The Tides of Avarice

by John Dahlgren

  Levantes had never said who he was, but now Sylvester could make a pretty shrewd guess.

  He was the fox who went by the name of Robin Fourfeathers.

  And he was already here!

  5 Captain Terrigan Rustbane, at Your Service

  Sylvester barged past Celadon, making the old lemming stagger. “Sound the alarm!” Sylvester yelled. “It’s started.” He didn’t wait to see whether the Archivist obeyed or not. Instead, he charged for the door. He was aware of shocked faces staring at him as he sprinted through the Library, not caring who or what he shoved aside in his dash.

  The scream heard by him and Celadon hadn’t reached the inner areas of the Library, but Sylvester had heard it clearly enough to recognize the voice.

  Viola!

  What a fool he’d been.

  Last night, already aware that the gray fox was someone not to be trusted a millimeter, he’d nonetheless been jollied into admitting that Viola Pickleberry was someone special to him. The most important person in the world, to be precise. He’d admitted that the two of them were an item.

  No wonder the gray fox had wanted to worm this information out of him. The only individual in the whole of Foxglove who had spent any time with Levantes was Sylvester. Levantes had died knowing something that Fourfeathers desperately, desperately wanted to learn. There was a chance, a very good chance, that Levantes had communicated something to the young lemming but, if so, the young lemming wasn’t prepared to admit it. What better way to change his mind about that, to put persuasive pressure on him, than to seize the person he loved beyond even his own life?

  It was so obvious, with the benefit of hindsight.

  Hadn’t Levantes warned Sylvester about exactly this sort of thing?

  Later, thought Sylvester as he sprinted down the Library steps and along the path towards the gate. Later I can beat up on myself for being the idiot I am. First I’ve got to get Viola out of the jam my stupidity’s got her into.

  If I can …

  It seemed to take him hours, and yet just the merest of moments, to reach the town square.

  When he did, he skidded to a halt, aghast at what he saw.

  The normally orderly lines of market stalls around the sides of the square were in disarray. Several of them had been thrown over, their wares strewn across the ground. Most of the traders had fled.

  No wonder.

  The area had been taken over by scores of the most disgusting looking creatures Sylvester had ever seen. There were rats, bobcats, weasels, ferrets, skunks, raccoons, possums and groundhogs, and those were only the ones he could identify. It seemed there was not one of them that hadn’t been maimed in one way or another. There were wooden legs, eyepatches, hooks for paws. Amongst them, teeth bared in a hideously threatening grin, was a mongoose with only a knot of tormented flesh where his right ear should have been.

  All of the invaders were heavily armed with swords, daggers, cudgels, maces – weapons he recognized only from the illustrations in old scrolls, and some he didn’t recognize at all. He could even see a couple of crossbows.

  No wonder the vendors had scattered.

  Wait . . . not all of the vendors.

  Viola’s mother sold pies here on Mondays, and today was a Monday.

  Some Mondays Viola helped, and today was evidently one of those Mondays.

  There was a large, grease-stained rat leaning weakly against a wall, who could attest to the fact that Viola had been helping her mother today. He was still spitting out pieces of his teeth while trying to get his jawbone to fit back into its sockets.

  The cause of his misery, standing just a few paces away and threatening another even larger rat with what appeared to be a rolling pin, was Viola’s mother.

  “I’m warning you, buster. You lay one of your filthy paws on a pie you haven’t paid for and—”

  “Mrs. Pickleberry!” howled Sylvester.

  Viola’s mother shot a glare in his direction. The rat she’d been intimidating grabbed the chance to sneak away.

  “What do you want, boy?”

  “Viola, where is she?”

  “How the devil do you expect me to know?”

  “I heard her scream.”

  Mrs. Pickleberry turned back to where the rat had been and discovered it wasn’t there any longer. She took two determined strides and grabbed by the scruff of his neck a mangy ocelot who’d been planning to feast on the pastries that bedecked the stall next to Mrs. Pickleberry’s. She whirled the ocelot around and threw him face-first into the nearest wall. There was a sickening crump before, almost to Sylvester’s relief, the ocelot started to wail in agony.

  At least she hasn’t killed him.

  “How the blazes do you expect anybody to tell one scream from another in the middle of all this?” bellowed Mrs. Pickleberry at Sylvester. “Grab yourself a cudgel and start smashing yourself a few skulls.”

  She was a tough lady, was Mrs. Pickleberry.

  Any other time, Sylvester would have done exactly as she ordered him to. But he hadn’t been imagining things when, from the Library window, he’d identified the scream as Viola’s.

  He paused then.

  Viola had been known to scream just for the heck of it, high spirits, joie de vivre, call it what you will.

  Sylvester’s mouth set in renewed determination.

  No, Viola hadn’t been screaming just for fun when this cutthroat army invaded Foxglove. She’d been terrified; he’d heard the terror in her voice.

  “Where is she?” he thundered.

  Mrs. Pickleberry froze as if he’d administered a physical blow. When she looked at him again there was a new expression on her face, one of dread.

  She dropped the weasel she’d just picked up and came storming across to Sylvester.

  “Stupid ol’ besom,” snarled a raccoon she’d shouldered aside. She paid him no attention as he wheeled toward her, his pikestaff held high above him, ready to strike her a killing blow. “How’d ye like me to slit yer gizzard and feed ye to the sharks?”

  Mrs. Pickleberry seemed to pay him no attention at all. She didn’t break stride. The rolling pin in her hand suddenly became a blur.

  There was a soggy sppllattt that Sylvester hoped wouldn’t haunt his dreams for the rest of his life. The raccoon vanished head-first through a shop window. His dilapidated boots remained upright in the roadway.

  Sylvester gulped.

  No wonder Mr. Pickleberry was always so very, very polite and deferential toward his wife.

  And everyone said Viola took after her mother.

  “Leave her alone,” he cried at the miscreants in a general sort of a way, feeling it was his masculine duty to do so. He wished his voice hadn’t sounded so shrill and squeaky just then – a lot shriller and squeakier, in fact, than Mrs. Pickleberry’s.

  There was a tap on his shoulder.

  He turned and found himself looking at a mass of scar tissue, on each side of which was an ear. He recognized it as a face, but with some difficulty.

  “Oh, wot ’as we ’ere?” came a sarcastic voice out of a toothless mouth. “We ’as a ’ero ’amster, that’s wot we ’as. And ’e wants to rescue the lady ’amster, like wot ’ero ’amsters do in books. But Jolly Jack Cutlass ’ere ’as different ideas about that.” The creature drew an immensely long, curved, blood-encrusted sword from its scabbard and swung it back, preparatory to a lethal swing. “Such as, ’ow do ’ero ’amsters do any rescuing when they is in two ’alves? Lessee now. They could—aaargh!”

  There was another of those terrifying blurs and Sylvester’s assailant dropped, amid a spray of blood, like a stone to the ground.

  For a moment, Sylvester thought the swordsman must be dead, but then the creature started pawing its way through the dust in a very slow attempt to escape.

  “You want to know where Viola is?” cam
e Mrs. Pickleberry’s harsh voice in Sylvester’s ear.

  “Yes. I heard her scream and I simply can’t find her.”

  “Last I knew, she’d gone off with some of her fancy friends to have a preprandial cocktail in the Snowbanks.” Mrs. Pickleberry jerked a claw back over her shoulder toward the tavern. “If Lady Muck was screaming, it was prob’ly because she discovered the olive wasn’t to her taste.”

  Mrs. Pickleberry spat on the ground expressively, then with a swish of her rolling pin felled a marauder who’d made the mistake of charging at her while swinging a morning star around his head.

  “I’ve never seen Viola so much as look at a cocktail in her entire life,” protested Sylvester.

  “Well, yes. I was exaggerating a bit. She went off near an hour ago to fetch herself some lunch – as if her mother’s individually home-baked pies weren’t good enough for her.” Sylvester, who’d had one of Mrs. Pickleberry’s pies and understood Viola’s point entirely, did his best to look appalled at the girl’s effrontery. “She hasn’t come back yet,” concluded Mrs. Pickleberry. “She’s had her head turned, I’ll warrant, by some smooth-talking—”

  BANG!

  For a moment, Sylvester and Mrs. Pickleberry just gaped at each other, ears ringing.

  “What in the heck was that?” gasped Sylvester before he realized Mrs. Pickleberry couldn’t hear him.

  He could barely hear himself.

  BANG!

  He registered the second explosion only in a sort of muffled way, thanks to the residual effects of the first.

  The marauders didn’t seem concerned by the interruption or by the smell of rotting eggs hanging in the air, but carried on looting and vandalizing much as they had been.

  Mutely, Sylvester pointed past Mrs. Pickleberry towards the door of the Snowbanks Inn.

  Standing there, holding a strangely shaped metallic apparatus and blowing smoke from its tip, was Fourfeathers.

  His other arm was around the neck of a struggling Viola. As Sylvester’s hearing returned he could make out the noise of her grunting and gasping as she tried to prize the bigger animal’s muscular arm off.

  “Take your hands off me you . . . you stinking heap of manure.”

  Mrs. Pickleberry growled.

  Sylvester reached out and put a restraining paw on her arm. “If you move against him now,” he whispered, hoping against hope she could hear him through her rage, “you’ll have every single one of his cutthroat crew descend on you. You’ll just get yourself killed and you won’t be any use to Viola if you’re dead.”

  Mrs. Pickleberry nodded reluctantly, but Sylvester could feel her muscles tensing as she fought the urge to go to the aid of her daughter. The same struggle was going on inside himself.

  Robin Fourfeathers, or whatever his name might be, slowly and deliberately gazed in Sylvester’s direction. Gone were the ragged, road-dusted clothes he’d been wearing yesterday. Today he was dressed in a black leather vest, black leather trousers and black boots. His arms, hidden by his jacket yesterday but now revealed, were covered with old scars and tattoos; he had half a dozen earrings in each ear. Despite himself, Sylvester conceded that the fellow cut a dashing figure.

  “Oh, there you are,” called the big gray fox chattily, as if they might be two acquaintances who’d run into each other at some social gathering. “Young Sylvester, my good friend and drinking buddy. How’s your head feeling?”

  “At least it’s still on my shoulders,” said Sylvester as loudly as he could. “Which is more than yours is likely to remain for long.”

  A loud hissing noise filled the square as the cutthroats sucked in their breath.

  “’E’s bein’ disrespectful at Cap’n Rustbane,” said a voice somewhere. “The Cap’n don’t like being disrespectfulled at – not at all, ’e don’t.”

  But Cap’n Rustbane (assuming the big gray fox who’d called himself Robin Fourfeathers was Cap’n Rustbane) didn’t seem disconcerted at all.

  “Pluckily spoken,” said the fox, as if solemnly adjudicating a competition, “and especially so in the circumstances. Remind me not to hang you after you’ve given me the map.”

  “Map?”

  “Yes, map. Approximately one-third of it anyway. Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

  Sylvester’s mind was racing. He knew what a map was, because Celadon had told him, but he’d never actually seen one. All those little shapes and squiggles at the bottom of the torn sheet must be places, or geographical features of some kind – towns, perhaps.

  “What’s a map?” he said, stalling for time. Beside him, Mrs. Pickleberry’s knuckles cracked audibly as she tightened her grip on the rolling pin.

  Rustbane let out an exasperated sigh. “Sylvester, you are, are you not, the proud possessor of the job description, Junior Archivist and Translator of Ancient Tongues, no?”

  Sylvester mumbled an admission that, yes, this was indeed the case.

  “In which case,” Cap’n Rustbane carried on without apparently paying Sylvester’s mumble any attention at all, “it is inconceivable that you don’t know what a map is. Kindly do not waste my time, and the time of everyone else here, by pretending otherwise.”

  His vocabulary has changed, thought Sylvester. His accent too. He put them on as disguises when he was acting the part of Robin Fourfeathers, minor ne’er-do-well and trickster. I wonder if this is what he really sounds like or if it’s just another disguise.

  Before Sylvester could respond to Rustbane, another voice cut across the square.

  “Stop bullying the boy, whoever you are, and let go of the girl at once.”

  Rustbane’s eyebrows seemed to darken as he shot a hard stare toward the newcomer. “And you are?”

  “Celadon, the Chief Archivist and Librarian of Foxglove, but that’s unimportant. Who I am is someone who doesn’t require the back-up of half a hundred armed ruffians in order to persecute young people who have no weapons and can’t defend themselves.”

  Sylvester could see something he never expected to see on the gray fox’s face: shame. It was there for only a moment, but it was there.

  Slowly Celadon advanced across the square. Every eye followed his progress. Even Viola ceased her struggles.

  “Let the girl go,” the Archivist repeated, more quietly this time.

  “Why should I?”

  “Because decency dictates you should do so.”

  The fox let out a guffaw of laughter. “Decency, you say? I ain’t got a shred of decency in me, and I’m proud of that! Don’t you know you’re speaking to a pirate, oldster?”

  “I’d guessed as much,” said Celadon mildly. “Now, if you’ll take your hands off Miss Pickleberry …”

  “A swap is all I ask,” said Cap’n Rustbane, still more amused than infuriated by the elderly lemming’s challenge. “This Miss Pickleberry’s life, virtue at least partially intact, in exchange for the map the renegade Levantes stole out from under my nose and gave to this naive little pal of yours. That’s known as trading, that is. A business proposition.”

  “Don’t be so stupid,” said Celadon as conversationally as if the two of them were discussing the weather. “That’s extortion.”

  “Most business propositions are, if the truth be told.”

  Celadon smiled, acknowledging the point. By now he was standing directly in front of the pirate captain. “Let’s not quibble about niceties of terminology,” he said. “Just release her.”

  “You think so?” said Rustbane.

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I have a nicety of terminology I’d like to share with you.”

  Still smiling, Celadon leaned his head forward to hear what the buccaneer had to say.

  Still gripping Viola firmly around the neck with one arm, Cap’n Rustbane carefully put down the metal apparatus he’d been wielding. He st
epped toward the stooped figure of the ancient Archivist, who was only half the fox’s size.

  “Here’s a terminological nicety for you.”

  Rustbane’s arm moved so swiftly that Sylvester couldn’t see it, but he knew the bigger animal must have backhanded the elderly lemming across the face, because Celadon staggered backward a few paces before collapsing on a mound of spilled potatoes.

  His grizzled form lay there terrifyingly motionless.

  “That does it!” snarled Mrs. Pickleberry.

  Sylvester was too horrified by what had happened to his mentor to have the presence of mind to stop her. She marched straight up to the front of the Snowbanks Inn. Rustbane, who’d been exchanging some jocular comment with a couple of his crew nearby, all of a sudden lost the grin from his face.

  “That’s my daughter.”

  “It is?”

  “Yes, and I want her back right now, you murderous scum.”

  “Big words.”

  Cap’n Rustbane looked as if he might be tempted to deal with Mrs. Pickleberry the same way he’d dealt with Celadon, but a call from one of the rats stayed his impulse.

  “Take care o’ that one, Cap’n! She got the sting o’ a hornets’ nest, she has!”

  Rustbane picked up the gadget he’d laid down a few moments earlier. Even though it wasn’t smoking any longer, he blew on it anyway.

  “I offer you the same deal I offered the old geezer here.” He gestured toward the sprawled figure of Celadon. Mrs. Pickleberry’s gaze did not waver in the slightest, still probing the fox’s own like a surgeon’s scalpel. “Your daughter,” explained the fox, as if further explanation were necessary, “for the map her boyfriend has.”

  “She ain’t got no boyfriend.”

  Rustbane arched his eyebrows in a parody of astonishment. “Are you so very sure of that, Mrs. Pickleberry? Is there perhaps something the charming Viola’s been failing to tell her loving mother?”

  “She’s gonna marry the Mayor. Mayor Hairbell. That’s all signed, sealed and delivered.”