“There’s no need to be fatalistic,” he said grumpily.
“I’m not being fatalistic. Just facing the facts. We’re both going to be lemming roasts by the time this night is over.”
“Hmmf!”
If Jeopord had only about a dozen pirates on the Shadeblaze, there were only about a dozen of them still alive here on the island. The carnage as the islanders strove to subdue the buccaneers had been extreme. Many of the pirates had adhered to the principle that they’d rather be dead than surrender, and with reluctance the islanders had granted them their wish. But the Vendrosians had paid a very heavy penalty too. For every one pirate corpse lying in hideous stillness on the sands, there were at least three or four dead islanders. The Shadeblaze’s complement had acquitted themselves impressively.
“Keep yer spirits up, mateys,” said a familiar voice from a couple of yards away.
For some obscure reason, the Vendrosians had permitted Sylvester and Viola to bandage up the old sea rat before they were comprehensively tied up. It couldn’t have been a matter of compassion; the islanders had emphatically demonstrated that compassion was a concept alien to them. Perhaps, with so much “food” already dead, they wanted to preserve, for as long as possible, those of their prey who still clung to life.
Sylvester gulped. It seemed Viola was wrong about being dead by the end of the night, but the prospect of being kept alive for weeks or months until a cannibal butcher decided it was their turn next to be a banquet was even less appealing than death.
The Vendrosian leader, Kabalore, and a handful of his biggest deputies now started moving among the captives, kicking and pulling the pirates to their feet. The air filled with nautical curses.
Sylvester and Viola, pushing backward against each other, were able to struggle upright before the little posse of islanders reached them, but Cheesefang, his movements still impaired by his wound, was less fortunate. The cannibals weren’t gentle with him as they forced him to stand. The old sea rat had screamed just the once when he’d originally suffered the wound. He screamed a lot more than once now.
“You’ll pay for this,” said Sylvester grimly to the tormentor nearest him, a stoat who had more skulls draped over his body than even Kabalore himself. As soon as he’d spoken the words, Sylvester began berating himself inwardly for having been so stupid.
The stoat turned a terribly yellow-eyed stare upon him.
“I’ll be picking my teeth with your jawbone, soon enough,” he said. “If you don’t hold your cack until then, I may not be too fussy about whether or not you’re still alive at the time.”
Sylvester swallowed hard.
“Coward!” snapped Viola.
For a moment, Sylvester thought she was speaking to him, but no, it was at the stoat she spat the word.
The stoat looked astonished. “Who the blazes do you think you are?”
“Viola Pickleberry, of course, and you?”
The question flummoxed the stoat still further.
“My name’s—hey, I don’t have to answer to scum like you!”
“What a very unusual name,” sneered Viola.
“It’s not my—”
Kabalore had noticed the exchange. “Leave her alone, Strimcrack. We’ve enough work to do without getting involved with the prisoners. Get those two apart,” he said with a nod at Viola and Sylvester, “and then tie ’em up again separately like the others.”
“Right y’are, sir!” cried Strimcrack with a display of good humor. Turning away from Kabalore, however, he added under his breath to Viola and Sylvester, “I’ll see you two pay for this disrespect. Pay in agony and fear.”
“Ooh-er,” commented Viola loud enough for Kabalore to hear.
The remark earned her another murderous stare from Strimcrack as he bent to sever the bonds holding the two lemmings. He was not gentle in doing so and both of them suffered a welter of gashes and bruises. When he retied their wrists behind their backs the stoat made sure to tighten the cords so that they sank deep into the flesh.
“You’ll be wishin’ you ’adn’t vexed ol’ Strimcrack, you will.”
“Oh, poot,” said Viola, despite the fact that her face was pale with pain.
Once all the surviving pirates had been rounded up and herded to a place uncomfortably close to the pulsing red embers of the bonfire, Kabalore strutted in front of them, holding a couple of the skulls of his necklace out in front of his chest as if they were trophies he was especially proud of.
“Welcome to the island of Vendros!” he cried, just as he had when the longboats had first landed on the island’s shore what seemed like many long hours ago.
His comrades set up a chorus of cackles and hoots into the dark skies. Clearly, they thought Kabalore’s remark represented the height of wit. Sylvester could see them cavorting in a grotesque ritual dance behind Kabalore on the far side of the subsiding fire.
Kabalore waited until the din had died down a little before he spoke again.
“We regret we did not inform you beforehand that your stay here is destined to be a permanent one.”
Once more, his cronies went into a fusillade of exaggerated laughter.
“Come again,” murmured Cheesefang into Sylvester’s ear. “Yer’ve been a luvverly audience. Thangyoo, thangyoo. I’m gonna be ‘ere all next week, wiv a matinee on We’nsday.”
“And,” Kabalore was saying, holding up a black-and-white paw to his comrades to tell them to quieten down, that the really good bit was yet to come, “we’re especially looking forward to the stay you’re going to have inside us!”
This time Sylvester thought the noise was going to shake the stars loose from their positions in the heavens.
“I wonder if this guy is going to be still as funny when he grows up and hits puberty,” said Viola caustically when she could make herself heard. She seemed unaware that Strimcrack was still fixing her with a lethal glare.
Sylvester wished he could find it within himself to joke like the other two. All he could see ahead was a long tunnel that got quickly darker and quickly narrower with, at the end of it, himself being slaughtered and butchered in the most revolting manner imaginable and then cooked and devoured by the kind of people he’d never even wanted to meet, let alone get eaten by. It wasn’t the most cheering of anticipations and there was no use pretending otherwise. Jeopord had clearly written them off, so there was no chance of rescue from that quarter. Aside from Jeopord, there was really only Mrs. Pickleberry and, doughty as she was, what could anybody honestly expect an elderly lemming to accomplish, even if she was armed with not one, but two, sturdy rolling pins?
If she was even still alive.
He and Viola had come a long way from Foxglove, and there’d been many times when Sylvester had thought they wouldn’t survive to live another hour – or even another minute – but he’d never experienced such an abandonment of all hope before. This really was it.
Kabalore, his cohorts having finally fallen relatively still, now addressed himself to the dozen or so bedraggled captives who stood in front of him with their hands tied behind their backs. Clearly, he’d expected to see them with their heads hung low in despair and dejection, and he quailed when he saw the reality.
These were pirates and they met his gaze with glares of defiance and threat.
All except one, who wasn’t a pirate at all: Sylvester Lemmington.
Kabalore recovered his composure swiftly.
“I owe it to you, to you steaks and chops and roasts and hashes” – he lingered over each word with greater lipsmacking relish than the last – “I owe it to you to tell you what’s going to be happening to you next.”
“It’d be quite all right if you just left us in ignorance,” Sylvester piped up.
“Silence, squirt!” said Kabalore.
The pirates murmured and grumbled in an ominous way, but Ka
balore obviously thought they were safely under control and he was in no danger.
“As you can see,” continued Kabalore, gesturing around him at the numerous corpses of pirates and islanders, “we already have a plentiful supply of fresh meat. Indeed, we’re going to have to feast for a week and a day and guzzle as hard as we can the whole of that time if we’re going to get through it all before it begins to go” – he gave a dandified sniff – “off.”
Sylvester’s insides turned coldly acid.
The cannibal chieftain beckoned behind him, and several burly islanders unwound long, dark whips from their waists. The whips looked vicious and intimidating, even when idle. The captives hardly needed the demonstration one of the Vendrosians gave, making his lash crack like a lightning strike.
“My friends here,” said Kabalore, “are going to escort you to comfortable accommodations in the cave we islanders call the Larder.”
The whip-wielders pressed forward and, grumble and swear as they might, the pirates had little choice but to obey orders. Soon, they were being herded in single file up the beach to where, unnoticed by Sylvester earlier, there was a notch in the thick wall of jungle vegetation. They plodded along a beaten path between the trees and tangled bushes, trying to see what lay ahead in the unreliable light of the blazing torches their captors held aloft. The noise of the sea breakers died out behind them, only to be replaced by the eerie sounds of the island jungle at night. Sylvester could sense eyes everywhere in the darkness watching him, not with any malice or intent to harm, but with a sort of cold, dispassionate curiosity. In a way, he found it almost comforting. This seemed far less frightening than his first experience of a jungle, back on Blighter Island. Or maybe it was just that there was no room left for any more fear in his mind. The whips, the cries of coarse mirth from the sweat-streaked islanders, the name of the place they were going to – all of these were enough to cram a small lemming brain with so much terror that it blanked out. It was almost as if there were no terror there at all.
“Don’t worry,” said Viola suddenly. She was walking directly behind him.
“Don’t worry?” he said incredulously. Their talking attracted a glare from the nearest islander, but the weasel did nothing to stop them. “Don’t you think that there’s really rather a lot to be worried about?”
“We’ll pull through, somehow or other. Something will turn up, you’ll see. Something always has before.”
She was right in that last remark, of course. Otherwise they wouldn’t be here to have the conversation, but Sylvester couldn’t help feeling the logic was like that of someone who jumps off a high cliff and, for most of the fall, can’t understand why people said it was dangerous.
Sylvester decided not to point this out. Let Viola cling to her hopefulness, however misplaced. It was obviously her lifeline.
He wished, for some reason he couldn’t understand, that Mrs. Pickleberry were here. He’d never have thought the day, or night, would come when he might yearn for the presence of the curmudgeonly old lemming as reassurance, but he did now.
I wonder what she’s up to, he said to himself. I wonder if Jeopord’s discovered she’s aboard the ship?
And Rasco. I miss the little nutcase so much. I hope he’s safe.
Nearby, a whip struck skin and a pirate yelped in pain or outrage or both.
Sylvester put his head down and kept walking.
✿ ✿ ✿ ✿ ✿.
When they reached it, perhaps half an hour later, the Larder proved to be far more spacious than Sylvester had expected. When Kabalore had talked about “comfortable accommodations,” Sylvester had assumed the worst: somewhere dark, cramped and cold, its walls dripping with foul water, its shadows filled with small creatures with large, venomous bites. Instead, the captives were ushered into a wide cavern with a sandy floor. There were niches in the walls where the guards could lodge their torches, lighting up the space warmly. The walls were also fitted out with metal rings and ropes, and briskly, with the ease of long practice, the Vendrosians secured their captives. Sylvester found he could walk perhaps three paces to one side or the other, but not much farther. Certainly the rope, tied from a ring about a yard above his head to the binding that fastened his forepaws behind his back, didn’t have enough slack in it for him to be able to turn himself right around. He and the others were going to have to learn to sleep standing up. What they were going to do about other bodily functions he didn’t know; he hoped he wasn’t going to be the first of the captives to find out.
It was some consolation that Viola was the next prisoner along the wall. At least they hadn’t been separated. On his other side was Cheesefang and that was heartening as well. Sylvester didn’t know that he liked the disreputable, temperamental sea rat, but at least he’d grown accustomed to him. The other pirates Sylvester knew only from having seen them on occasion around the deck of the Shadeblaze. He had no idea what any of them were called.
Once the Vendrosian guards were satisfied none of the prisoners could escape their bonds, Kabalore ambled into the Larder carrying a bulging wineskin and bearing a broad complacent grin.
He bowed sarcastically to the tethered pirates, then raised the wineskin to his lips. A long stream of the potent green grog jetted into his mouth, and he drank with loud satisfaction.
“That’s better,” he said at last, lowering the skin and wiping the back of his paw appreciatively across his mouth. He laughed. “I do hope you folks won’t regard us as terribly ill-mannered if we leave our guests on their own for a while, will you? As you know, my friends and I have some concentrated feasting to get done, and there’s no time like the present to get started on that sort of job.”
He and the guards cackled loud and long at this display of humor.
To make sure the prisoners knew their place, a couple of the guards lashed out with their whips, the savage blows drawing blood wherever they fell. Sylvester cringed, certain he or Viola was going to be next, but fortunately they were spared. At last, with Kabalore in the lead, the islanders left the pirates to their own devices.
“Now, there’s a stroke o’ luck,” said Cheesefang as soon as the cannibals were gone.
“What is?” said Sylvester.
“Them bastards done left us with their torches.”
“So?”
“Flame burns through rope, dunnit?”
“It also burns through flesh,” Sylvester pointed out. “Besides, the cannibals have obviously thought of that. Our ropes aren’t long enough for any of us to get anywhere near one of the torches.”
“See these?” said Cheesefang, opening his mouth wide.
Sylvester turned his head and found himself staring in sick fascination at what looked like a stone wall a moment after a herd of buffalo has stampeded through it.
“Them’s teeth,” said Cheesefang, making the wall wobble nauseatingly.
“Er, yes,” replied Sylvester. “I’d guessed that bit.”
“And we was given toothypegs,” the sea rat continued, “for a purpose, which purpose is chewing. And ropes is made for getting chewed through, see?”
Sylvester doubted Cheesefang’s teeth were good for chewing through anything tougher than porridge – and only porridge that hadn’t been cooked by Bladderbulge, at that. He mumbled something tactful to this effect.
“I know that,” countered Cheesefang, his voice full of exasperation. “Them’s good pirate toothypegs, which is to say there’s a lot o’ them missin’ and the ones has survived is a bit on the bluntish side. Same for me as it is for me mates ’ere, see?” He rotated his head to indicate the other pirates. All were listening intently to the conversation. “That’s prob’ly wot them cannibal bumheads was counting on when they thought it was safe to leave us alone. But wot they didn’t notice is that you, Sylvester,” Cheesefang continued, “you an’ Little Miss Droppydrawers there—”
“How dare you ca
ll her Little Miss—”
Cheesefang ignored the protest. “You two ain’t got pirate teeth yet. Yer toothypegs ain’t matured into the well developed pirate standard. An’ yer rodents. Yer whole lives is built aroun’ chewin’ stuff. You gettin’ me?”
“I think so,” said Sylvester, hackles still ruffled, “but however sharp our teeth are, they’re not going to help us. The rope’s behind me and Kabalore and his crew didn’t leave me enough leeway to turn myself round to get at it.”
“Don’t have to.” Cheesefang looked and sounded incredulous. “You tryin’ to tell me that you an’ Little Miss Droppydrawers ’aven’t ever ’ad to escape from a prison cell?”
“Um, no. We haven’t. We’re law-abiding citizens.”
Cheesefang spat. “Lemmings! Clueless. I tol’ Cap’n Rustbane, the triple-breasted goddess bless his soul, I told ’im gettin’ involved with lemmings was a big mistake, but did ’e listen?”
“No,” said one of the other pirates, a beaver with two hooks in place of forepaws.
“I want your help I’ll ask for it, Pimplebrains,” snarled Cheesefang.
Pimplebrains? thought Sylvester in bewilderment. Is that a name or an insult?
Cheesefang was taking deep breaths, as if trying to get his sanity under control. “Then I s’pose,” he said heavily to Sylvester, “yer ol’ Uncle Cheesefang’s goin’ to ’ave to talk you through this one.”
“How to, er, turn ourselves around when the rope’s too tight to let us?” said Viola, sounding as puzzled as Sylvester felt.
“Yes. No. Sort of. Good to find ye’ve not fallen asleep, Miss Droppydrawers. See, wot ye’ve—”
“Cheesefang?”
“—got to … Yes?”
“You call me ‘Miss Droppydrawers’ one more time and you’re going to find your ugly head jammed firmly up the aperture your drawers would ordinarily cover. Got that?”
Cheesefang looked suddenly nervous. A gleam came into his eye that Sylvester had seen before. It was that gleam of mingled awe and admiration that tended to be in the sea rat’s eyes when Daphne Pickleberry was around. Now, clearly, Cheesefang had discovered that her daughter deserved something of the same.
The Tides of Avarice Page 44
