The Tides of Avarice

by John Dahlgren

  “But me?” said Sylvester.

  “What about you?”

  “You said you wanted to let the others live, but you didn’t say that about me.”

  “You and me have bad blood between us now, Sylvester, too much bad blood in the past few minutes for there to be any outcome but that one of us die at the hands of the other.”

  “Excuse me,” squeaked Rasco.

  “What?” snapped Rustbane, looking at the mouse as if at a lump of gristle left on the plate.

  “Could you kill me too?”

  “Have you lost your senses?”

  “See, Rustbane, I’m on Sylvester’s side. He’s my buddy. So if you gonna kill him I think you gotta kill me too. Savvy?”

  “It’ll be easier than blowing my nose, I can assure you,” snarled the fox, making a lunge at Rasco which the mouse easily evaded.

  “How do you blow your nose if you can’t catch it?” cried Rasco with a laugh that belied the seriousness of the situation. Before Rustbane could pull back his sword for another slash at him he’d darted between the fox’s legs and scampered up the moss-covered bole of an old sagging birch tree.

  All this time, Jasper had been standing quietly, simply observing. If the slaying of Pimplebrains had had an effect on him, he’d shown nothing of it. If anything, he seemed slightly bored. There was a wry twist to his mouth as if this sort of barbarism was only to be expected if you were so foolish as to consort with pirates and suchlike lowlifes.

  Now he raised his head and fixed Rustbane with a stare so terrible that, even though the fox was many times larger than Jasper, he cowered.

  “So you think you’re going to kill my son and leave me alive, do you?”

  Rustbane tried to rally his bravado. “How do you plan to stop me?”

  “There are a hundred dead cannibals on Vendros Island who thought they could mock the humble lemming when they found him, but each of them died in the shadows of the cavern behind the Larder. They got a surprise when the lemming fought back, I can tell you. For some, the end came so quick they still had the expression of surprise on their faces as they died and it’s going to be the same for you, you mangy specimen of the vulpine species.”

  “No, Dad,” said Sylvester thickly. “This is my business and I’ll finish it.”

  “Don’t be a fool, son.”

  “It’s something I have to do, Dad. You’ve got to let me. I’m not a child anymore.”

  “I don’t want to lose you a second time, Sylvester, not after we’ve found each other again.”

  “Same here, but this is my fight. I was the one who brought the pirate back to Foxglove. I have to deal with the consequences of my decision.”

  The sword in Sylvester’s paw seemed very heavy, then suddenly it seemed as light as a feather. To a Zindar, it would be.

  “Stand back, Dad. You too, Doctor Nettletree and you, Rasco.” The last was directed somewhere above Rustbane’s head, where the mouse had scuttled along to the tip of a birch branch and seemed to be readying himself to jump down on to the fox.

  Then, directly to Rustbane, Sylvester said, doing his best to growl, “Cap’n Terrigan Rustbane, I challenge you to combat.”

  To Sylvester’s surprise, Rustbane bowed his head, and not in one of his usual sarcastically mocking bows but as a sign of genuine respect.

  “Whatever hex you put on my flintlocks,” said the pirate, “can you take it off again?”

  “It’s off already. The only place it was ever on was in your mind.”

  “Then let’s each take a pistol.” The gray fox looked at Doctor Nettletree. “You’re a medical fellow. You’re accustomed to seeing death close up. Unhook them from that corpse” – he jerked his head toward the ungainly sprawled body of Pimplebrains, which Rustbane clearly now regarded as just a heap of dead meat rather than the remains of a friend – “and bring them to us.”

  Sylvester was horrified at the prospect. The pistols were the right size for a fox, not for a lemming. Even using both paws he’d barely be able to lift one of them.

  Then he smiled. His sword had begun feeling airily light in his paw. He knew, although he couldn’t have identified the source of this knowledge, that it was going to be the same with the flintlock.

  Doctor Nettletree didn’t have the advantage of Zindar abilities and made heavy weather of disentangling the weapons from the dead Pimplebrains’s hooks and dragging them across to a place roughly midway between Sylvester and Rustbane.

  “They’re both loaded, I trust?” said Sylvester. The world was, he knew, full of dead people who’d failed to be sufficiently suspicious of the gray fox.

  Rustbane nodded. “I keep them that way, but you’re welcome to have them checked. Doctor Nettletree, I wonder if you’d oblige us again?”

  The doctor bent over and examined the two pistols in turn.

  “Both fully charged,” he reported.

  He backed away from the silvery weapons as if he didn’t want to be near them any longer than was strictly necessary. Sylvester could sympathize with the doctor. He’d felt the same way about the pistols ever since the first time he’d seen them, a lifetime ago. For now, however, they’d lost the terror they’d always held for him.

  The fox stepped forward and scooped up the guns.

  Sylvester tightened his grip on the handle of his sword, expecting trickery.

  The fox, reading his mind, merely chuckled and tossed one of the pistols so that it landed at Sylvester’s feet.

  “There’s your weapon, hamst—lemming.”

  “I thank you.”

  Rustbane looked his own pistol over, one side and then the other, as if seeing it for the first time. “The traditional thing in these circumstances,” he said chattily to Sylvester, “is for each of us to retreat twenty paces, backs to each other, then turn and fire at a signal. But I don’t think there’s room here for us to go twenty paces without walking face-first into a tree trunk, so let’s make it just ten, shall we?”

  Sylvester inclined his head. “Ten seems perfectly sufficient to me,” he said as if he knew what he was talking about.

  He threw aside his sword and then bent down to pick up the pistol Rustbane had given him. As he’d anticipated, it felt perfectly comfortable in his paw. It was something of a stretch for his claw to reach the trigger, but he coped with that by adopting a two-fisted grip, one paw on the gun’s butt, the other wrapped around the trigger guard.

  “How will I know you’ll go the full ten paces?” he said to the pirate. “How can I be sure you won’t wait until my back is turned and put a bullet through me?”

  “You have my word as Cap’n Terrigan Rustbane.”

  “Joking aside,” said Sylvester shortly.

  Rustbane put on an expression of mock outrage, then his eyes lost their humorous glint. “Well, you have your father and your friends to watch over me. I’m sure Doctor Nettletree would biff me with his sturdy poker if I so much as hiccuped when I shouldn’t.”

  Sylvester was dubious. Doctor Nettletree’s poker seemed a puny weapon to use against someone the size of the gray fox but there was no sense in arguing. Besides, the one whom Rustbane should be worried about wasn’t Doctor Nettletree – it was Jasper, or even Rasco.

  “Really, you know,” said Rustbane with an affected yawn, “it’s me who should be worried about cheating.”

  “How so?”

  “Your father, here. If the ancient Zindar talents you’ve absorbed make you able to freeze time the way you did, how much can your father do, who was in the Zindar vessel for years, not just a single night?”

  “Dad wouldn’t cheat.”

  “Even when he sees his only son about to die? It’s hard to believe that someone wouldn’t do everything they could, fair or foul, to save the life of their child.”

  “That,” said Jasper, “is just something you’r
e going to have to worry about, isn’t it, Rustbane?”

  “I suppose so. Besides, I don’t think even you could move faster than a speeding bullet, and the bullet that’ll be traveling toward your son’s heart will be speeding as fast as I can speed it.”

  “Stow the chatter,” said Sylvester, wondering momentarily where his courage was coming from. “Ten paces. Doctor Nettletree here will count them out for us. Then we turn and fire. May the best lemming win.”

  Deliberately, he turned his back on Cap’n Rustbane.

  This could be the end of it all, despite Rustbane’s assurances, despite the other three being there. He could shoot me now and I’d be dead before there was time for anyone to do anything to stop it.

  But the bullet in the spine he expected didn’t come.

  Instead, he heard a shuffling sound that he interpreted as Rustbane turning around likewise.

  “You’re okay so far, son,” said Jasper. “You still sure you want to go through with this?”

  “Oh, what larks,” commented Rustbane. “I haven’t fought a duel like this for, oh, months at least. It was my two hundred forty-seventh duel, and the two hundred forty-seventh that I won. What’s your own record at dueling, Sylvester?”

  “Like yours, it’s a hundred per cent,” Sylvester replied. “Stop babbling, Rustbane. If you’re too frightened to face me, say so now.”

  “Me? Frightened? The possibility of being frightened isn’t in the heart of a pirate, and most especially isn’t in the heart of Cap’n Terrigan Rustbane. Prepare to die, Lemmington. Such a pity when we might have been friends.”

  “One!” shouted Doctor Nettletree, cutting off Rustbane’s flow of words.

  Sylvester took a pace.

  Behind him he heard Rustbane do the same.

  “Two!”

  Each number felt like a hammer blow to Sylvester’s head. If he were wrong about the extra speed and strength the Zindar vessel had given him, each step was a step along a very short path to where the end of his life lay waiting for him.

  “Three!”

  Doctor Nettletree’s shout seemed to be coming from a different world, a world infinitely far away. Sylvester felt as if his soul were floating through the mists that lie in the space between worlds.

  “Four!”

  It would be so easy, wouldn’t it, for him just to let go of his existence here on Sagaria and wander in those mists forever? Oh, to be sure, Viola would weep for him a little, but she’d find someone else, someone more reliable, someone who wouldn’t go traipsing off for escapades on the distant oceans.

  “Five!”

  Maybe Jasper and Hortensia would shed a tear for him as well, but of course they had each other, and that would dilute their grief until it was just a tiny sting.

  “Six!”

  He could almost welcome death. He just hoped that the physical pain of the bullet’s impact wouldn’t be too great.

  “Seven!”

  Better to die than to go back to living the way he had been, spending each and every day translating lies that smelled of ancient dust.

  “Eight!”

  Except there was no reason he had to do that, if he were living with Viola. There’d be nothing to stop him going back to sea, with her by his side, so they could find new adventures on islands and continents where no lemming had ever trod before.

  “Nine!”

  There was quite a lot to live for perhaps. What had made him so foolhardy as to challenge a wily old campaigner like the gray fox to a duel? How could he, Sylvester Lemmington, hope to survive against the famous Cap’n Terrigan Rustbane, renowned in every corner of the world for his skill in fighting and his cruelty? This was truly the—

  “Ten!”

  He heard the click as Rustbane cocked his flintlock.

  Sylvester spun around, raising his own pistol, tugging back the hammer as he did so.

  In some ways it’s been a good life. In some ways, not so much. This is a rotten time to be leaving it, though, just when everything seems to be opening up in front of me. But when is there ever a good time for one’s life to finish?

  Suddenly everything seemed to slow down, as if he’d entered a dream.

  Rustbane, twenty paces away, looked enormous, bigger than the sky.

  The gray fox was slowly, slowly raising his pistol.

  Sylvester had never fired a gun in his life, he suddenly realized. He didn’t know how to aim this thing.

  He aimed it anyway, closing his eyes so he wouldn’t be able to see all the things he was doing wrong.

  BANG!

  That was Rustbane firing. Already the pirate’s bullet was dashing relentlessly through the air. Rustbane had virtually been born with a gun in his paw. There was no way his aim could miss. The best Sylvester could hope for was to get off a shot of his own before death took him.

  Eyes still tightly shut, he squeezed the trigger.

  And that was what saved him.

  No one had ever told Sylvester that pistols pack a recoil when you fire them.

  The recoil threw him backward more than a yard to land in a tangle of limbs on the mossy forest floor. Something that buzzed like a wasp flew angrily past him to bury itself noisily in the undergrowth. The gun jolted itself free of his grip and rocketed somewhere further behind him. He was defenseless for when Rustbane came to finish him off, as surely the gray fox would now do.

  But why was Rustbane taking so long about it?

  Certain that he was about to stare directly at his own doom, Sylvester raised his head.

  No one was looking at him. Instead, Jasper, Doctor Nettletree and Rasco were all gazing at an untidy pile of gray fur on the far side of the glade.

  “What’s happening?” Sylvester croaked.

  “You’ve shot him,” Jasper said without turning his head.

  As if reminded by Jasper’s words that he was a physician, Doctor Nettletree strode to where Rustbane lay.

  “He’s still alive!”

  “Too foul for even Hell to take him, I expect,” said Jasper.

  “No,” said Doctor Nettletree in a cold fashion. “Wherever he’s going to go, he’s going there soon. It’s a miracle he’s clinging on to life at all and he won’t be able to keep it up for long.”

  Sylvester felt every muscle in his back protesting as he groped his way to his feet.

  “Let me speak to him. I need to speak to him before he goes. I owe him that much. He was right when he said that, if only things had turned out a little bit differently, we could have remained friends for the rest of our lives.”

  “Yes,” said the voice of the gray fox, sounding like a breeze turning over autumn leaves. “Yes, let Sylvester come to me. I never thought he’d be the one to usher me into the darkness, but I’m glad it’s him.”

  Sylvester rested on his haunches by Rustbane’s side.

  “You sure this isn’t a trick?” he said.

  “No tricks this time,” whispered the fox. “I’ve run out of all my tricks.”

  “You didn’t give me much choice but to kill you, you know.”

  “I know, and you’re a grand marksman, young Sylvester. For a hamster, anyhow.”

  “A lemming. Not a hamster. A lemming.”

  “Have it your own way.”

  For a few moments, Rustbane said nothing and Sylvester thought life had departed him, but then, “Jeopord nearly did for me, back on Vendros, you know.”

  “What’re you talking about.”

  “I hid it well but he managed to wound me. No one’s been able to do that to Cap’n Terrigan Rustbane for many a long year. The wound wasn’t serious, just a tickling of the ribs, but it told me the time had come that I should start thinking of letting my life run down. For a while, I thought that maybe the prospect of the treasure would get my old juices flowing again, but even that
wasn’t enough. The show I put on about forcing you to open the casket? It was just a show. All of my life has been, in a way, just a show. I’ve been very skilled at making sure no one but me can see behind the scenery I’ve erected on my life’s stage. That no one discovered that the props are made of paper and string. But I’ve known.”

  “Stop talking so much. You don’t need to.” Sylvester tried to take Rustbane’s paw. Even using both his own, the paw was too large for him to hold comfortably, but he held it as best as he could.

  “Oh, but I do,” said Rustbane, rallying yet again. “I’ve let my greed, my avarice, rule me all my life. Each new day I’ve let the tides of avarice pull my ship away from shore and out into the seas of adventure but the tides aren’t flowing anymore, at least, not for me. The tides are tired, like I am. I’m an old pirate who’s lived years longer than any pirate could expect to. I should’ve had my gizzard slit a thousand times or more, yet each time I’ve been able to sidestep the blade. Not now, though. It’s fitting it should have been one of my own bullets that killed me. Fitting that the bullet should have been fired by someone I so sorrowfully underestimated. If there’s really another life after this one, like some folk say, I’ll know not to make that mistake again.”

  The fox made a curious half-coughing noise that Sylvester realized was laughter.

  “You saved my life,” Sylvester said. “More than once.”

  “I didn’t have any choice. I thought the only surviving copy of old Throatsplitter’s map was the one inside your head. I had to keep you alive. It was pure selfishness, I assure you.”

  “I think it was more than that.”

  “Then you think wrong.”

  Neither of them said anything for a few heavy seconds. Sylvester could almost feel the gray fox’s life tugging at the cords Rustbane desperately held on to.

  But the cords were already stretched to the limits of their endurance. They couldn’t last much longer.