From the introduction: Razor cliffs of crumbling picrate protect a tumbledown village of turf roofed huts, where the tangle-haired children of goatherds peer from every darkened threshold and never glance at the flat green horizon of the sea beyond. Tun, the toothless village septuagenarian alone remembers when the villagers were not afraid of the sea: before the Sea Reavers came through the cliffs at Gravesand Beach and before the Young Duke and his sword thegns caught them there returning with slaves and plunder to make great slaughter of the strangers and their turtle ship and bury their profane corpses in the Gravesand where they fell. The few surviving villagers were granted the scavenging rights to the Reaver's ship, but its strangeness, and in recent years, terrible screaming cries have prevented more than a cursory plundering.