The Tides of Avarice

by John Dahlgren

  If I sort of sidle over to the shelves as quietly as I can, thought Sylvester, I should be able to get a better look at some of those jolly interesting looking books.

  “—in its radiant splendor makes the sun seem dim by contrast. Where are you going, young fellow?”

  The lemming froze. Cap’n Rustbane still had his back to him and was earnestly scrutinizing some papers on the big oak table. Sylvester was certain the cautious movements of his feet had made not a single sound, yet somehow the pirate knew.

  Sylvester had once had a schoolteacher like that. Bat Ears Thornapple. It was rumored that Bat Ears Thornapple had an additional pair of eyes in his hindquarters. He had also possessed a long wooden ferrule with which he’d delighted in rattling the paws of young lemmings he discovered moving or whispering behind him while he was writing on the chalkboard. Sylvester’s knuckles still throbbed nostalgically any time he thought of Bat Ears Thornapple.

  “Er, just moving one from one foot to the other. Pins and needles, you know.”

  Now Cap’n Rustbane did turn around to look at Sylvester. There was a crazy glint in the fox’s eyes. Sylvester reminded himself that the pins and needles excuse had never worked with Bat Ears Thornapple, either.

  “Terrible thing, pins and needles,” said the pirate with sinister softness.

  “Ye–yes. It is.”

  “The only known cure, I think,” said Cap’n Rustbane, “is amputation of the affected extremities.”

  “That’s odd,” said Sylvester. “My case of pins and needles has cleared up. Just like that.”

  The pirate snorted. “And that, of course,” he said, “is the other cure.”

  Sylvester inwardly cowered. This was exactly like Bat Ears Thornapple, only worse.

  “Now, where was I?” the fox said.

  “You were talking about the treasure.”

  “What an excellent thing to have been talking about. I must do it again sometime soon.”

  “Oh, yes, please,” said Sylvester, his eagerness sincere. Anything to get the pirate off the subject of amputation. Sylvester, despite himself, began ranging over all the pieces of his body that could be amputated – that seemed almost designed for convenient amputation, in fact. Whoever had put his head on the end of a neck, for example, had clearly had easy severance in mind.

  “Oh, all right then. You’ve persuaded me.” The fox drew a deep breath. “I lost far too many years of my youth to … to other things when I could have been hunting for this treasure, you see.”

  “You did?” said Sylvester, expecting to elicit a few seedy confessions.

  “Yes. I was, I’m embarrassed to say, a rather amateurish sort of a pirate when I first began.”

  “You were?” Sylvester couldn’t imagine Cap’n Rustbane being amateurish at anything, least of all piracy.

  “Yes. Oh, I was pretty good at the actual buccaneering itself, you understand, and in fact I devised a couple of new techniques of pillaging that are still in use today, but I had the unfortunate habit of getting caught.”

  “But didn’t they—”

  Sylvester stopped himself short. Under no circumstances remind this crazy fox of amputation, he told himself sternly.

  “No, they didn’t. I played on their sympathies, of course. Told them I was a very young fox – which I was – and that I’d reluctantly been forced into a life of crime on the high seas by the need to look after my ancient invalid mother. I tell you, by the time Terrigan Rustbane had finished with a court of law, even the most notorious hanging judges were weeping on each other’s shoulders.” Cap’n Rustbane drew himself up to his full height, the fringes of his ears nearly touching the cabin’s ceiling. “Many of them wanted to set me free, there and then, so I could run home and make an extra pot of chicken soup for my dear old mom, but The Law wouldn’t let them.” The pirate succeeded in pronouncing the capital letters of “The Law.”

  “But I thought—”

  Cap’n Rustbane raised a paw. “You might have thought judges had the final word on what happens to the unfortunates brought before them, and for all I know this may be true in Foxglove. But in most of the rest of the world the judges are themselves under the direction of The Law. And The Law decrees that people found guilty of piracy on the high seas, no matter how well-intentioned, must be punished. So I spent more of my youthful years than I like to remember languishing in prison cells here, there and everywhere. I swear to you, Sylvester, I began to think the true color of the sky was blue with dark vertical lines.

  “Still, my times of incarceration were not wasted. They taught me the error of my ways.”

  “But . . .” began Sylvester, looked around him, mystified.

  Cap’n Rustbane realized what his guest must be thinking. “Oh, no, I don’t mean that. I don’t mean they taught me to give up my life of crime. No, what they taught me was what an infernal nuisance it was getting caught. Sitting there behind bars for all that time, I recognized that the reason I kept getting caught was I kept leaving behind me people who’d seen me, and who could tell others what they’d seen. This was the single weakness in my modus operandi. The solution to my dilemma seemed such a simple one, once I’d discovered it.”

  Sylvester gulped.

  “I see you’re ahead of me,” continued the fox with a smile that Sylvester wished he hadn’t seen. “So, ever since then, I’ve made sure I don’t leave behind me any surviving witnesses.”

  Sylvester gulped again, louder this time.

  Cap’n Rustbane clapped his forepaws together. “And it works!” he cried gleefully. “As soon as I instituted my new practice, I stopped getting caught, and that meant I stopped having to spend long, boring periods in jail. From there it was but a single step – well, more accurately, a single swashbuckling bound – to becoming captain of my own ship, and I’ve never looked back.”

  “I, ah, can imagine,” said Sylvester.

  “I’ll tell you about that swashbuckling bound another time,” said Cap’n Rustbane in a softer voice, beckoning Sylvester to join him at the table. “Now, what you were really wanting to know about was the treasure, was it not?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Sylvester. “The treasure. Lots and lots of treasure, you were saying.”

  “I quite imagine I was. People who’ve heard about the magical chest of the Zindars – and exceedingly few people have, let me tell you – are apt to talk about treasure at length. Sometimes, dare I say it, to the point of tedium. But I shall be careful not to do that today, my little friend.”

  Cap’n Rustbane put his arm across Sylvester’s shoulders as if the two of them were lifelong buddies. He lowered his voice yet again, looking around him furtively as if all the portraits on his cabin walls might be trying to eavesdrop.

  “You see, my boy,” he said at barely more than a whisper, “the magical chest of the Zindars is thousands of years old. It’s been the ultimate prize for seafarers for as long as there has been avarice in people’s hearts – which is, I should think, for about as long as people have had hearts to put avarice into.”

  “Who were the Zindars?”

  The fox smiled. “I’ll be laying a wager that’s something you’d like to know. Maybe I’ll tell you another time, once I’ve decided I can trust you. And maybe, contrariwise, I’ll come to the decision that I can’t trust you after all, and you’ll be dancing on the end of a rope or swimming among the sharks at the bottom of the ocean. We’ll just have to wait and see, shan’t we?”

  The conspiratorial smile he gave Sylvester seemed to reveal more teeth than ever before.

  “What I can tell you is this,” said the Cap’n, straightening up. He tapped the stack of papers in front of him with a very long and sharp-looking claw. “About fifty years ago, the greatest pirate to ever sail the seas of Sagaria – that is, until I came along, of course – the second greatest pirate who ever sailed the seas of Sagar
ia, one Cap’n Josiah ‘Throatsplitter’ Adamite, heard a rumor borne by the wind of where the Zindar chest might be found.”

  “It was just a rumor?” interrupted Sylvester. He was annoyed to find his own voice had instinctively dropped to a whisper to match Rustbane’s.

  The fox patted the side of his gray nose with the side of his paw.

  “There’s rumors and there’s rumors, young Sylvester. This was one of those rumors.”

  “Ah,” replied Sylvester wisely, as if he knew what Rustbane was talking about.

  “By listening to the rumors, old Throatsplitter got himself as clear an idea as could be as to where the treasure of the Zindars was hidden, and he set down the results of his research in the form of a map.”

  “Ah,” Sylvester repeated, shrugging guiltily. This time he did know what Rustbane was talking about. He wished he didn’t.

  “I see you know what map it is that’s pertinent to this here discussion,” said Rustbane, his yellow–green eyes looking sad.

  Sylvester was keen to change the subject. “What happened to Cap’n Adamite? Didn’t he ever get to look for his treasure?”

  The fox sighed. “The ways of the ocean can be tragic ones, dear Sylvester, as you’ll learn in the days and weeks to come. Old Throatsplitter, who was as kind and generous a man as ever disembowelled his granny, came to a sorrowful end. I was there to witness it myself, oh rue the day.”

  “Was he,” Sylvester searched for something appropriately pitiful, “eaten by a shark? Or drowned trying to save a child’s life?”

  “Well, no,” said Rustbane, looking annoyed at the interruption. “Not in veritable point of fact, no. I stuck my cutlass into his liver and twisted it about a bit, is what actually happened. And still he wouldn’t tell me what he’d done with his map, see? He died with a horribly supercilious sneer on his face, as if he’d won out by dying. Which in a way,” Rustbane hurried on, “he had. He’d gone to his watery grave. Well, it was watery by the time we’d given him the old heave-ho over the side of his ship, this very same Shadeblaze as has become your home. He’d gone to his grave knowing the secret of the treasure, and leaving me behind not knowing even what had happened to his sea chart showing the chest’s location.”

  “That must have been very frustrating for you.”

  “Frustrating isn’t the word. It was . . . It was . . .”

  Cap’n Rustbane evidently found himself unable to speak.

  “So, how did you find out what he’d done with the map?”

  Rustbane’s face cleared of its fury like sunshine bursting through an overcast sky.

  “Ah, that, young fellow,” he said, “involved some cunning. And, as many people will no doubt have told you, there ain’t no one cunninger above or below the high seas, nor even on land, as your good friend, Cap’n Terrigan Rustbane.”

  The pirate let the final words hang in the air between them as if they explained everything.

  Eventually, Sylvester broke the silence. “Yes, but—”

  “Oh, I’m so terribly sorry. I’m quite forgetting my good manners. You can’t have had breakfast yet. Let me summon the ship’s cook to fetch you something appetizing from the galley. I haven’t eaten anything myself this morning, so I’ll join you in the repast. What’s the saying? ‘The condemned lemming ate a hearty breakfast’?”

  Refusing to hear Sylvester’s words of protest, Cap’n Rustbane picked up a little brass bell from the midst of a snowdrift of tidal charts on the table and rang it. Immediately, the door burst open and Cheesefang appeared, cutlass tremblingly at the ready.

  “Yer wantin’ me to rip out ’is innards, Skip?”

  “Er, not quite yet, my good man. Later perhaps, if you’re good. In the meantime, perhaps you’d be kind enough to ask Bladderbulge to bring up breakfast for two from the galley.”

  Looking disappointed, Cheesefang retreated. “Nothin’ personal, mind. Just business,” he muttered to Sylvester through the closing crack of the door.

  “Bladderbulge?” said Sylvester, not immediately recognizing it as a name.

  Cap’n Rustbane rolled his eyes expressively.

  “Yes. It’s so terribly unfortunate, especially for a cook. Heaven knows what was going through the mind of his mother when she named him. Not much, I’d expect. Whatever, he’s the only sailor in the whole of the Shadeblaze’s crew who doesn’t have a piratical moniker. Every time we try to invent one for him we, ah, fall short, as it were.”

  During the few minutes it took for Cheesefang to fetch the breakfast-bearing cook, Bladderbulge, Cap’n Rustbane resisted Sylvester’s timid efforts to extract further information about Adamite’s map, brusquely fobbing him off with remarks like “Can’t talk sensibly on an empty stomach, m’boy” and “Sausages! Sausages! I do hope he’ll bring sausages!”

  On one of the latter occasions, Sylvester, in frustration, asked the Cap’n his views on sausages and was treated to a learned philosophical discourse on the relative virtues of sausages made with different piquancies of spice. Sylvester had never thought he’d be glad to see Cheesefang again, but it was a relief when the rat arrived with Bladderbulge, interrupting Cap’n Rustbane’s sausageophiliac flow. Bladderbulge proved to be indeed bulging. He was a rotund badger with a wooden hind leg and he sported a stump where a tail should have been.

  With an imperious swing of his arm, Rustbane swept the books and papers from one end of the table onto the floor and indicated to Bladderbulge that he should set down his tray of steaming food there. Sylvester was surprised to see that each of the several plates on the tray had a shiny metal covering on it.

  Bladderbulge lifted these off one by one with the air of a conjurer revealing that his scantily clad assistant has not, after all, been sawn in half. The smell of hot, spiced meats filled the cabin.

  There were plenty of sausages.

  “Good,” said Cap’n Rustbane firmly, seeing this. He pulled out a pair of low stools from under the table and sat himself down on one of them. Being so much smaller than the fox, Sylvester had difficulty clambering up on his, and even then the edge of the table was only at his chin level.

  “You could try eating standing up,” suggested Rustbane, who was already halfway through his second sausage and was eyeing the heap of sardines on Sylvester’s plate in a speculative way.

  So, Sylvester stood on the stool and ate like that. He hardly noticed the food he was consuming, so intent was he on finding out more about Adamite’s map. The very fact that he was eating anything at all was a small miracle he realized afterward, bearing in mind how he’d been feeling when he’d reached the Cap’n’s cabin. The greasy food settled his stomach, and for the first time this morning – in fact, since coming aboard the Shadeblaze – he began to feel like his normal self.

  The food seemed to change Rustbane’s mood too, but not for the better.

  As soon as Bladderbulge had cleared the plates away, the fox began to pace from one end of the cabin to the other, occasionally paused to dart a furious glance at Sylvester, then resuming his restless striding.

  When at last he spoke, it was in a voice filled with harsh bitterness.

  “Yes, I remember it all too well, those long months spent locked up with hard rock beneath my feet rather than the comforting sway of Mother Ocean.”

  “It must have been miserable for you,” said Sylvester.

  Cap’n Rustbane didn’t hear him.

  “The cell I was in had one tiny window, high up in the wall. I could perhaps have jumped up and clung on to the bars somehow to look out at the world, but the bastards had shackled my feet to the floor with just enough chain for me to reach the privy in the corner, which stank. All I could do, day in day out, was gaze longingly up at that tiny rectangle of light, made even tinier by the height of the wall, and imagine what was happening underneath the pathetically small fraction of sky I could see. There was a dark c
loud there … Were people putting up their umbrellas and chasing each other laughingly through the rain or marching along, heads down with grim faces watching the water splash on the road in front of them? Ah, the scrap of sky is blue today … Is everyone out playing ball on every available patch of green grass, or are they fanning themselves with their hands and wishing they didn’t have to work on such a hot day as this? You see what I mean?”

  The fox halted abruptly and turned blazing eyes on Sylvester, who cringed as if Death itself had snuck into the cabin.

  “You see what I mean?” the fox thundered again. Clearly, he wanted no answer. “There was nothing a person could do, trapped in there, except think of how he was going to avenge himself once he’d finally been released from that hellhole. Oh, I tried all the usual means of escape and just about all of the unusual ones too. Didn’t I tell you we foxes are cunninger than just about any other creature? But they were no use, as I’d known before I tried ’em. So, all I could do was wait and do my best to count the days, and think of what I was going to do when those days were ended. The higher and higher the number of days I counted, the nastier and nastier the things I plotted to do to more and more people. That’s how prison affects a fellow, you see.”

  He paused again, swiping the side of his face lightly with his paw. “No, of course,” he mumbled, “you probably don’t see, being a lemming. Lemmings aren’t naturally vicious creatures, like foxes.”

  Sylvester could have corrected him on this (it was obvious Cap’n Rustbane didn’t know much about lemmings!) but decided it was safer to stay silent.

  “The first time I was let out of prison, there were crewmates waiting to welcome me,” the fox continued, pacing once more. “Risking their lives, they were, because if the peelers – that’s the name for the coastal police, in case you didn’t know – had known who they were they’d have found themselves dancing from a yard arm quick as blinking. But they came anyway and hauled me off to a tavern and filled me full of good grog to celebrate my freedom, and when I told them my plans for vengeance they shook me by the shoulders and told me not to be so damn stupid. The best thing I could do, soon as I’d thrown all that good grog up again and could walk on my own two hind legs (well, with my shipmates to support me, leastwise), the best thing I could do, they said, was put as much of the world between me and the prison – and the people who’d put me there – as I possibly could, and as quick as I could.