The Tides of Avarice

by John Dahlgren

  “Or, if they did look in there, me an’ Elvira’d clobber ’em.”

  Sylvester moaned inwardly. This wasn’t quite what he’d meant.

  “What I’m saying is,” he tried again, “if there isn’t a chamberpot to, er, to hand, as it were, where’s the next best place in a bedroom to hide things?”

  “Under yer kegs,” said Mrs. Pickleberry. “Like Viola does.”

  “Kegs?”

  “Yer smalls.”

  Ah. Sylvester grinned happily. That was more like the answer he’d been searching for.

  Viola looked fretful. She glanced at her mother. “I didn’t know you’d worked out that—” she began.

  “Precisely,” Sylvester said, cutting her off. “Underneath some dirty underwear. If whoever was the inhabitant of this cabin – and I’m pretty sure I know who it was, from what Rustbane was telling me the other day – if whoever he was wanted to hide something in a hurry before rushing up on deck because of an emergency, where better than under a heap of dirty clothes?”

  “Blimey,” said Mrs. Pickleberry. After a long moment’s cogitation she added, “Yeah, but, even if folk afterwards had a nat’ral whatjacallit, a nat’ral reticence about pokin’ around in his smelly undies, don’t yer think that eventually someone’d have done it anyway?”

  Sylvester rocked on his heels. Damn, I hadn’t thought of that. These are cutthroat pirates we’re talking about, not milksops. They’d not be deterred for long, no matter how filthy the—

  “I don’t know,” he said, shrugging. He glanced at the rolling pin in his paw, then at the fungus-girt mass of clothing by the chest of drawers.

  “They could have been a whole lot worse many years ago,” said Viola dubiously.

  “That must be it. Over time their initial, ah, virulence must have abated somewhat, so that—”

  “Oh, gimme ’ere, yer great buttockbrain!” said Mrs. Pickleberry, grabbing back Elvira. “I brought up children o’ me own, ya know. I seed a lot worse’n this in their bedrooms.”

  Soon there were items of clothing, and bits of items of clothing, all over the cabin floor. Some were indeed not so savory as one might have preferred.

  “Nope,” said Mrs. Pickleberry with finality after a while. “There ain’t not nuffink of value ’ere.”

  Sylvester, having been a little hopeful despite the unlikelihood of actually finding anything having fought his way through the thicket of negatives, gave a little sigh of disappointment. Then something caught his eye.

  “Wait a moment.”

  “Wot?”

  He went down on his knees, ignoring the cold slimy water that splashed on to him.

  “Look!”

  “What is it?” said Viola.

  “It’s a chest.”

  “A chest? A treasure chest?”

  “Who knows? Who can tell until I get it open,” cried Sylvester, his excitement rising. Forgetting about what he was putting his paws into, he scrabbled away at the last of the clothing.

  “’S a very small chest,” said Mrs. Pickleberry staring at it critically, her head cocked to one side.

  “Sometimes it’s the smallest things that’re the most valuable,” observed Viola, looking eagerly at the little chest.

  “Thass what yer father keeps sayin’,” muttered Mrs. Pickleberry.

  Their discovery was made of wood, with iron bands hooping around it in both directions. The bands had severely rusted, as had the lock that held the lid down. Even if the discoverers had possessed a key, it was clear the only way they were going to get inside the box was by brute force.

  “Lemme at it,” said Mrs. Pickleberry, as if on cue.

  Elvira rose and fell with brutal effectiveness, then rose and fell again even more devastatingly. Sylvester found himself shuddering in sympathy with the wooden chest or, at least, what was left of it.

  “Yow! I’ve got a splinter in my leg,” wailed Viola, putting a forepaw on Sylvester’s shoulder to balance herself while she reached for the offending area.

  “I’m just surprised we don’t all look like porcupines after that little display,” said Sylvester too softly for Mrs. Pickleberry to possibly hear the remark.

  She heard it anyway.

  “You got any complaints, punk?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Then keep ’em to yerself, unless you wanna end up lookin’ like that box o’ yours.”

  “Certainly.”

  By this time, even had Sylvester been remotely in the mood for an argument, his attention would have wandered. Lying in the blistered wreckage of the wooden chest was a shape Sylvester recognized only too well from his time in Cap’n Rustbane’s cabin.

  A book!

  Not a scroll, like those in the Foxglove Library, but a book with binding and pages you could turn and a spine with lettering on it.

  Well, not much by way of lettering. Age and disrepair had more or less eradicated the gilt altogether. Still, who cared about minor details like that when one had a book that looked like it hadn’t been read for decades!

  “Let’s get this back to my cabin,” he said with sudden decision. “Clearing up the deck in the storm’s wake isn’t going to take the crew forever, is it? The sooner we’re out of here and have hidden any trace of this secret room the better. Agreed?”

  The other two saw his point.

  Within ten or fifteen minutes the three lemmings had managed to conceal the hole in the cabin wall sufficiently to pass a casual inspection, and who was likely to give the cabin anything more than this? Not Cheesefang, that was for sure. The temperamental old rat was clearly intent on doing only as much as he had to in order to pass muster in the Cap’n’s eyes, and not one iota more. Sylvester pushed the boards together – their dampness made them stick to each other as if coated in a weak glue – then the two females pushed the clothes cupboard that had been near the porthole over to cover any trace there might be of Sylvester’s repair job.

  “I think that’ll do,” said Sylvester, puffing, at last. “What in the world have you two put in that wardrobe?”

  “None o’ yer business, whippersnapper.”

  His mind filling with images of extremely heavy metal strengthenings for various inscrutable items of female lemming underwear, Sylvester led the way back along the passage to his own cabin.

  Once the three were settled there, Viola and himself sitting on the bunk while Mrs. Pickleberry appropriated an old sea chest on which to deposit her ample rear, Sylvester opened the book.

  It was, as he’d suspected, a journal or log. What made him whistle, however, was the inscription on the flyleaf:

  Logbook of

  Captain Josiah Adamite

  Skipper of the Good Ship Shadeblaze

  Beneath this there was an inscription that Sylvester couldn’t read. The long confinement in the damp of the secret compartment had made the old sea dog’s ink run. Sylvester hoped this wasn’t going to affect any pages but the outer ones. After being granted such an incredible stroke of luck as to discover the logbook in the first place, it would be too cruel a stroke of fate if much of it was illegible.

  Cautiously, he riffled through the next few pages. Phew. It looked as if the writing on them was perfectly readable, or as readable as Adamite’s crabbed hand had ever been.

  “What does it say?” urged Viola, nudging him in the ribs.

  “Patience, patience. I’m just getting to that.”

  “I got a passin’ interest in the subject meself, laddie,” said Mrs. Pickleberry from the corner.

  “I know, but this book is very old and it’s been kept in lousy conditions. I don’t want it to fall apart in my paws. We’ve got to be careful with it. There could be invaluable information in here, information even Cap’n Rustbane doesn’t know!”

  “You goin’ to tell it to him?” said Mrs. Pickleberr
y fixing him with a gimlet gaze. “You bein’ so matey with the verminous skunk an’ all?”

  “Fox,” said Sylvester tiredly.

  “Eh?” said Mrs. Pickleberry and Viola.

  “He’s not a skunk,” Sylvester explained. “He’s a fox.”

  “Like we’re not hamsters?” said Mrs. Pickleberry.

  “Same principle.”

  “Oh, shaddap, yer dingbat.”

  “Lemming,” said Sylvester. “Not a—oh, look,” he added hastily, “here’s the first page Cap’n Adamite wrote in this volume of his diary.”

  It was a pity, Sylvester ruminated as he pored over the small, angular handwriting, that he’d been unable to make out the date on the flyleaf. They had no way of telling how old this diary was. Presumably, it was the last set of records the old buccaneer had committed to paper before his untimely demise at the end of Rustbane’s cutlass. For a moment, Sylvester wondered if trunkloads of earlier volumes of Cap’n Adamite’s writings might exist elsewhere aboard the Shadeblaze. Then he realized the inevitable truth: all Adamite’s earlier diaries must have been discovered after Rustbane’s mutiny and cast overboard like their author. No, thrown to the flames, more likely, lest any of them should somehow survive the ravages of the ocean and come to the attention of other eyes.

  However minuscule that possibility might be, Sylvester thought, Cap’n Rustbane is not a person ever to take even the slightest chance unless he has to.

  Even so, Rustbane had taken a chance, without knowing it.

  He and his crew hadn’t searched the vessel that they’d stolen from its master carefully enough. Cap’n Adamite had outwitted the gray fox, something few could ever boast. This final volume had survived.

  “Gerra move on, dammit,” growled Mrs. Pickleberry.

  “I’m just adapting my eyesight to the handwriting,” pleaded Sylvester. “It’s very small and blurry and the ink’s faded. And the spelling’s awful, it’s hard to make out what Cap’n Adamite meant some of the words to be, his spelling of them’s so weird.”[1]

  “Yeah, right. Excuses!”

  “Oh, Mom.”

  “Hmmf. Infatuated, that’s what you are. And why?”

  The bickering between the two Pickleberries, which had diminished to a minor trickle for fully ten minutes or so, now threatened to become a mighty torrent once more.

  There was one possible way of stopping it, Sylvester decided.

  Holding the open book up toward the lantern, he began to read aloud words that had been written decades ago by a buccaneer who’d willingly shed the blood of the innocent all over the seas of Sagaria, whose flinty heart had been a stranger to mercy, and yet for whom Sylvester now experienced a strange stirring of fellowship, in that they shared a single adversary, an adversary called Captain Terrigan Rustbane…

  [1] Thanks to a kindly editor Cap’n Adamite’s spelling, which was indeed bizarre, has for the sake of preserving the reader’s sanity, been corrected in the extracts that appear over the next few pages of this narrative. All of us should be so lucky.

  10 Dead Man’s Tale

  What better time to start a new volume of my logbook than now, when I have reached a turning point in my piratical life? From the very first moment I heard those wonderful, dream-inspiring words “the magical chest of the Zindars,” I have known that somehow my fate and that of the chest were to be intertwined and, sure enough, that is what has come about. It was by something of a miraculous happenstance that I heard about the chest at all, for few have done so and fewer still have lived to tell the tale. I am in the process, wherever I can, of rendering that number even smaller.

  I can still remember that night at The Moldy Claw in Darkwater, many years ago, as if it were only yesterday. Such are the illusions that the mind plays to trick a man, even as scurvy a knave as this old dog of the open sea! I was in the tavern for the simple purpose of wetting my whistle, with a few of my men alongside me for—

  “He was a dog then?” said Viola.

  Sylvester stopped reading and looked at her in bafflement.

  “Who?”

  “This Cap’n Adamite of yours.”

  “I, ah” – he looked down at the logbook, where his claw was marking a place that was still far too close to the beginning – “I don’t know what particular type of animal old Adamite was. Now I come to think of it, it was something Rustbane didn’t tell me that day in his cabin.”

  “But Adamite himself just said it.”

  “Hm?”

  “He called himself an old dog. I remember.” Viola jostled Sylvester as she peered over his shoulder at the journal. “See? There it is, an ‘old dog of the open sea’!”

  “I heard it too,” said Mrs. Pickleberry. “Ain’t no gettin’ out of it, young Lemmington.”

  “I think—” Sylvester began wearily.

  “Don’t matter what you think,” said Mrs. Pickleberry, pulling a pipe from her pocket and looking around for some means of lighting it. “If there was one person best placed for knowin’ what sort o’ a creature Cap’n Adamite was, it’d bin Cap’n Adamite hisself, the ol’ bastard, and he said he was a—”

  Sylvester put up a paw to stop this madness. “He just said he was an old sea dog.”

  “’Xactly.”

  “It’s an expression.”

  “So you says.”

  “He was just saying he’d been at sea most of his life, that’s all. That’s what’s meant by ‘sea dog,’ just ‘sailor,’ really. I mean, if I’d spent years at sea I could call myself a sea dog, even though I’m not a dog at all, I’m a—”

  “Lemming,” said Mrs. Pickleberry for him. “Not an ’amster. We knows. You keep tellin’ us.”

  Sylvester drew a very long, very noisy, very deep and, in the end, wholly unsatisfactory breath. It did, however, serve its purpose which was to stop him from beating Mrs. Pickleberry to a bloody pulp and possibly, however much he might love Viola, doing the same to the younger lemming.

  “Look,” he said when he thought he’d probably be able to keep his voice under control, “if I keep being interrupted every few lines, we’re never going to get the journal finished, are we?”

  “Who’s doin’ any interruptin’?” said Mrs. Pickleberry, glaring around the cabin as if there might be culprits hiding under the furniture. She’d managed to get her pipe lit, which somehow made her bulging-eyed glare even more intense. It was also turning the air in the cabin a virulent-looking yellow-gray. The lantern chose that moment to flicker. Sylvester wondered if the flame was about to expire through lack of oxygen. “I can’t see no one,” she said.

  He sighed again. “Let’s just try to get through the rest of the logbook in one go, shall we?”

  “Why not cut ahead to the interesting bits?” said Viola, clearly thinking she was being helpful.

  “That was one of the—”

  Realizing the trap he’d been just about to walk into, Sylvester tried the conciliatory approach.

  “Perhaps we can learn something from Cap’n Adamite’s account of how he first learned of the magical treasure chest of the Zindars?”

  “Hmmf,” was Mrs. Pickleberry’s acerbic response, but she seemed ready to let him carry on. With any luck, she’d fall asleep soon. Surely it must be about time for her afternoon nap by now?

  “Where was I?” Sylvester muttered. He must have moved his paw during the disputation, but soon he found his place again.

  … with a few of my men alongside me as a safeguard and for company, couthless though it might be. The atmosphere in the tavern was if anything more pungent than ever, which, I might tell you, took some determined pungenting. My trusty midshipman, Hamish, was with me, as he always was when there was ale to be had and the prospect of a wench between the sheets, as was my first mate Jeopord …

  This time it was Sylvester who wanted to pause, although he
knew any hesitation on his part would be pounced upon gleefully by Viola and Mrs. Pickleberry as setting a precedent for the future. He pretended there was an extra bad smudge of the ink, holding the page closer and screwing his eyes up as if struggling to decipher the words.

  Jeopord . . . I know that name! He’s that ocelot who carries out Rustbane’s orders with such gratuitous willingness. So, he was old Adamite’s first mate as well, was he? That means that at some stage Rustbane must have leapfrogged him in the Shadeblaze’s pecking order, doesn’t it? It’s a wonder Jeopord is happy with that situation – getting rid of the old master simply to find himself serving a new one. Perhaps there’s resentment still there. I must bear it in mind in case it’s something I can explore to our advantage later.

  “D’yer want me to do the readin’ fer yer?”

  “No, no, no, Mrs. Pickleberry. I’ll be fine. Just a, heh heh, tricky bit, that’s all.”

  … as was my first mate Jeopord, with whom at the time I’d have entrusted my soul, so confident was I of the fellow’s loyalty. But, as the old saying goes, the only ocelot you can ever trust is the one whose pelt you’re wearing, and that certainly has proved to be the case with Jeopord, damn his guts. I can still use him for a while yet, so long as I keep a vigilant eye turned on him, but the time must surely come when either he or I must walk the plank. ’Tis a pity I ever took that mangy fox, Rustbane, aboard, for it’s him I blame for the turning of Jeopord’s allegiance from me!

  But enough of this. I lose track of my own musings …

  We were in the Moldy Claw, all those years ago, the three of us and a few others from the Shadeblaze besides, and I make no apologies for the fact that the drinks were chasing each other briskly enough down my throat. I’ve always had a hard head for drink, but this night . . . well, let’s just say I was glad enow that we’d brought a youthful second mate with us to act as our Designated Stander and make sure those of us who wanted to got home.

  When the ales had caused their usual consequence, I decided to brave the rigors of the shack that’s out the tavern’s rear. Something I’d never have done had it not been for those same ales, mark my words! I wobbled past rogues from every corner of Sagaria as I made my way to the door of that crowded room, and was dampened by so many spilled drinks of so many kinds, that e’en at the best of times I’d have not been able to put a name to all of them.