The Tides of Avarice

by John Dahlgren

  “What ye have to do,” continued the rat, a tone of unaccustomed politeness entering his voice, “is back yerselves up against the wall as hard and as far as ye can possibly manage, see? Watch me.”

  Cheesefang shuffled back and back on the sands until, standing upright, he was nearly flat against the wall almost directly under the metal ring to which he was tethered.

  Sylvester saw at once the point of the maneuver. The rope from the metal ring dangled right alongside Cheesefang’s face. All the old pirate had to do was turn his head and, with a certain amount of juggling, manipulate the rope with his mouth until it was between his teeth.

  “Gotcha!” said Sylvester in admiration.

  Lemmings aren’t the same shape as rats, they’re somewhat, well, pudgier, to be forthright about it, and it proved a lot more difficult for Sylvester and Viola to accomplish what Cheesefang had demonstrated, but at last, they succeeded.

  “Ye ready?” said Cheesefang.

  “Uh-huh,” grunted the two lemmings.

  “Then get chewin’ as quick as yers can! No knowin’ when those cannibal swine be gettin’ back.”

  Sylvester didn’t need the urging.

  The rope was made from some type of local vines, twisted tightly together, and it tasted like a bar of old soap that had been left on the side of the bath to dry and crack for a year. Or, at least, that’s what Sylvester thought. He tried eating soap exactly once when he was very young and going through what his mother had euphemized as his “experimental stage” (his father had used franker terms for it, the only repeatable one being “nuisance”), and strangely enough, he could remember how it tasted, despite the span of years.

  Disgusting.

  And here he was on a cannibal island facing the same prospect but this time with reluctance. Not only did the rope taste disgusting, it was tough. Out of the corner of his eye, Sylvester could see the back of Viola’s head and could tell she was finding the rope as resistant to her teeth as he was. Both of them began to gasp from the effort and the pain.

  At last, Sylvester found that only one strand of the rope in his mouth was left intact. He chomped down hard on it and felt the fibers beginning to disintegrate. Unwilling to have the rope on his tongue anymore, he danced away from the wall, jerking with his wrists as hard as he could.

  The rope resisted for a moment, then snapped.

  Sylvester went sprawling flat on his face in the cool sand.

  A few moments later, Viola did exactly the same. They lay there, their heads a few yards apart, grinning at each other with the satisfaction of a difficult task achieved, the sound of their breath echoing all around the cave.

  There was a curious muffled drumming noise. Lazily, Sylvester turned to see the pirates, unable to clap the hands that were tied behind their backs, were stamping their feet to applaud the two lemmings.

  “Thanks, folks,” said Sylvester smugly.

  “Ahem,” Cheesefang said a minute or two later, once the pirates had quietened again. “Yer still not done, you two.”

  “What?” said Viola.

  “One o’ yer’s got to gnash through the rope at the other one’s wrists, ain’t yer?”

  “I don’t suppose the islanders left any swords or daggers lying around, did they?” said Sylvester with implausible optimism. “Even a pair of scissors would do.”

  The cave filled with the pirates’ derisive laughter.

  “Kabalore may be stupid, but ’e’s not stupid,” said Cheesefang.

  Sylvester sniffed. “Just wondering.” He glanced across the floor to where Viola was wriggling to her feet. “I’ll do it,” he told her. “Once your arms are free, you can untie me.”

  She looked as if she might be about to object, then he saw her change her mind.

  Gnawing through the ropes at Viola’s wrists was somehow not as bad. Sylvester guessed it must be that this was fresher rope than the one that was hanging from the wall. Or maybe it was the proximity of Viola, her familiar warmth, that made him feel more cheerful. Whatever, it didn’t seem long at all until she was rubbing her forepaws together to get the blood circulating in them once more, and a minute or two later she was picking with her sharp, nimble claws at the knots that bound him.

  In less than half an hour everyone was free. The two lemmings were the heroes of the day. No one even thought of calling them hamsters.

  Cheesefang sidled over to the cave entrance and peered outside.

  “Garn,” he pronounced, his face twisting into a scowl as he turned back to face the others. “Now, there’s a rotten stroke of Lady Fate if ever I did see one. Them ’orrible cannonballs ’as posting a posse of guards not an ’undred yards from ‘ere. They’s feastin’ and boozin’ away like they got a grudge against their guts, but they’s armed up to the eyeballs with spears and cudgels and longbows and swords. Most o’ the blades they’re carrying be ourn, by jingo! Ain’t no way to escape this direction, there ain’t.”

  Viola looked downcast. “This calls for a curse,” she said.

  The pirates gasped.

  “Bottom!” she exclaimed, putting a lot of feeling into the word.

  There was a moment’s silence, then the pirates started sniggering.

  Sylvester put his arm around Viola’s waist comfortingly. “I don’t think they regard that as much of a curse,” he said.

  “When you’ve all finished being idiots,” said the beaver called Pimplebrains coldly from the rear of the cave, “there’s something important I’d like to show yers.”

  All eyes turned toward him.

  “There’s another way out of this cave,” he said, pointing with one of his metal hooks. “Look.”

  Now that the beaver had drawn their attention to it, it was obvious. Sylvester couldn’t understand why none of them except Pimplebrains had noticed before. Maybe the flickering of the wall-mounted brands had deceived their eyes into thinking it was just another shadow. Or maybe it was because they were all focusing so intently on ridding themselves of their hated bonds.

  Partly concealed by a vertical fold in the rocky wall of the cave there was a pitch-black cleft.

  “Could be just ’arf a yard deep,” observed Cheesefang cynically.

  “It ain’t,” Pimplebrains retorted. “While you lot was putting on yer variety show about bottoms” – the sneer almost dripped – “I was exploratizing back ‘ere. I reckon this crevice goes a long, long way into the hill. I couldn’t go too far, because I was running out of light and, unlike Jeopord and his kind, I can’t see in the dark. But I got far enough to smell the breath of the sea and the open sky, somewhere way in the distance.”

  “Blimey,” said one of the pirates, a one-armed weasel. “I’m game for this.” He leaped to the wall and snatched down the torch from the niche. “The rest of you comin’ with me and Pimplebrains?”

  The beaver held up a hook in caution. “Could be it’s a dead end. We could get stuck in there an’ not be able ter find a way back.”

  “It’s worth the risk,” cried the weasel.

  The rest of pirates raised a motley cheer – a very quiet cheer, because of the guards outside the cave entrance. Soon, everyone except Pimplebrains was equipped with a torch, and some carried two. By silent agreement, Cheesefang was the person to lead the way into the dark, narrow passageway, with Pimplebrains following right behind him. Sylvester and Viola came next, then the remainder of the party.

  The ceiling in there wasn’t much higher than some of the larger pirates’ heads, and when a stalactite hung down, which was frequently, it was even lower. There was a fair amount of bumping and thumping as unwary creatures collided with the stone pendants, not to mention the astringent smell of burned fur from accidents with the torches. The stalagmites too were a menace, often rendering an already narrow passage almost impossibly so. Once or twice Sylvester, as he struggled to clamber around a particularly
large stalagmite, was certain he wasn’t going to be able to squeeze himself through. Each time he managed it, of course, but he winced at the thought of how much of themselves the bigger animals must be scraping off on the sharp flints of the walls.

  It took him a time to realize, what with all the exertion, but the air in the crevice was a whole lot colder than in the big cave the cannibals called the Larder.

  He shuddered. How long could it be before their escape was discovered? Surely the islanders would instantly guess where the pirates had gone. They’d lived here since time immemorial. They must be fully aware of the back exit to the Larder.

  Sylvester cursed himself. He should have thought to persuade Cheesefang and the others to leave a false trail outside the cave mouth, so the Vendrosians might be deceived into thinking the fugitives had fled into the deep jungle. Too late for that now. Half his life he seemed to be thinking of good ideas long after they’d have been useful.

  He gritted his teeth and told himself crossly to get a grip. The only good option at the moment was to get as far from the Larder as possible. If Pimplebrains was right, they’d eventually come out into the open air. Then, if they were very lucky, they could lose themselves in the night before the cannibals even realized they’d gone.

  “Strike me timbers and lash me thighs!” said Cheesefang suddenly in astonishment, up ahead.

  “Gawd luvaduck!” agreed Pimplebrains. The awe in his voice was obvious.

  Sylvester pressed forward with renewed vigor, holding his torch out in front of him.

  When he saw what the other two had seen, his jaw dropped. “Blimey,” he breathed.

  “What is it?” said Viola, close behind him. Then: “Oh!”

  For Sylvester, it was like the first time that, as a very small lemming, he’d been taken by his parents to the temple back in Foxglove. The interior of the building had seemed larger, somehow, than the open sky outside. He felt as if there might be clouds and thunderstorms up near the temple’s painted ceiling. The sheer scale of the place gave it an ambience of the most profound mysticism. He’d gaped in awe. It had been a long time before Hortensia and Jasper had been able to persuade him to come with them to the family pew.

  In the years since, his mind had grown a little more sophisticated, of course, and he tended now when entering the temple to have to control his lips from moving into a mocking curl. But that reduced not at all the sense of unadulterated wonder that flooded through him as he gazed into what was a far vaster chamber than the Foxglove temple.

  The rest of the pirates now stumbled out of the constricted passageway and were gathered together in a huddle. No one spoke very loudly. It would have seemed somehow disrespectful.

  The torchlight could penetrate only a small distance into the cavern. Its far walls could be detected only as occasional glimmers, occasional impressions of things that might or might not have been actually seen. Sand covered the cavern’s floor. The walls were a conglomeration of steep, misshapen rocks that were so black they might have been coal; the dancing of the torchlight made them seem like the claws of some enormous creature – at rest now but ready at any moment to pounce upon its prey. Overhead in the ceiling, the torches’ flames made crystals twinkle like the red embers that had floated in the air above the cannibals’ bonfire.

  But none of these were what caught Sylvester’s eye.

  In the middle of the cavern, lying three-quarters of the way over to one side, was a ship that dwarfed the Shadeblaze. Somehow, Sylvester knew it was a ship, even though it looked nothing like the pirate vessel. Its hull didn’t just cover the lower half of this ship but extended all the way round. It was made not of wooden planks, like the Shadeblaze’s, but of some dull gray metal that seemed to swallow light and give nothing back in return. There were some angular markings engraved into the hull near the bluntly pointed tip that made no sense in any of the languages Sylvester could read, living or dead. But far more obvious was the huge, circular, splinter-rimmed hole in the hull about one-third of the way back from the ship’s prow. It was high up near where the water line would usually be, but as the ship sat askew on the sandy floor, it was close enough to the ground for them to walk through. In the hole one could see nothing but the menace of dark shadows. Even those were enough to convey that this ship was damaged beyond all hope of repair.

  “What in Sagaria is that thing?” said Cheesefang.

  “I can tell you what it is,” chipped in Sylvester.

  “Ye can?”

  “Yes. Sometimes it’s valuable having an archivist along with you.”

  Cheesefang snorted. “I’ll believe ye. Thousands’d rather tear orf their own ’eads. So, go on then. What is that thing?”

  The rat was trying to keep his voice nonchalant. The big giveaway was that he couldn’t bear to turn his gaze away from the huge edifice that filled the center of the cavern.

  Sylvester’s own voice became humble. “It’s one of the ships of the Zindars.”

  “Of the wot?”

  “The Zindars.” Sylvester explained as concisely as he could. The pirates gathered around him, listening eagerly to his narrative. For once they were silent. That is, until there was mention of the Zindars’ treasure chest, and the fact that Jeopord possessed the map old Cap’n Adamite had created. The map that showed the location where the treasure chest was buried. Sylvester felt it was time, way past time, that the pirates should know all this. There had been far too many secrets kept back from this crew, first by Throatsplitter Adamite, then by Terrigan Rustbane and, most recently by their latest captain, Jeopord.

  At the same time, something made him hold back from telling them that the map Jeopord owned showed its “X” alongside the wrong island.

  Think of it as my insurance, he decided. He glanced at Viola and she nodded back, clearly understanding his thoughts.

  “Ye mean,” said Cheesefang, stroking his jaw with the paw that wasn’t holding a guttering torch, “the treasure chest of the Zindars could be right ’ere in front of us?”

  “Unlikely,” said Sylvester promptly. “Vendros isn’t the island marked on Cap’n Adamite’s map.”

  “I remember Cap’n Adamite,” struck in Pimplebrains. “He was all right, he was.”

  “Thank ye for that,” said Cheesefang sardonically. At last, he turned to look Sylvester in the eye.

  “But ye think this … object belonged to the Zindars?”

  Sylvester gulped. “Yes, I do. I think this must have been one of the sites of the great last battle between the Zindars and their persecutors from the stars. I think a bolt from one of the foe’s great energy weapons punched the hole in the side of the Zindar vessel that we can see in front of us. They must have had other ships, obviously, because they were able to escape from Sagaria back to the starways, but—”

  “So ’ow come yer thinks their treasure chest ain’t buried ’ere?” Cheesefang interrupted.

  Sylvester gave his very best imitation of a carefree laugh. “It could be buried here. I’m not saying for definite it isn’t, but it also could be buried in any one of a thousand other places. And, like I said, Vendros isn’t the island indicated on Adamite’s map.”

  Cheesefang glowered. “I served under Josiah Adamite for many a long year and, lemme tell you, years were very much longer back then. ’Specially if ye was serving on the Shadeblaze when Cap’n Adamite was the skip. And I can tell ye this, safe in the knowledge that there’s none here can countersay me, ol’ Throatsplitter was a devious bugger and there’s no way he would tell the truth if there was the chance to tell something different. Most particerlarly when he was concoctin’ hisself a treasure map.”

  Sylvester tried not to let his astonishment show. It was as if the sea rat could somehow read the dead captain’s mind.

  “So,” Cheesefang continued, once more scratching his jaw, “wot I’m sayin’ is this could just as likely be the island wh
ere the treasure’s buried as anywhere else in this part of the ocean. My guess is ol’ Josiah’d have made sure ’is treasure map was of the right region, ’cause he’d need that information hisself if he was goin’ to navigate here. But I think ’e prob’ly put a mark on the chart indicating the wrong island, just to get up people’s noses, like.”

  Sylvester said nothing. Apparently, that was enough for Cheesefang to know that he’d penetrated the lemming’s, and Cap’n Adamite’s, secret.

  “Wot I’m thinking,” Cheesefang concluded, “is that we should mebbe start diggin’, jus’ on the offchance. The dead ship’s here. There’s no better clue than that, that these Zindthings stuffed their chest inter the ground somewhere near it?”

  Sylvester could think of a thousand reasons why this line of reasoning was flawed, but all he did was stand there with his mouth opening and closing like a goldfish’s.

  “This place is colossal,” said Viola. “You could be searching here forever and still not know if the treasure chest lay just one more spadeful away.”

  “It’s a chance I is willin’ to take, Miss Droppydrawers,” said Cheesefang with what probably seemed like civility if you were a sea rat.

  “Cheesefang?” said Viola in a deceptively light tone.

  “Ah, yerss?” The sea rat looked anxious. He’d obviously remembered their last conversation on the subject of drawers.

  “Are you fond of your head?”

  “Er, yerss.”

  “Then just be careful, you hear?”

  “Um, yerss.” The relief in the sea rat’s voice was manifest.

  Despite the objections of Viola and Sylvester, the sea rat was determined the pirates should give the cavern floor at least a perfunctory search for the Zindar’s chest. He ignored their warnings that it surely couldn’t be too much longer before the cannibals discovered they were missing and came in hot pursuit.