The Wreckers of Rimtsiar

by Simon Whitechapel

W.A. Mozart, Die Zauberflöte (The Magic Flute).

If it had, he would encode his findings in black lacquer on a slip of white silk, bind it to the dwarf-foot of an apus with silver wire, and release the bird to carry the ship’s doom swiftly back to his kinsfolk in Rimtsiar. They, having poured a libation in thanksgiving to the sea-god Zsuszu and deciphered the silk slip, would prepare for the ship’s arrival off their stretch of coast, whose headland and bay bore an oft-remarked resemblance to those of Tšant-Morl, fifty leagues further south. By night, the resemblance was closer still, save for the absence, at Rimtsiar, of the twin pharoi that guided passing ships through the treacherous shoals off Tšant-Morl.

Some centuries before, the folk of Rimtsiar had decided to repair this absence by creating twin pharoi of their own, or at least the semblance thereof, with which to guide ships to doom and enrichment – the doom being that of the ships, the enrichment that of Rimtsiar. A naturally piratical and flint-hearted folk, they had soon refined their techniques and now reckoned to wreck perhaps three ships in a bad year and eight in a good, for an average, bad years slightly outnumbering good, of five ships a year. Such were their skill and the dangers of the coast that their depredations had gone entirely unremarked and might have gone unremarked for more centuries to come.

The chief dangers, as they had long recognized, were that a sailor or passenger would survive a wreck and guess how it had been contrived, or that their secret would be somehow betrayed to a stranger passing through Rimtsiar by land. Thus it was, first, that they strove mightily, and thus far with almost complete success, to ensure that no sailor or passenger ever did survive a wreck; and second, that their xenophobia was proverbial throughout the empire. Indeed, so little contact had they had with outsiders since the commencement of their wrecking, that their dialect was now wholly unintelligible beyond Rimtsiar and the thickness of their successive agents’ accents an oft-renewed by-word at Dzlun. But they cared nothing for the opinion of the wider world, for which they preserved a half-hundred epithets of contempt or disdain in their secluded tongue, and only once in their centuries of wrecking had they allowed a spark of dovish compassion to lighten the wolfish darkness of their deeds.

This had been twenty-seven years before, when, moved by her extreme youth, exceptional beauty, and explicit pregnancy, they had allowed a single passenger to live of eight souls to struggle ashore from the wreck of a barquentine. Even then the girl might have been dispatched with the rest, but it so happened that when she was carried ashore unconscious by the waves she was clasping a neck-worn amulet of Zsuszu, an especial favorite, in his darkest aspects, of the folk of Rimtsiar. Her fingers had been prised open preparatory to a vote as to whether her throat should be slit, and when the amulet was discovered the vote was tipped, by an extra and just sufficient two, in her favor.

Guarded closely by day and night thereafter, she gave birth in the autumn of the following year before leaping to her death from the headland at the prospect of a forced wedding to the priest of Rimtsiar, who had adduced the miraculous nature of her survival in favor of his superior claim to her person. The twin sons she had borne were raised as native-born Hrimtsiaruu and never told the truth of their origins, which, indeed, were soon enough forgotten by the moiety of the townsfolk. One of the twins, christened Genz-Hao, or “Wave-Elder-Son”, by the disappointed priest, embraced the folkways of Rimtsiar without reservation and became one of the most spirited and skilful of the wreckers on reaching manhood; but the other, christened Lrur-Maqq, or “Foam-Younger-Son”, rebelled almost from his earliest days and seemed never to lose his horror at the deathly trade plied by the folk of Rimtsiar, in which, on reaching simultaneous manhood, he refused to partake with his brother.

Advised by their priest that the youth’s lodestar of nature had proved stronger than his faux-pharos of nurture, the Hrimtsiaruu thereupon seized, hamstrung, and untongued him before setting him to work pumping the bellows in the blacksmith’s forge. Now he could not flee the town and could have told no tale even had he been able, and it was expected that the crippled youth would sooner or later follow the example of his mother and leap to his death from the headland.

And certainly he was drawn to the spot, for he spent many hours there when not sweating at the forge, playing a crude flute he had fashioned of seal-bone, or listening to the harsh melody of the gulls that in summer nested on the cliffs. There seemed some message for him in their cries that he was always on the verge of comprehending, and always just failed to catch. So it was that, ill-fed though he was, he refrained from stealing their eggs unless driven thereto by the threats of his thick-wristed master the smith, who took a fancy for sea-birds’ eggs now and again, and delighted, after the Rimtsiar fashion, in trampling the sensibilities of the weak.

But worse than trampled sensibilities was to result for Lrur-Maqq from an egg-stealing, for one day, as he scaled a sea-cliff with his pockets fat with nest-warm eggs, the cord of the neck-amulet of Zsuszu that had been his mother’s caught on a jag of rock and snapped. In a heart-beat the amulet had fallen down the cliff-face into the sea and was gone till the earth swallowed the sky, as the saying went in Rimtsiar. The outraged cries of robbed gulls seemed to transform to jeers at his loss, and he reached the top of the cliff heart-sore and near-weeping.

Nor was his sorrow assuaged by his return to Rimtsiar, for an apus had winged its way home but a half-hour before and the febrile excitement of a prospective wrecking had seized the town anew. The ship, it was soon mooted throughout the town, would be carrying a cargo of especial size and value, and should be sighted on the fifth day after receipt of the enciphered message. Preparations were set in hand immediately, and bundles of straw and flagons of oil were carried to the headland to lie ready under triple-layered sail-cloth till the hour at which they would be set ablaze, luring the ship onto rocks of which, in the ordinary way of sailing, it would never pass within a sevenknot.

Four days passed and the daylight of a fifth, and a watch-party was landed on an islet far out in the bay, ready to catch the twinkling lights of the marked-down vessel as she plowed the brine-furrow unsuspecting down the coast. Soon after midnight, a cry went up on the headland: a lamp had flashed on the islet, signaling the ship’s approach, and the straw could be soaked in oil and readied to be set ablaze. Eight minutes passed, and the lamp flashed again: the ship was almost at the mouth of the bay. Now flints sparked and the priest and his three neophytes began to chant prayers for sharp rock and brittle hull; then the straw was ablaze, flaring there and there on the headland like the twin pharoi of Tšant-Morl.

The night was still, and ordinarily the orders of the ship’s captain, as he saw to the re-setting of the sails, would have carried clearly to the ears of those on land; but either the captain’s voice was too low or the crew too well-practised to need orders, for the ship sailed in utter silence across the bay, its lamps burning sombre yellow and red, like the eyes of great dragons or demons in the dark. But the silence ceased when, to the cheers of the watching Hrimtsiaruu, the hull crashed against sea-hidden rock and the lamps shook out like fallen fruit, save for one, apparently on the foremast, which quivered for a moment and then blazed more brightly, as though the wick had been re-set by the collision.

Now the longboats were launched from the shore of Rimtsiar, carrying the wreckers out to the ship to slit the throats of the unsuspecting crew and secure the cargo for retrieval by day. But the boatsmen returned far sooner than expected with startling and indeed discomfiting news. The ship was bare of both crew and cargo, and might never have had either, to judge from the newness of its timbers and cordage. Moreover, it was built to an odd and seemingly archaic design none of the wreckers had ever seen before, though all had watched ships ply the coast since they were babes-in-arms. One detail in particular hushed the voices that conveyed it: like its timbers and ropes, the ship’s sails were perfect black, in strict defiance of the superstition that reserved such sails for the barque of Zsuszu himself, in his aspect of Thalassopsychopompos.

In the morning it was seen that the wreckers had spoken sooth: though the ship was already dashed half to pieces by the waves as it sprawled on its hull-smashing rocks, two of its masts were still standing, and the sails that flapped on them were black as sea-jet. Longboats were again launched, carrying wreckers with crow and sledge to complete the ship’s demolition, lest it still be above water when another ship came sailing down the coast; and as the boatsmen rowed across the bay, oars flashing fire-like in the sun, Lrur-Maqq saw from his post at the forge that the lamp atop the mainmast, though dimmed in the sunlight, was burning strongly yet, despite the hours it had been alight.

It had already been decided that the ship was not that of which Rimtsiar’s agent at Dzlun had written, but an examination of its deck and hold by daylight brought no solution to the mystery of either its origin or the disappearance of its cargo and crew. Superstitious unease had taken hold of the folk of Rimtsiar, and the black timbers that began to drift ashore after the wrecking was complete were gathered and burnt on the shore, without being dragged into the town for firewood and other uses, as was customary.

But Lrur-Maqq, on hearing the whispers that were now running through the town, betook himself to the shore that night when his forge-work was done and his master abed, to find a splinter of the wood and carve himself a second flute. The wood was black and close-grained, and at first defeated his knife, but then he found the knack of it, almost as though the wood began to respond to his purpose, and by moonrise the flute was complete.

He carried it through the sleeping town of Rimtsiar to the headland, for he was impatient to hear how it sounded. Arrived, he seated himself cross-legged on the cliff-top, facing the silver orb of the moon as she rose over the sea, put the flute to his lips, and began to play. The first notes pierced his ears painfully, ringing in his skull like the cries of gulls larger and fiercer than any known on an earthly coast, and the tune he played was arriving at his fingers and lips he knew not whence.

Now the moon had paved the dark brine-meadows of the sea with a highway of silver, and Lrur-Maqq caught through the shrill notes of the flute the trampling of feet behind him. He twisted where he sat, still playing, and saw with astonishment that his master the smith and a half-dozen other worthies of Rimtsiar, night-attired all, were racing in silence toward the cliff, though after the oddest of fashions, for they did not seem in control of their legs, and indeed clutched and struck at them with closed fists as they ran, as though they wished to beat them to a halt. Whether or no their efforts would have proved successful was never apparent, for they did not stop when they reached the cliff-edge a few paces from Lrur-Maqq, but leapt over and down, still flailing at their legs, into the moon-silvered sea.

The smith and his six companions were but the first of the cliff-leapers, for as Lrur-Maqq played on, wondering that the shrillness of his tune did not wake the cliff-roosting gulls, he saw more men came racing up the headland beating at their legs, and with them were women and children, beating their legs after the same wise. These too came to the cliff-edge and leapt to their deaths in the sea; and after them came yet more to the selfsame doom. The notes of the flute grew higher and shriller yet as Lrur-Maqq watched the town of Rimtsiar sacrifice itself to the sea; but darker was to come, for on a sudden his nostrils were assailed by a stench of corruption, and amid the silent throng of leg-beating racers he saw the forms of the newly dead, faces and limbs black and swollen, with earth still falling from their cere-cloths as they ran with uncouth and uncoordinated strides to throw themselves to a second death in the sea.

He played on, and now skeletons appeared among the living folk of Rimtsiar and the fresh corpses of its dead, rattling like crotala in accompaniment to his tune, and he realized that the graveyards of Rimtsiar, equally with the homes of its living, were emptying themselves in obedience to the death-flute. Now the throng was dwindling, comprised mostly of the old or very young, or babe-bearing mothers who seemed to try to throw away their offspring as they raced to the cliff-edge, but never succeeded in so doing. On Lrur-Maqq played, and now the supply of living Hrimtsiaruu was quite exhausted, and even the skeletons that streamed up the slope to the headland were often incomplete or disarticulate, so that single thighbones, spinning end over end, or crumbled skulls, hopping and bouncing, came to the cliff-edge and over.

And at last it was done, and Lrur-Maqq, rubbing his eyes in wonder as the black flute fell from his unenchanted fingers, was alone on the headland, the sole heir and master of the wreckers’ town of Rimtsiar.