“So, I took their advice, and off we sailed on the big blue sea, and I tucked my memories of that foul hole away at the back of my mind and thought I’d never see them again.
“That was the ending of my first time in jail.
“But then, like a numbskull, I only went and got myself caught again, didn’t I? Luckily, it was in a different country, with a different judge, or I’d’ve had my neck stretched for sure. Because you can blather your way out of just about anything in front of a judge the first time, but you try it again he’s going to see right through your blandishments and be twice as hard on you as otherwise. Whatever, even though the crowd was baying for blood, the judge took pity on my youthful innocence and off I went to jail again. If they hadn’t told me it was a different prison and a different cell, I’d never have known. Same tall walls, same tiny barred window, same jakes as stank to high heaven no matter if I used it or not.
“And I plotted and schemed, and my dreams were full of satisfying cruelty and gore …
“The day I was let free, though, there were my old muckers from the pirate ship, and off we went to the tavern, and I had a headache and an acid gut for a week but I never hurt anybody for having put me away.
“Same goes the third time I was incarcerated – which was what I had been the first two times, only I hadn’t known the word. They was a lucky judge and jury, lucky peelers …
“Then there was the fourth time. Ah, me, yes, the fourth time.”
The gray fox stopped at the side of the desk and leaned on his hands against it, looming over Sylvester like some enormous bird of prey. Looking into Rustbane’s eyes, Sylvester could see deep pits of agony. Fury, yes – a crazy rage. Bitterness. A writhing serpent of vindictiveness. But, most of all, what Sylvester saw behind the screens of yellow–green was pain.
“The fourth time, it wasn’t just me. The soldiers and peelers had caught near the entire crew of the Mollie O’Grady, which was the sweet vessel I sailed in under Cap’n Bosseye Skankangle, may his fine and twisted spirit be blessed in memory. There was sixty or more of us hauled into the assizes at Swivern. That’s in Tarngonia, which is mongoose country, case you don’t know. The judge was this little mongoose who was viciouser even than Bosseye, but all dressed up in long robes and finery so his viciousness looked civilized. The jury was worse – not that most of the judges I’ve come across pay much mind to what juries think. The chief of the coastal police stood up in front of everyone and told them there was no sense making much of a trial out of this, since we was all pirates and had been caught with our paws elbow-deep in booty and gore. Just string ’em all up, said this pillar of justice, ’less you want to boil a few alive for sport.
“The judge, peering over the top of the stupid little spectacles he affected, agreed with the police chief, and the jury and the audience obviously did too, because they were yelling and cheering and calling out for us to be torn limb from limb, not just hanged.
“Me, I squirmed my way to the front, and laid the most innocent gaze you ever did see upon the judge, who couldn’t help but notice it. I swear to you, Sylvester, I made myself look so youthful and guilelessly misled that day it’s a wonder no one offered to change my diapers. The judge hammered on his bench for quiet and sooner or later he got it. Of all the crew of the Mollie O’Grady I was the only one who got the opportunity to speak my piece in front of the court.
“And what I told them was all about my poor sick mother (I’d got that little speech down pat, all right!) and my half-dozen little brothers and sisters, some of ’em barely able to walk as yet, whose cute little furry tummies was empty and echoing. If I didn’t want to just sit back and watch ’em all starve to death, the only thing I could do was to go to sea in search of wages so I could feed ’em. And how was I to know that the gentle sailors who offered me a job were really cutthroat pirates?
“I tell you, by the time I’d done there wasn’t a dry eye anywhere to be found. Even some of my crewmates were bawling like babes on each other’s shoulders. As for the judge, he’d had to take his little spectacles off a score of times to dry the insides so he could see.
“And the end result of it was that, while Bosseye and all the rest of the fine seafarers of the Mollie O’Grady were dragged off to the gibbet, I was thrown back into that same identical prison cell with the tall walls and the dinky little window and the lav in the corner that I swear they stunk up extra while I was sleeping at nights.
“That was the longest time I ever did spend in prison. And the last, by the belly of the triple-breasted goddess, the last!
“The day I was released, there was no one at the gate to meet me.
“They’d all swung, see? All my crewmates, all the people there were in the world that I could call ‘friend.’ Back on that dreadful day when I alone had been tossed behind bars, they’d met their makers at the end of a rope.
“I went on my own to a tavern and got drunk on grog, but my heart wasn’t in it.
“All the time I was sitting there drinking, I was remembering the smug face of the chief of the coastal police, and the beady little hypocritical eyes of the judge who’d passed sentence on us, and the bloodthirsty looks on the jurors, and the braying of the townsfolk who wanted to see us all dangle. And most of anything, I remembered what my dreams and schemes had shown me doing to these scum.
“So I went into the hills and I found me a band of outlaws, and I beat them into taking me as their leader. I had to kill a few with my bare hands, but that was what was needed to get the rest to fall in line. I trained them how to use the swords and cudgels we got by murdering wayfarers on the lonely roads out there, and I bided my time until the wrath was banked back inside me, glowing white hot but fully under control.
“One night, when the moon was shy of the sky, me and my twenty cruelest cutthroats crept into the town where the courthouse was, and—”
Cap’n Rustbane stopped speaking abruptly, noticing Sylvester’s presence for the first time in a very long while.
“You’ve put your paws over your ears,” he said. “What in the world possessed you to do that, young Sylvester? We’re just getting to the best bit.”
“I don’t want to hear what happens next.” The words came squeezing out of Sylvester’s mouth as if they’d rather have stayed inside him.
“What?”
“Blood and guts may be all right for you, but I’m a peaceable fellow and—”
“Are you too lily-stomached for tales of mayhem?”
“Yes! That’s exactly it. Think what you like of me, but—”
“But it’s the gore and grue and the shrieks of the women and the spurting of blood that thrills the soul of any buccaneering boyo!”
“Then I’m not a buccaneering boyo.”
Cap’n Rustbane chuckled. It was a sound that could have made the flames of hell freeze in fear.
“But you’re learning my ways.” The fox’s voice was so quiet that it could barely be heard over the creaking of the ship’s timbers. “D’you think you’re frightened at the moment, young Sylvester?”
“Ye–yes!”
“Then imagine how frightened you’d be if it weren’t just at the thought of me telling you about hacking people to death – slllloooooowwwwly, so I could savor their pain – but because I was just about to do all of these things and many, many more … to you!”
The last word was delivered no more than a finger’s width from Sylvester’s nose.
He thought he was going to fall off the too-high stool.
He thought he was going to faint clear away.
Billows of blackness encroached from all sides of his vision, converging in towards the center and seemed destined to blot it out entirely, but somehow he clung on to consciousness.
He stared Cap’n Rustbane straight in the eye with what he hoped was a reasonable imitation of defiance.
“I’m a peace
able person, as I’ve said, and I’ve no stomach for bloodshed or cruelty, but that doesn’t mean I’m a coward. I’d ask you, sir, to remember that.”
For a moment, Sylvester knew, his life hung by a strand from a spider’s web.
Then Cap’n Rustbane guffawed with laughter, slapping Sylvester on the back, which lifted him and sent him sliding across the table in a flurry of charts and pens.
“Only a hamster, and you’ve shown more courage to my face than any man-jack of my crew has done for a bucketful of years. I like you, young Sylvester. I knew from the first I was going to, and Cap’n Terrigan Rustbane is never, ever wrong about a thing like that.”
“Lemming,” said Sylvester.
“Whassat? Speak up!”
“Lemming.”
“Explain yourself.” The pirate’s grin seemed to span the cabin wall to wall.
“I’m not a hamster,” said Sylvester with as much dignity as he could muster while lying flat on his stomach, his nose acting as an impromptu bookmark for what appeared, in the instant before impact, to be A Voyage to the Atolls of the Great Western Ocean, by Sir Perceval Montiffew. “I’m a lemming. I’ve told you before.”
“You have indeed,” cried Cap’n Rustbane, reaching out a paw to help him up. “And it’s magnificently sorrowful I am to have made this same error yet again. Please accept my humblest apologies.”
“Apology accepted,” said Sylvester, hoping he didn’t sound too prim. The fox was, after all, helping him to his feet and dusting him down.
“Good, good. Now, where was I?”
“Somewhere I’d rather you didn’t go back,” said Sylvester.
“Oh, yes. Me and my band of hoodlums were—but you wanted me to skip over the good part, didn’t you?”
“Yes.” Uneasily, Sylvester wondered if Viola would have given the fox the same answer.
Again, Cap’n Rustbane laughed. “You see, young Sylvester, the point of my telling you the story wasn’t to impress you with the terrible things I’ve done during my time upon this mortal coil. That’s a story too long to be told at a single sitting. What I’m trying to get through to you is the way a good pirate captain – and you don’t find pirate captains any gooder than me, in a manner of speaking – makes sure of the unswerving loyalty and obedience of his crew, even their love. That’d be not too strong a word.”
“You still haven’t told me how you learned about Cap’n Adamite’s map,” Sylvester put in. He was sitting on the edge of the table now, his hind legs dangling beneath him.
“I haven’t!” The Cap’n smote his brow histrionically. “And I was going to do that too, wasn’t I? Whatever is happening to my brain? Sometimes I think I’d forget my head if it wasn’t fixed on.”
“Yes, you were. Going to tell me about the map, I mean.”
“Telling you about the map’s important, isn’t it?” A sort of quiet reasonableness entered the fox’s voice. Sylvester wasn’t sure he liked the sound of it. “But then,” Cap’n Rustbane went on, “the lesson I’m in the process of teaching you is important too. Yes. I think it’s the more important of the two things. Remind me about the map later.”
“Surely,” said Sylvester as if that was what he’d intended all along.
“Good. Now, my fine young friend, I was talking about fear and I was getting to the stage of telling you about what fear can do to a person, even someone who, like your good self, is no coward. Fear, true fear, isn’t listening to something appalling, and oohing and ahing about how ghastly it all is. Fear is when it’s about to happen to you.”
From nowhere a razor-sharp dagger had appeared in the fox’s paw. Sylvester might have been better able to appreciate the legerdemain involved were it not for the fact that the paw in question was unnervingly close to his own throat.
“It’s fear that enables me to rule the roost aboard the Shadeblaze,” explained Cap’n Rustbane, turning the blade over and over so that in the light from the lantern above the metal seemed almost liquid. “Some of them scurvy creatures out there are bigger than me, and there’s even a few of them that are tougher than me and better in a fight, but there ain’t none of them meaner than me. Ain’t none of them crueller than me, or readier to cut out a tongue or an eye or a heart if I don’t like its owner.”
Cap’n Rustbane let the implications of this sink in, then carried on.
“Aboard this ship, see, young lemming, I’m the judge and jury, and I’ve got a heart harder by far than that old mongoose back in Swivern. I know, because I saw his for myself as I held it in my paws and watched as it stopped beating. My word is law anywhere on the Shadeblaze, from the bottom of the keel to the topmost tip of the mainmast. It’s law, as well, wherever my crew might chance to be on land or sea, even if they’re not aboard the Shadeblaze. If anyone wants to go against my word, to break my law, why, he finds out the difficult way what it’s like to raise the hackles of Cap’n Terrigan Rustbane.”
With a dexterous flick of the gray fox’s paw, the dagger vanished again.
Sylvester suddenly noticed he must have stopped breathing a while back without realizing it. He filled his lungs with a panicky gasp.
“Is that understood?”
“Cer–certainly,” said Sylvester.
“The same goes for everyone. You included. That pert miss of yours too.”
Sylvester could almost hear the gears turning over in Cap’n Rustbane’s mind.
“And almost certainly for that mother of hers, Three Pins. I hope.”
The dagger reappeared for a glittering split second. When it vanished again, Sylvester realized that a neat half-inch had been trimmed from his whiskers on both sides.
“Understood?” the fox repeated.
“Oh, absolutely.”
“Obey my orders and you live. Disobey, and . . .”
Cap’n Rustbane drew his finger across his throat eloquently.
Sylvester tried to give a sophisticated laugh. It came out as if someone had strangled it.
Once more, the dagger was in Rustbane’s paw. “Remember how I threw this, back in Foxglove, and missed you?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t often miss.”
He flipped the dagger end over end, so that he was holding it by the blade rather than the hilt, then in the same movement gave it another flip.
Sylvester felt the wind as the weapon whistled past his cheek. A tiny coolness told him that he’d lost more whiskers. Behind him, there was a thunkk as the dagger lodged in the cabin wall.
“Your life’s mine to do as I like with, you understand?”
“I do.”
“Then remember it. Fear me. Your life depends upon it.”
Yet again, the fox’s mood visibly shifted, as if the shadow of a cloud were lifting off a grassy field.
“But you were asking me about the map, were you not?”
“Er, yes.” Baffled by the fox’s newly regained amiability, Sylvester suspected a trap somewhere. Cap’n Rustbane’s constant shifts of humor made Sylvester feel as if he were walking on slippery ice. At any particular moment he was managing to keep himself upright, but always with the awareness that the very next moment might, without any advance warning, see him painfully dumped on his rear.
“Well,” said Rustbane, uncannily perpetuating the theme of Sylvester’s thought, “you’re sitting on it.”
The fox laughed uproariously as Sylvester, horrified, tried to look underneath himself without falling off the edge of the table.
“Not quite, dear Sylvester, not quite. But a little more to the side and you would be.”
Sylvester’s gaze turned towards where Cap’n Rustbane was tapping a long, sharp claw on what looked, at first glimpse, like some old paper someone had crumpled up to throw away, then relented and tried to flatten out again. Age had turned the paper that mellow brown Sylvester knew so well from his
work at the Library in Foxglove. The irregularly shaped piece of map that he’d burned had been this same yellow.
“Take a look, dear boy.”
Sylvester shuffled along so he could see the paper better. It was obvious at a glance, even though the job had been done with painstaking skill, that the sheet had been formed by gluing two roughly triangular sheets together along one edge. The result was a rectangle from which one large shape was missing. It didn’t take a genius to work out what that piece of the jigsaw puzzle had been, especially since the remaining portions were covered in the same squiggles as the one Sylvester had destroyed.
On one of the pieces there were even more squiggles running diagonally across the top right-hand corner and then turning to follow, in an irregular fashion, the right-hand side of the paper for about three-quarters of the length of the sheet before disappearing off the edge. A sudden flash of insight told Sylvester this must be a section of coastline of a larger landmass.
One of the sheets of parchment was significantly filthier than the other, and than the sheet Sylvester had been given by Levantes. It looked as if someone might have been using it as a handkerchief – someone with a very bad cold. And that was the polite version of what seemed to have been done to it.
“The last time I was in jail,” breathed Rustbane into Sylvester’s ear, “back in Swivern that was, you’ll remember. The last time I was rotting in a prison cell there was a poor wretch of a squirrel in the cell next to mine. It was strictly forbidden for the two of us to talk, on penalty of a flogging, so o’ course we did. Not the way the guards thought we’d have to, mind, which was shouting out loud enough for the other one to hear us through the thick stone walls. No. Over the years, before we’d gotten there, there’d been other prisoners in these two cells and they’d dug into the mortar between the stones with their suppertime forks and spoons and whatever else came to hand, I have no doubt, even their fingernails. By the time I was thrust unceremoniously into that cesspit, there was a tiny hole all the way through the mortar into the next cell.
The Tides of Avarice Page 18
