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The Tides of Avarice

Page 15

by John Dahlgren


  “Yer gonna be a good little captive, aren’t ya?” said one of the skunks throatily in Sylvester’s ear as they trudged along somewhere in the middle of the pack.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If we let go of yer arms, yer not gonna run away, anything stupid like that, are ya? I meanter say, yer one of us now, one o’ the valiant crew o’ the jolly ship, Shadeblaze. Wouldn’t look good, yer started trying to make a break for it.”

  Sylvester gaped at the walls of sweaty bodies on all sides of him. It wasn’t just that most of the creatures who made up Rustbane’s crew were bigger than lemmings, it was that all of them were significantly more muscular than archivists.

  “I think you’d be safe enough to release my arms.”

  “Good,” said the other skunk. They unhanded him. “Try anything funny, though, and ya get to share a bunk for a month with Two-Tooth Percy.”

  This notion seemed to strike the skunks as extremely funny, because they laughed long and loud.

  “What’s so special about Two-Tooth Percy?” said Sylvester, trying not to sound as if the prospect of sharing a bunk with anybody didn’t fill him with disgust. “Does he snore, or something?”

  “Every pirate snores,” said the skunk on his left, as if explaining the obvious. “It’s part of the job description, like. Naw, Two-Tooth Percy’s the bunkmate all o’ us avoid like plague for quite a different reason.”

  Again the pair guffawed.

  “And what’s that?” said Sylvester. On second thought, I’m not so sure I actually want to know, he decided.

  “Two-Tooth Percy …” began the skunk on his right before breathless mirth stopped him.

  He tried again.

  “Two-Tooth Percy, see, ’e’s a porcupine!”

  ✿ ✿ ✿ ✿ ✿

  This is the last time I’ll ever see you, dear Foxglove, thought Sylvester for the hundredth time.

  They were coming to the town gate; beyond it was open country and then the sea. Sylvester had lost all sense of how big the throng had become, what with cohorts of further pirates joining the stream from other parts of town,

  He’d never known anything other than this town and its immediate environs. He’d always been aware, of course, that there was a wider world beyond it, but he had rarely allowed that fact to obtrude into his consciousness. It would never have occurred to him that he, Sylvester Lemmington, would one day venture out to see that wider world for himself. Now that it was actually happening he found that, although there was certainly some sadness in him that he was saying farewell to everything and everyone that ever had meaning for him, there was also a sort of bubbling exhilaration, and eagerness to throw himself into the arms of the unknown.

  He might have begun to skip along between the two skunks were it not for one thing.

  Amid all the rest that he was leaving behind, there was Viola.

  Yes, it was painful that he would never see Mom again. Yes, the uncertainty of his dear mentor Celadon’s fate (had the old fellow survived Cap’n Rustbane’s brutal blow?) was an itch that Sylvester suspected would never go away.

  But the loss of Viola …

  Someone had made a vicious blade of shattered glass and thrust it into Sylvester’s heart.

  The only solace he could think of was that, after the slimeball’s display in the town square, surely not even Mrs. Pickleberry would insist that Viola marry Mayor Hairbell. At least his true love had been spared that vile destiny.

  And perhaps, on nights when the moon rose high in the mysterious sky and the heavens were filled with a richness of stars beyond all number, Viola would stare up at the universe’s infinitude and feel herself wrapped in the eternal love of the one lemming whose heart for her had always been a pure and gleaming …

  Sylvester shook his head angrily.

  If his thoughts got any mushier he was likely to fall into them and drown.

  He hoped Viola would be able to find someone else to fall in love with who would fall in love with her, and that she’d soon forget Sylvester. She’d be happier that way.

  Hm. Still pretty high on the mushiness scale.

  There was no sign of any guard as they passed through the town gate.

  No wonder.

  No one but a lunatic would put themselves in the path of a hundred or more bloodthirsty pirates.

  Actually, I damn well don’t hope Viola quickly finds some other lemming to love her. I hope she’s miserable about losing me for a good long time and that, even if she eventually marries and has someone else’s kids, it’s always the name “Sylvester” that’s on her lips as she drifts off to sleep. Because I’m not going to give up on her the moment she’s out of sight. I’m going to be carrying a banner for her in my heart for the rest of my life. One day, however improbable it might seem now that I won’t end my life at the bottom of the ocean, perhaps capricious fate will bring me back to Foxglove and I’ll find her still waiting for me, those magical eyes of hers still filled with love for me …

  He emerged from under the gate’s shadow to discover that Rustbane had pushed back through the jostle of bodies to find him. The pirate had retrieved his tricorn hat.

  “How’re you bearing up, me hearty?” cried the fox. He attempted a piratical swagger but there really wasn’t room for it in the mob.

  “I’m, er, ready to look into the gaping jaws of Davy Jones himself and, um, laugh at fear,” Sylvester essayed. That sounded like the sort of thing a derring-do buccaneer should say.

  Maybe I should have added a cussword or two, he fretted.

  “That’s the spirit, me bucko!”

  The comradely whack Rustbane delivered between Sylvester’s shoulders was enough to send the lemming staggering.

  “We’ve got a nice surprise for you.” The fox winked. “Oh, you’re going to be thanking Captain Terrigan Rustbane for this one, let me tell you.”

  That wink was a bit … well, vulgar, if truth be told. Lewd. What in the world can the fellow be talking about?

  About fifty yards beyond the gate stood a little posse of pirates. One of them was sporting a rapidly blackening eye. Another was bleeding from the nose. A third, lying curled up hugging his hind legs in the middle of the road and covered in a sheen of cold, oily sweat, was moaning softly.

  Sylvester’s brow furrowed. Whatever could be going on?

  Then the little knot of waiting pirates opened up and he could see, standing among them with her forepaws tied together, the person he’d just been thinking about.

  “Viola!” he cried.

  And one other.

  “Mrs. Pickleberry,” he cried as an afterthought, hoping his voice managed to convey the same degree of enthusiasm.

  Rustbane seemed as surprised as he by the presence of Viola’s mother. The fox did a double-take, then put his paws on his hips and began tapping his foot angrily. The pirates who’d been marching on all sides of him chose to discreetly melt away.

  “What the devil did you bring the old trout for?”

  “Lemming,” corrected Sylvester automatically, before he could stop himself.

  The Cap’n turned an irate glare in his direction.

  “Er, not trout. She’s a lemming,” said Sylvester weakly, wondering if he were pulling himself out of the hole or digging it deeper. At least so long as I’m still talking I know I’m still alive. “Lemmings have four legs and hair, you see. And, ah, trout have … well, they—”

  “For the triple-breasted goddess’s sake, will you stop your gibbering?” Rustbane turned back to the battered little band who’d been awaiting them. “Couldn’t you simply have got rid of the old bat?”

  “Not bat,” began Sylvester, then pretended he’d just been coughing.

  “Well, we tried, Skipper,” said a possum who looked as if he’d seen better days and was wishing he still could. “But, like, she ’ad her
rolling pin with ’er.”

  Rustbane nodded, apparently accepting this as sufficient explanation. They’d all witnessed the lethalness of Mrs. Pickleberry’s rolling pin.

  “An’ she’ll make a fine pirate,” added the possum hastily, pushing his luck.

  “Hmmf,” said Rustbane.

  The possum rubbed his forepaws together in an ingratiating way. “Got to find her a good piratical nickname, mind. Summat fitting, like. Too bad ‘Pigface’ is already took, innit, cuz it’d suit her right down to the—aargh!”

  “Definitely not ‘Pigface,’” said a raccoon pirate quickly as the echoes of a very loud thwokkk slowly faded. He gazed sickly down at the writhing form in the dust and did his best to look as if he’d never seen the possum before in his life.

  Rustbane made up his mind. Earrings jingling, he delivered to Mrs. Pickleberry the most elaborate bow Sylvester had ever seen.

  “A thousand welcomes to the crew of the doughty vessel, Shadeblaze, sweet matron.”

  “Grmmple,” said Mrs. Pickleberry, fixing him with a skeptical stare.

  “Sylvester,” called Viola softly, straining at her bonds.

  Beside him, the two skunks tensed, ready to seize him again if it looked as if he might run towards her.

  “Oh, let him go. Let the lovers unite,” said Rustbane in a disgusted sort of a way as he straightened up from his bow. “I’d hoped this might strike terror into young Sylvester’s heart, and instead what do I get? The kind of scenes that’d have put even my sentimental old granny, whoever she was, off her supper. Go on, Sylvester, go on. Get your slobberfest over with so the rest of us can start concentrating again on being the scourge of the Seven Seas. I thought the presence of the luscious Miss Pickleberry among our company might help hone your memory of the map’s details during our voyage.”

  Sylvester ran to Viola and held her tightly to him.

  “I’ll find some way of setting you free,” he whispered into her ear.

  “Don’t you dare!”

  “What?”

  “D’you think Mom would’ve allowed them to catch me if I hadn’t insisted?”

  “Huh?”

  “It was touch and go, I can tell you. In the end she only agreed if she could come along too as chaperone.”

  “What’s a chaperone?”

  “I’m not sure. I think it’s a type of pirate. Now, kiss me again, will you?”

  It was difficult, under the searchlight of Mrs. Pickleberry’s icy gaze, to kiss Viola with the full intensity the occasion demanded, but somehow Sylvester managed it.

  “Why didn’t you just run for the hills?” he said when finally, on the verge of asphyxiation, they pushed each other apart.

  “And leave you unprotected at the tender mercy of a mob of murderous cutthroats?”

  “I thought that was … I mean to say …”

  She grabbed his ears and shook them affectionately. “You’re going to need someone to look after you, Sylvester Lemmington. Otherwise you’ll get yourself into all sorts of perilous scrapes. You’re such a noodle, you know. No one’s doubting your manly courage, of course,” she patted him on the chest, “but you need someone alongside you to be the brains of the operation, don’t you?”

  “Oh.”

  “So—”

  Sylvester kissed her yet again before he could say anything stupid.

  “Daphne.”

  With difficulty, Sylvester pulled himself away from Viola.

  “Sorry?”

  “Daphne,” repeated Mrs. Pickleberry.

  Still Sylvester was baffled.

  “My name,” she explained gruffly.

  “And …?”

  “Since we’re about to be shipmates, you’d better start calling me by it.” She turned her gaze to Viola. “You too, you little flibbertigibbet.”

  Viola looked dismayed.

  “Aw, Mom.”

  “Can’t have your pretty boy here trying to stutter his way through ‘Mrs. Pickleberry’ if there’s an emergency in the rigging and all our lives hang in the balance. He’s likely to strangle himself with his own gizzard halfway through the third syllable. Calling me ‘Mom’ won’t be no use either, since half these blaggards don’t know who their real mom is and are likely to get confused. See?”

  Sylvester felt his eyes slowly crossing as he tried to follow the logic of this.

  Rustbane, who’d been eavesdropping, chipped in. “Daphne ‘Three Pins’ Pickleberry! A fine piratical name. I like it. I like it a lot. Now, you fine fellows and, er, fellowesses, shall we continue on our way to the Shadeblaze, just in case our friend Mayor Hairbell manages to round up a posse of sturdy folk to pursue us?”

  “This is your last chance,” Sylvester murmured to Viola. Mrs. Pickleberry – Daphne – could fend for herself. “If you’re going to make a bolt for it, now’s the moment.”

  “But why should I want to?”

  “We’re going on a long journey, and the chances are slim that we’ll ever come home. Danger will lurk around every corner. It’s not just foes we’ll need to be wary of, but our so-called friends.” He waved his arm to indicate the pirates surrounding them, who conveniently chose this moment to reinforce his point by looking as malignant and untrustworthy as possible. “We’re going to see strange new places where every step we take could be our last. We’re going to see horrors that’d turn the stomach of the toughest of lemmings. We’re going to—”

  “Oh, Sylvester,” interrupted Viola. She clutched her forepaws together in front of her chest and gazed at him with rapturous eyes. “That all sounds just wonderful!”

  Sylvester knew when he was beaten.

  “To the Shadeblaze it is, then,” he said resignedly to Rustbane.

  “To the Shadeblaze!” cried the pirate king.

  His men cheered, and began once more to stamp their heavy way along the road to the shore.

  6 The Shadeblaze

  A couple of hundred yards out from the shore there floated a monstrous object unlike anything Sylvester had ever seen. It was made mostly of wood, or seemed to be, and there were windows in the side. It could have been a house bobbing upside-down in the water, except there were long, sharp bits sticking out both ends and three even longer poles sticking up from its top (or bottom) – if in fact it was an upside-down house, which Sylvester was pretty certain it wasn’t. He was guessing this was what Levantes, and later Cap’n Rustbane, had called a ship – the Shadeblaze, no less.

  From the upward-pointing poles there hung what appeared to be gray sheets.

  It’s obviously laundry day aboard the pirate vessel, thought Sylvester, smug in his growing knowledge of nautical matters. What very big beds they must have.

  “The Shadeblaze,” Cap’n Rustbane confirmed at his shoulder. “Doesn’t she look magnificent?”

  “Why, yes, she does,” said Sylvester courteously, wondering why the black kitchen towel hung up to dry at the very top of the longest of the three poles had a skull and crossbones embroidered on it.

  I hope Rustbane doesn’t expect us to wash all the dishes, he thought.

  Viola was regarding the ship with the same wide-eyed rapture she’d shown when he was telling her about the adventure awaiting them. Even Mrs. Pickleberry—oops, I must learn to call her Daphne or, even better, Three Pins. Even Daphne seemed impressed, although trying very hard not to be.

  “It’s a house on the water,” breathed Viola adoringly.

  “Aye,” said Cap’n Rustbane. “That’s exactly what it is, a house, a home. It’s my home, you see, and you three are going to be my houseguests, in a way. Working houseguests, like. You three’ll be working your furry little butts to the bone, I can warrant you that.”

  “You mean we’ll be pirates,” said Mrs. Pickleberry.

  Rustbane gave her a big confirmatory grin. “Or corsairs, if you pref
er. Sounds a lot better over afternoon tea if you say you’re a corsair than you’re a pirate.”

  Along the beach were drawn up a score or more of long, thin objects that Rustbane told them were longboats. They’d use the longboats to get out to the Shadeblaze, since the option otherwise was swimming.

  “Pirates can’t swim,” he confided. “It’s a law of nature.”

  Sylvester remembered how poor Levantes had been at swimming. At the time, Sylvester had thought it was just the ferret’s injuries that had made him that way, but perhaps pirates weren’t supposed to swim.

  “If we discover a pirate can swim,” continued the Cap’n, “we make him walk the plank. That gives him a chance to go swimming all right!”

  Puzzled, Sylvester decided not to ask what walking on a plank had to do with swimming. He’d get to the bottom of the mystery soon enough.

  He also decided not to tell Rustbane that he, Viola and Mrs. Pick—Daphne could, as lemmings, swim very proficiently. Their survival depended upon them playing the part of swashbuckling pirates, although what you actually did to swashbuckle was yet another thing Sylvester did not know.

  This voyage is going to be extremely educational, if nothing else, he reflected.

  Some of the pirates were beginning to leap into the longboats, and Cap’n Rustbane indicated to the three lemmings they should do likewise. The skunks who’d been escorting Sylvester jumped into the nearest boat and beckoned to him. As soon as the lemmings got close enough the skunks grabbed them and hauled them aboard, dumping them unceremoniously in the long pool of salty water in the bottom of the boat.

  Rustbane decided to travel in this boat too. He waited until the vessel was packed with as many pirates as it could safely hold, then sprang aboard with a flourish, walking across the shoulders of his crew until he reached the bow.

  “Cast off!” he cried.

  Some of the pirates still left on the beach pushed the longboat out through the shallows until, heavily laden, it was afloat.

  “Arm them oars,” ordered Rustbane.

  Obediently, pirates grabbed the ends of long poles Sylvester hadn’t paid much attention to. He saw now, as the crewmen swung the poles around, that the other ends were flattened out. The poles – or oars, as Rustbane had called them – fitted into little cups fixed along the sides of the boat.

 

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