The Tides of Avarice

by John Dahlgren

  He was just about to tiptoe away when he was unlucky enough to catch Cap’n Rustbane’s eye.

  “And where are you off to, you piggy little furball?”

  “The bathroom.”

  “The what?”

  “The bathroom. Er, the head. The jakes. It’s all the excitement, you know.”

  “A pirate never goes to the lav before a battle, does he, my lads?” cried Cap’n Rustbane.

  “No!” yelled the crew around him loyally.

  “He saves it for when it’s really needed, don’t he?”

  “Yes!”

  Sylvester’s mind boggled. What in the world could Cap’n Rustbane mean?

  “So, you just stay here beside me, young Sylvester Lemmington,” said Rustbane, reverting to his normal voice. “You’ll learn a lesson as good as any lesson learnt at sea could possibly be, a lesson in the way we scurvy knaves treat those pompous lords who would try to haul us home to face Jack Ketch.”

  He put his arm round Sylvester’s shoulders as if to reassure him. Sylvester thought there could be no other gesture so threatening. Jeopord looked on with a sardonic smile twisting his lips.

  “Just come a little closer, my beauty,” breathed Cap’n Rustbane, addressing the Spectram vessel. The churning of the waters was becoming almost deafening as the Specter of Justice, charging through the waves roughly parallel to the Shadeblaze, drifted nearer and nearer to Rustbane’s ship. “Come a little closer to your Uncle Terrigan. He’s got a little gift for you.”

  “Keep your vessel on its course, Rustbane,” hailed the Spectram officer unnecessarily.

  “Is that so?” Rustbane called back. “I regret to say, Captain, that we have to leave you now.”

  “Don’t make it even harder for yourself, Rustbane! You’ll swing anyway, and your men alongside you, but there are worse things that could happen to you.”

  “And there are worse things that could happen to you too, my fine one!” bellowed Rustbane. “Let ’er rip, lads!”

  For a moment, Sylvester thought the largest thunderstorm in the history of Sagaria must have crept up behind them unnoticed and suddenly let loose. The explosion was so loud his eyes watered from the pain of it. Surely no thunderstorm could be as noisy as this? Then it must be that Sagaria herself was splitting into a thousand pieces, erupting into a cold and merciless space. He staggered, clutching ears he was certain must have been torn apart from the explosion.

  “What in the blazes was that?” he asked as the echoes reluctantly subsided, astonished he could hear his own words.

  “Chain shot,” said Cap’n Rustbane from somewhere close by in the gray, pulsating smoke. “Marvelous stuff is chain shot, if you use it at just the right time. And was there ever a righter time than the one we just used it at?”

  Sylvester started coughing. The smoke around him was already clearing, but it still bit his throat like the fieriest spice. Through the haze he could see, in the direction of the Spectram ship, angry red glows where fires had started. There were smaller dark shapes he identified as Spectram sailors jumping overboard in the hope the water would be safer than the decks of their vessel. One larger dark shape, lurching fitfully sideways, he realized, was the Specter of Justice’s mainmast toppling.

  Beside him, Cap’n Rustbane chortled gleefully. “That’ll teach the bluenoses to come searching for a fight with the triple-breasted goddess’s own true free men.”

  The smoke was clearing rapidly now, as the two ships left most of it behind them. Quite how the Specter of Justice was still propelling itself through the water was a mystery to Sylvester, but Rustbane seemed to regard it as perfectly natural that it should do so.

  “Fire again!” barked the gray fox, and there was another explosion from beneath where they stood, this eruption barely less loud than its predecessor. The chain shot had done awful damage to the Spectram ship, the chains scything down almost anything that stood in their way, including the ship’s crew. Now the Shadeblaze’s cannon were firing a more conventional load, the balls ripping huge holes in the side of the other vessel.

  One of the largest holes was only half above the waterline. Sylvester watched sickly as water rushed into the great splintered wound, like an army descending on a city whose last defenses have just fallen.

  “Surely, that’s enough,” he murmured to himself.

  He must have spoken louder than he thought, because Cap’n Rustbane turned to look down at him, a deceptively friendly grin on the gray fox’s face.

  “But I’ve hardly even got started.”

  Sylvester stared into the fox’s eyes, those oddly baffling greenish eyes that were prepared to reveal so little. “Why can’t you just leave them alone now? They’ll be lucky if any of them survive at all.”

  The green eyes narrowed. “Oh, they’d survive all right. There’s no one better at saving his own skin than a Spectram officer, I can tell you. It’s their naval training. They’ll have the lifeboats broken out already, somewhere we can’t as yet clap eyes on ’em, and we’re not so far from port that the bluenoses won’t be able to reach there. It’s like we’re dealing with a nest of ants, you see, Sylvester. The only safe thing to do is stamp the life out of the very last one of ’em. Otherwise, before you have time to turn around twice, there’s ants all over the place again. You see what I’m driving at, don’t you, boyo?”

  “N–Not really,” said Sylvester.

  “Well,” confided the gray fox, “to tell you the truth, it doesn’t really matter whether or not you do, because after all this is over you’re going to tell me what I need to know and then be feeding the fishes yourself.”

  He winked. Sylvester had never thought a wink could chill a person to the bone, but this one did.

  Cap’n Rustbane let go of Sylvester’s shoulders and turned to walk away along the deck, though the billowing smoke. His black leather coat whipped and flapped in the ocean wind, creating for a moment the illusion that he was a winged angel of death descended upon the world to suck the souls of the dead off to some place of eternal weeping. As Sylvester watched, Cap’n Rustbane reached to his belt and drew his two flintlock pistols.

  Everyone’s attention was suddenly distracted by a commotion as two smoking figures emerged from a hatch onto the deck. It took a breath or two before Sylvester could recognize them as the two rats, Thickskull and Sneezeball, whom Cap’n Rustbane had detailed to carry out his deadly orders. They must have been right next to the cannon when the chain shot was fired. Blood was pouring from their ears. They staggered a few steps across the open boards, then bumped into each other and fell.

  “Fine work, my powder monkeys,” said Rustbane, turning back in Sylvester’s direction, the two flintlock pistols crossed beneath his chin like the bones crossed beneath the skull on the Shadeblaze’s flag. He appeared oblivious to the fact that the rats could hear not a word he said, that they probably would never hear anything ever again. “Well done! You’ve won the battle for us. Now it’s up to your skipper to clear away the remnants so that we don’t leave a mess on the sea behind us. Oh, and to have himself a little fun at the same time, o’ course.”

  The air directly above the water had now largely cleared of smoke. Looking over the side of the Shadeblaze was like looking under a pillow. In the water there was a mass of floating wood, many of the pieces splintered and blackened. There were also more broken bodies than Sylvester wanted to think about, as well as a few sailors who, though hideously injured, were putting up a brave fight to stay afloat. And, miraculously, there were three or four people who seemed to have survived the onslaught of the Shadeblaze’s cannon virtually unscathed.

  One of these was the officer who had been hailing Cap’n Rustbane through a megaphone. Rustbane had addressed him as the Specter of Justice’s skipper, and Sylvester knew of no reason to think otherwise.

  As Sylvester watched, one of the Specter of Justice’s l
ifeboats peeped into view beyond the bow of the doomed vessel. It was overladen already with rescued crew, but the Spectram captain, seeing it, began to swim determinedly towards it.

  “Ah,” said Cap’n Rustbane, beaming. “Target practice! This is going to be like shooting fish in a barrel.”

  He stretched out his arms in front of him and screwed up his face as he tried to squint along both barrels at once.

  “You can’t do that!” shouted Sylvester.

  “Like hell I can’t.” The gray fox decided to concentrate on the pistol in his right paw. His arm steadied.

  “He’s defenseless!”

  “More fool him.”

  “He’s fighting for his life already. How can you be so cruel?”

  “Quite easily. Just you watch.”

  “In the name of your . . . your . . . ah, yes, your triple-breasted goddess, show the poor fellow some mercy, can’t you?”

  “Shut your piehole and press the lid down firmly, why don’t you?”

  “But—”

  “Mercy’s for wimps. Mercy gets you killed. And mercy’s no fun. Just wait ’til you see the fountain of blood when my bullets split his skull wide open.”

  Cap’n Rustbane claw tightened on the trigger.

  Sylvester could stand it no longer.

  There was a barrel of rum just behind the pirate. None of the crew was paying any attention to their sole remaining captive, not when there was the prospect of watching a few good killings.

  Scuttling forward as fast as his legs would carry him, Sylvester launched himself, in what he was sure was a suicidal leap, to land on top of the rum barrel.

  He landed there with a scrabbling of claws. More by luck than good judgement he managed to stop himself from sliding straight across the top of the barrel and falling off the other side.

  From here he was same height as the gray fox.

  “Watch out behind you, Cap’n!” he squealed.

  Rustbane lowered the pistol he’d been about to fire and turned, an expression of bewilderment on his face.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Take this, you murderer!”

  Again, Sylvester launched himself crazily into the air, this time leaping toward a much smaller target than the barrel top – at the pistol still held in Cap’n Rustbane right paw.

  For a second, he was certain he was going to miss it entirely, that he was going to sail straight past the pistol and into the turbulent waters below. Then, by one of those mad strokes of luck that only seemed to happen to other people, Rustbane tried to pull the gun out of Sylvester’s way and his evasive movement, instead, gave the flying lemming the opportunity he was looking for.

  He reached out a paw and yanked on the barrel of the pistol as hard as he possibly could.

  Startled, Rustbane let go of the gun, and it went skittering away across the deck to rest up against . . .

  Sylvester, deflected, caroming off at a wild angle, could hardly believe his eyes as he saw what the pistol rested up against. He barely had time for his disbelief to register, though, before he himself hit the deck and slid.

  All the breath was punched out of him by the impact of landing. Darkness filled his vision. His ears still worked perfectly well, however, even though there seemed to be a rushing river very close at hand.

  “Yoohoo,” said a voice he’d thought he might never hear again.

  “You devils!” yelled Rustbane in fury. “Give me that gun.”

  Slowly the pain began to ebb from Sylvester’s midriff.

  “Ask a bit more nicely,” said Viola in her best “sweetness and light” tones.

  Rustbane’s intake of breath was like a garden rake being pulled through gravel.

  “Please give me back that gun.”

  “No,” said Viola.

  “I have another one,” said Cap’n Rustbane.

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” said another voice and this time it took Sylvester a few moments to recognize it.

  When he did, awareness flooded through him alongside his by now rapidly returning vision.

  Jeopord! That treacherous ocelot has chosen this of all moments to strike against his skipper. The battle’s won against the Specter of Justice, but that doesn’t mean the survivors won’t be able to marshal the remains of their forces and launch some kind of ragged attack. This is the worst time for Rustbane to be confronted by a mutiny!

  In an instant of cold clarity, Sylvester recognized within himself the odd truth that his sympathies lay with the pirate who’d been preparing so brutally to slay the Spectram officers and who was planning to take Sylvester’s own life – that his sympathies lay with Rustbane rather than the mutineers.

  But there was absolutely nothing he could do about it, one way or the other.

  Drooling in fury, Cap’n Rustbane looked first at Viola, then at Jeopord then at Viola once more.

  “You wouldn’t be sending your old comrade to his doom, would you?” he said to Jeopord, even as his eyes were still on the smaller foe. Behind Viola stood a very determined looking Mrs. Pickleberry. In front of the two lemmings was a small black figure.

  Rasco! How in the heck did you get here?

  As if he’d heard Sylvester’s thought, the little mouse turned and winked at him.

  “We’ve spent a dozen years together at sea,” the gray fox was saying, “ever watching each other’s back. Haven’t we, Jeopord? Now, just give me the gun.”

  “I think not, Cap’n.”

  “So ye still call me ‘Cap’n,’ do ye, ye varmint?”

  “Just my little joke,” replied Jeopord in an oily manner. “Just my little joke.”

  “A joke, is it? But I still am your cap’n, may the goddess darn it!”

  “Not any longer, Rustbane.”

  Rustbane growled and Sylvester’s spine froze. He’d never heard anything so frightening as that long, low sound. He glanced again across at Viola and the others, and saw it had petrified them, too.

  Jeopord, by contrast, seemed hardly fazed by it. The purloined pistol dipped momentarily in the air, but then was pointing steadily at Rustbane’s heart once more. That little dip was the only sign he’d heard the threat.

  “Give me my gun. That’s an order, Jeopord.”

  “We don’t take our orders from you, Rustbane. Not any longer.”

  Rustbane sat down on the barrel from which Sylvester had launched his crazed leap. “So this is mutiny, is it?”

  Jeopord leered. “I’ve heard it called that, yes.”

  “Stabbed in the back by me own best pal, me Jack o’ Cups hisself.” Rustbane had begun to wheeze, as if the shock of the betrayal had aged him by many years. Sylvester, watching him, didn’t trust this impression any more than he trusted anything else about the gray fox. Cap’n Rustbane was putting on a performance, that was all. There were very few times when he wasn’t putting on a performance.

  “Oh, pass me an onion, someone,” said Jeopord.

  “Betrayed by my one true friend.”

  “And a clean handkerchief.”

  “Loved you like a brother, I did.”

  “That’s not what you said when you had me flogged last year. Old Lumberbrains, handling the cat-o’-nine-tails, was prepared to stop when he’d got within an inch of my life, but you told him the Shadeblaze was going metric so he should carry on until he got within a centimeter, you scum!”

  “It was for yer own good,” Rustbane said, but even he didn’t seem to believe his words.

  “Just as this is for yours,” countered Jeopord with a sarcastic chuckle. Behind him, out of the remaining wisps of smoke, a gaggle of other pirates materialized, as if they’d been standing there whole time but had only now decided to let themselves be seen.

  “Bladderbulge,” said Jeopord, gesturing behind him with an indolent paw. “Truss up the Cap�
��n here the way you’d truss up one o’ those turkeys you burn.”

  “With pleasure, Jeopord,” said the cook, moving forward. “Do I get to stick him in the oven afterwards?”

  “I’m still thinkin’ about that.”

  “You treacherous swine!” Cap’n Rustbane burst out. “You’ll be sorry for this, mark my words.”

  “I’ll mark ’em, all right,” said Jeopord, visibly relaxing. Obviously, as Bladderbulge advanced upon the deposed skipper, the ocelot felt he was now in complete command of the situation. “About two out of ten, I’d say.”

  “Ha!” Cap’n Rustbane let rip with a string of nautical oaths. Mrs. Pickleberry blinked admiringly. “Without me – me, d’you hear? Without me, you’re just a rabble of rabid street curs, waiting for death to come along and claim your miserable rotting hides. If it wasn’t for me, you’d all have danced to the tune of Jack Ketch long ago, and be moldering in your unmarked graves. I made something out of you, I did! I made you into pirates. Pirates who could be proud to hold their heads up high, unafraid to look offal like the Queen of Spectram’s pantalooned dandies in the eye.” He waved a paw toward the floating planks that were the sole relics of the Specter of Justice, and to the lifeboats vanishing in the distance. “Without me you’d be nobodies, not the fearsomest crew there’s ever been a-sailing on the seas of Sagaria!”

  The gray fox paused for effect, wiping the back of his wrist across his lips. Bladderbulge was a statue beside him, the rope suspended between the fat pirate’s paws.

  “Without me,” Cap’n Rustbane continued, his voice hardly above a whisper, “you’ll never find Cap’n Adamite’s treasure. You’ll go to your graves still trying to hunt it down.”

  Murmurs spread through the thronged cutthroats. Rustbane’s final remark had obviously struck home among some of them. Once more the direction of the pistol in Jeopord’s paw wavered; once more the ocelot almost immediately brought it back under control.

  “Don’t listen to him,” said the ocelot. “Pay him no mind. Do you think he’d share the treasure with the likes of us if he ever did find it? Do you? Do you really?”