seen far away from the salt dunes and fish smells of this nameless village. Dasel Grigs stepped towards the survivor and smashed a boat hook into the sailor’s face. Even over the wind she heard the crunch of bone and tearing cartilage. The sailor fell to the beach without crying out, bright blood gurgling from his ruined face, spraying and bubbling as he tried desperately to draw breath. A second stroke of the boat hook crushed his throat and the frothing ceased. Erulisse watched with giant frightened eyes, hands pressed against her lips. She expected something to happen. Someone to run over and scream at Dasel, perhaps drag him back to town for what he had done. Instead a pair of girls, only just old enough to braid their hair, crossed and took the body, dragging it by one arm each to the pile. They looked a little green at the chore, but both of them had done their time gutting fish and managed to control their gorge. Erulisse marveled at the effort, her own stomach close to rebellion even at this distance. How many of the corpses had blue lips? She found she didn’t want to look.

The boats had reached the ship now, the deck canting so badly that the surf surged hungrily up over the bulkhead, dragging more flotsam into the sea by the minute. The boatmen leaped from their craft onto the slanted deck and scrambled up to the hatches, pulling the gratings free and tossing them into the surf. With practiced efficiency they formed a chain, passing whatever they could tear free down to the boats. Erulisse saw another survivor pulled from the wreck, huddled and freezing. He was thrown into the boat with as little care as any other piece of loot. The steersman hauled him up by the hair and slashed his throat with a fishing knife, blood spurting into the foam for a few moments before the corpse slumped back into the boat. Erulisse’s stomach churned and her hands trembled violently, alternately hot and cold. She had known that ships wrecked on Breakers Rock, perhaps even at some level that the beacon fires lured ships to their doom, but it had never occurred to her to ponder why there were never any survivors. She fell to her hands and knees and vomited, caustic acid and a few carrots burning in her throat. She shivered violently, unable to move, even to flee the mocking crash of the surf. She curled up on the rocky shore of the creek, trembling violently and hugging her knees to her chest.

By the time Erulisse was able to stand the first hint of dawn was brightening the eastern sky. Her mouth tasted foul and the smell of bile and vomit was thick in her nostrils. Forcing herself back to the lip of the creek she saw that the great ship had broken in two. The stern had settled against the rock, all but out of sight in the chop of the calming sea. The forward section had been carried free, onto the mud flats that were exposed when the tides were particularly low. All three boats were drawn up on the beach, and small fires had been kindled around the piles of salvage. Pad Tredegar, the head of the village council was standing by a pile of crates. Some kind of silver necklace dangling from his fist. Erulisse remembered the drowned woman it had been pulled from.

“What’s this worth then!” he demanded in the same theatrical voice he used when auctioning his catch at market. People immediately began to gabble, their number and enthusiasm rendering the words unintelligible from this distance. Erulisse swallowed as her young mind tried to come to terms with the ghoulishness of it. Could she wear a necklace that had been taken from a woman who had been clubbed to death? A cloak from a man whose throat had been cut over the side of the boat so blood didn’t soil his fine clothes. She imagined what her uncles would say if she asked about it. These outsiders had so much, a silver necklace that was worth more than a year's labor for poor fisher folk, enough rope to rig a dozen boats, nails and pots, and canvas, and a thousand other things, the lack of which would condemn their village to another year of penury. Was it really so inexcusable to take what the sea sent to them? Erulisse’s eyes turned to the pile of bodies, considerably larger since last she had looked. A grotesque collection of limp bodies, some drowned, some obviously dispatched by the villagers. It was just chance that her eyes caught movement at the edge of the beach. Something had emerged from the water, long and lean and low to the ground. Her mind told her it was a fish, even though it clearly had legs. It seemed to flow across the rocky beach, lifting itself more erect as it picked up speed. It was the size of a peddler’s horse, though no horse ever had such magnificent bronze scales, nor such wicked curved teeth. Erulisse froze, an instinctive prey reaction as natural as breathing. Her body was locked shock still, save for her eyes which tracked the thing as it picked up speed, scattering slate from behind powerful clawed feet. She tried to make her mouth work but she couldn’t breathe, the bone deep certainty that to speak was to die choking her desire to scream a warning. Bran turned just as the thing leaped at him, flashing fluidly like a pouncing cat. The fisherman screamed and flung out a hand in bar and Erullise clearly saw the jaws snap shut around Bran’s elbow. The momentum of the thing carried it into the group of milling villagers, turning their excited gabble into terrified screams in a heartbeat. The widow Corrigan screamed and stumbled free of the pack, grabbing desperately at the squirt of slippery pink gray entrails pouring from a terrible wound in her stomach. The beast whipped its head back and forth, tossing Bran like a rag doll, the sound of tendons popping eerily similar to a sail snapping in the wind before tossing him away, left arm ripped away in a jagged stump. Someone managed to fetch the thing a glancing blow with a bill hook, but it turned and bit viciously into its attacker's leg, worrying at it like a hound at meat and sending the victim staggering away, bright red blood jetting from shredded arteries. Blood covered the beasts copper snout and it was fighting mad now, berserk with cold, and fear, and maybe some animal understanding that these people had murdered its master. It struck like a viper, sending Clem al’Hussan to the ground in a welter of blood, then pounced on Marial Nocturne, pinning her to the ground with one foot while it ripped the throat from another fisherman with the other. The rout was immediate and complete. Tired, soaked, and terrified, the villagers threw away their weapons and ran, abandoning the old and injured to grisly death in their haste to flee. The creature followed like a fury, not feeding, but killing in a frenzy of claws, teeth and flying blood. In a half dozen heartbeats it was over, the coppery scaled killer pursuing the villagers into the questionable shelter of the scrubby forests upon the bluffs.

Erulisse was glad she no longer had anything in her stomach to vomit up. With an incredible effort she managed to shut her eyes and then, with another titanic act of will, open them again. She staggered out onto the beach, seized by some childish notion that she could help. It stank of the blood and dung of disemboweled bodies, of the wastes men and women had voided as they died. She passed Bran Socl’s severed arm, still recognisable from the partially chewed away anchor tattoo, the stump of bone a shocking white against the bloody mangled meat. Marial Nocturne was dead, her chest still rose and fell with a ragged frothy burble of blood, but Erulisse’s mind refused to believe that anyone whose body was so thoroughly torn to ribbons could still be alive. She tripped and fell in someone’s entrails, screaming in horror and disgust despite the part of her mind that told her the creature might come back for her at any moment. She scrambled to her feet, finding the blood soaked silver necklace in her hand. She recoiled in horror, but she couldn’t open her hand to throw the thing away. Sobbing in horror and terror she turned and fled down the beach, splashing through the inrushing tide as she ran for her life, trying to ignore the way the incoming tide sounded like a satisfied chuckle.

[Tolza]

More!

[Asandra]

Less! That was brutal

[Erulisse]

Thank you both! in different ways!