The Tides of Avarice

by John Dahlgren

  “I didn’t do all of the things you think I did,” said the fox at last. His voice was now so hoarse Sylvester could barely make out the words. “Some of them, yes, but not all.”

  “I think it’d have been impossible for a single person to commit all the crimes you’re supposed to have done,” said Sylvester, trying to soothe him.

  Again that horrible half-coughing noise. “I tried, though, believe me, I surely did try. There wasn’t an evil I didn’t think about doing. It was just that there were some I didn’t have the time or ability to put into practice. Even so, I took my pleasure more times than could be counted in making pipsqueaks squeak.

  “I wish it hadn’t been like that, now I look back on it, but it was too late. Word of mouth had made me into a legendary, almost mythical pirate captain who was unkillable. Who would’ve thought it could happen to an abandoned fox cub, found on the doorstep of an orphanage a long, long time ago. Violence and abuses were common practice back then for someone weak and left alone in this vast world. A slap instead of a pat. A kick instead of a hug. Abuse instead of a kind word. I remember once, that in a silly, naive way to gain affection, I plucked some flowers and gave it to the matron of the orphanage. She trampled them underfoot, slapped me in the face and told me that bribery didn’t work with her. I should’ve known better. That day I made a promise to take revenge on the world that had put me there. The world was the enemy. I trained my mind and my sword arm and designed the most fearsome weapons ever made. It paid off, didn’t it? I’ve left a mark, haven’t I? Even though it’s a mark of death and fright.” The fox coughed slightly. Sylvester could feel grip of his paw grow weaker. “Well, we’ve all got to play our roles and choose our path in this world, don’t we? Now, I wish I’d played the other role. I should’ve held out and chosen the other path. The one you took, Sylvester. I toyed with the idea of leaving it all behind and starting anew but the legend had grown out of all proportion and my enemies would’ve sought me out for revenge wherever I went. I would’ve never been safe. I decided to ride it out until the end. But at night, it was in my dreams. Dreams of another life. That’s why I set out for the treasure, I wanted a new life. That would’ve been my wish. But I understand now. The wounds I had caused this world would never heal just because I became someone else. As I said before, the monster inside of me would never have been truly expelled. It would always remind me of the bricks upon which I had built my new life. A perhaps likeable exterior but a rotten foundation, which was bound to collapse. I would never have gotten that beautiful and simple life I longed for. Not until I had paid for my deeds.What was that name I told you when we first met?”

  “Robin Fourfeathers. You said you were called Robin Fourfeathers.”

  The gray fox settled himself more comfortably for death. “That’s it. Robin Fourfeathers. I think I’d have liked to have been Robin Fourfeathers in real life, not Cap’n Terrigan Rustbane. I wish I’d been liked by many, loved by some, always sought out in the tavern by people who wanted an evening of good company, jokes and song. It would have been a better way to live than being feared by half o’ Sagaria, and that half the better half.

  “One more thing, Sylvester.”

  “Yes?”

  “That black spot I put on the crew of the Shadeblaze when Jeopord was making me walk the plank and everyone else except Three Pins and Rasco was just letting him do it, you remember?”

  “I remember only too well,” said Sylvester quietly.

  “Well, I rescind it. Let it never be said that Cap’n Terrigan Rustbane went to his grave leaving people alive he’d intended to kill. I forgive ’em all, present company included.

  “Oh, and I abandon my claim to the Zindar treasure, even though it’s mine by rights according to the pirate code. Whatever’s in that chest is yours, young Sylvester. Yours and your sweetheart’s, to do with as the pair of you see fit. Just, when you’re enjoying it as you go down the years, spare a thought from time to time for old Terrigan Rustbane, who wished it to you on his deathbed out of the goodness of his heart.”

  Sylvester smiled wryly. The gray fox had perhaps seconds to live but he still wanted to believe it was out of his grace and charity that he was allowing others to have his treasure.

  “And the Shadeblaze,” said Rustbane, scrabbling at Sylvester’s arm. “See it goes to a good home, will you?”

  Suddenly Rustbane stiffened, and his eyes opened wide with amazement. To Sylvester it looked as if the gray fox were staring into another world, somewhere as far from and as near to Sagaria as could possibly be. The fox’s grip on Sylvester’s arm tightened, painfully so.

  “It’s you, isn’t it?” said the pirate in an unearthly hiss. “Come to welcome me, have you, Throatsplitter?”

  Cap’n Adamite promised he’d be here at the end to give Rustbane a surprise he wouldn’t like receiving, thought Sylvester, feeling ice travel down his spine.

  “Two old pals together, are we, Josiah? Aye, the two of us’ll make merry wreaking a swathe of destruction across the face of the next world together, won’t we?”

  This may not prove to be as much fun as you think, Rustbane. But Sylvester said nothing out loud. Why make the gray fox’s last moments of life any more miserable than they already were? Time enough for Rustbane to discover the truth. Besides, the old buccaneer might have relented, although Sylvester, remembering the Cap’n Adamite he’d come to know through the journal, somehow doubted it.

  “I’ll be with you as soon as I can, me … old … hearty …” The last two or three words came out of Rustbane’s mouth as a series of spitting noises and were followed by a rush of dark red blood. Those unique yellow-green eyes slowly lost their focus and then closed for the final time. With a sigh that seemed to have been brought up from the deepmost pits of the world, Cap’n Terrigan Rustbane fell back against the forest floor and expired.

  “Took his time about doing it, didn’t he?” said Jasper heartlessly.

  Sylvester looked up at his father’s face through a blur of incipient tears. “How can you say that?”

  “Easily. He’s not worth your pity, son. He caused misery and suffering all his life long, and the world’s a better place without him in it. Any good you saw in him, Sylvester, was your good being reflected back at you by someone too wicked to absorb any of it himself.”

  “He meant a lot to me!”

  “Then I’ll not take that away from you, Sylvester.”

  And, he was the one who closed the circle, thought Sylvester, wiping his eyes. The circle Madame Zhania was talking about. Was I really saved by that recoil when I fired that gun or did he miss me on purpose? If the latter is the case, then it would explain another of Zhania’s mysterious foretellings. That there would come a time when one of us would have to give the greatest gift of all to close the circle. Did Rustbane give that gift? By sacrificing himself? He realized that he would never know the answer to these questions for as long as he lived.

  Jasper pulled his son to his feet. There were birds singing among the upper parts of the trees as if nothing at all had happened.

  “Come on now, lad. You’ve got a treasure chest to open.”

  23 The Treasure Chest of the Zindars

  There’s a small clearing in the middle of Mugwort Forest where stands a single gray stone. On it are the crudely chipped words:

  Here Lies Cap’n Terrigan Rustbane

  The Most Feared Pirate That’s Ever Been

  *

  Here Lies Also The Fox Robin Fourfeathers

  Whom I Would Have Liked To Have Known

  No one visits that glade very often, except a librarian and his wife. They place fresh flowers at the foot of the stone and tidy up the leaves and twigs the forest has dropped since last they visited.

  Sometimes, when there’s no one there to hear it, there’s a great moaning sound from underground, as if someone were begging for release from torment.
/>   More often, though, there’s just silence.

  The birds rarely fly overhead.

  ✿ ✿ ✿ ✿ ✿.

  The prow of the ship that’s been renamed the Lightblaze slaps down onto the surface of the water and sends up a great plume of spray. Sylvester, standing on deck and peering ahead, takes the brunt of the soaking, freezing surge.

  “Bleurrggh!” he says.

  His wife, standing nearby, doubles up with laughter as he shakes himself like a terrier. The baby she clasps in her arms wakes up and begins to wail. Their two older children scamper around on the deck, creating a whirlwind of high-pitched giggles as they imitate their father’s contortions.

  “Less o’ that frivolitizin’!” cries a well-known voice. “Or I’ll be takin’ me cutlass to yers, d’yer hear, you ’orrible little landlubbers?”

  “Eek!” says little Nimbus, stopping in his tracks and pretending to tremble with fear.

  “Aargh!” agrees his elder sister, Molly. “It’s Grandma.”

  “And she’s armed.”

  “Armed and dangerous.”

  Clutching each other to save themselves from falling over, they go off into another peal of giggling.

  “Waaaah!” says the baby, who’s called Anemone.

  Down the deck toward Viola and the dripping Sylvester comes a doughty-looking figure clad in a black leather jerkin, black leather pants, black leather boots with silver buckles, and a black leather hat, bearing a brightly colored parrot feather that’s almost as tall as the pirate herself.

  “Welcome, Three Pins,” says Sylvester, grinning.

  “That’s Cap’n Three Pins ter you, Sylv.”

  “I was just watching us get closer to home,” Sylvester says, gesturing to where, in the distance beyond the Lightblaze’s voluminous figurehead of a triple-breasted goddess, a familiar landmass is crouching over the sea.

  “Foxglove,” says Viola. “It’ll be good to see it again after all this time.”

  “It’s been only a couple of weeks.”

  “Long enough when you’ve got these little horrors to look after.” She gestures at her brood.

  “True enough, my darling. True enough.”

  “Be good ter get you lousy lubbers off of my ship,” remarks Mrs. Pickleberry, tapping the pommel of one of the cutlasses she bears in her belt. The belt itself is of interest, having been woven of a profusion of different bright colors of vine and with a golden buckle in the form of a skull and crossbones.

  “Mo–om, you don’t mean that.”

  “An’ wot makes yer think I don’t, Little Miss Droppydrawers. Amn’t I Cap’n Daphne ‘Three Pins’ Pickleberry, Scourge of the Seven Seas, the vilest, most defiantest pirate there ever was or ever will be?”

  Oh, well, thinks Sylvester. Rustbane told me to be sure his ship was in good hands, and what better hands than Daphne’s? When we got back from Mugwort Forest on that fateful day, we found there’d been some changes made at the Pickleberry household. Viola’s dad had taken himself a room at the Snowbanks Inn, citing “irreconcilable differences” to anyone in the bar who’d listen to him about why he wasn’t planning to live at home anymore. He found a real soulmate in Mr. Snowbanks, he did. Mr. Snowbanks who’d discovered only that morning his wife wanted to leave him for one of her long-haired poetastic friends. Back at home, Daphne had told Viola and Bullrich she’d decided she liked the pirate life, and was determined to go back to it as soon as she no longer had kids to look after, so Viola told her she wasn’t a kid anymore and … well, there wasn’t much crockery left to break in the Pickleberry household by that time, but what there was, the pair of them broke anyway, and then Viola came straight round to my place to discover I wasn’t there, but Mom told her she could stay, her and Bu—

  “Hi, Sylvester,” says a voice at Sylvester’s elbow. “Did you know you’re soaked from head to toe?”

  Bullrich.

  Well, there are drawbacks to every arrangement, aren’t there? Besides, it won’t be long now before Bullrich will be of an age when he’ll be wanting to leave their home to start a family of his own. Already Viola and Sylvester have been dropping heavy hints about him getting a job of some sort, rather than lying around in bed all day reading unsuitable magazines.

  “Can’t think why,” growls Mrs. Pickleberry, completely ignoring her son, “the pair o’ you don’t leave the sprogs at ’ome and sign up on the good ship Lightblaze as crew. Think of it. You ain’t known freedom ’til you been up to yer gunnels in the tang o’ the salty brine.”

  “Brine’s always salty,” murmurs Sylvester, ever the pedant. “If it’s not salty it isn’t brine.”

  Mrs. Pickleberry stares at him as if there ain’t no plank that’s long enough. “Ree-erly?”

  “Yerss.”

  She takes a swat at him and misses. “Impertinence aboard me very own ship!”

  The kids have never properly stopped giggling since their grandmother appeared, but now they reach a crescendo. Sylvester doubted the wisdom of bringing them along for this vacation, but Cap’n Pickleberry was insistent. “A nice sea cruise’ll bring some color to their cheeks and some grit in their backbones, yer mark my words,” she said, and she’s a difficult woman to contradict when she’s got a cutlass in one hand and your throat in the other.

  Seeing so little of her grandchildren is probably the one thing Daphne regrets about her life on the ocean waves, thinks Sylvester. She loves them so much and they know it too. Little perishers wrap the old baggage round their little claws, they do.

  Cap’n Pickleberry, as skipper of this sturdy vessel, unlike her predecessors, is not a true pirate – not in the strictest sense of the word. She has an agreement with the Spectram Royal Navy, whereby she undergoes missions that the officers of that corps consider too dangerous, or which the powers-that-be in Spectram regard as politically inadvisable to be seen doing. That way, she finds all the excitement and danger she could wish for without having to burden her conscience by committing crimes against innocents. Although Cap’n Pickleberry would never admit this is a factor, her legal status makes it unlikely she’ll end her days like so many pirates do dangling by a rope from a yardarm.

  Still, sometimes she lets her thoughts stray to buccaneerly obsessions, not least of those being treasure.

  “Is it true you once found treasure, Dad?” asks Nimbus with that uncanny timing children have.

  “Yes, you little terror, it’s true,” replies Sylvester, putting a paw on his son’s head. “And one of these days I’ll tell you about it, but not now. Now it’s time for you and your sister to have supper, and then it’s off to bed for the pair of you. Tomorrow, when you wake up, we’ll be rocking at anchor off Foxglove and you’ll be almost home.”

  “Aw, Da–ad!” protests Nimbus, sounding in this moment quite astonishingly like his mother.

  A long while later, there’s only Viola and Sylvester and the moonlight left out on deck. The Lightblaze reached her mooring just as summer’s late twilight finally fell, and she’s resting easy there now, moving back and forward on the light swell just enough to make the anchor chains creak.

  “Is it true you once found treasure, Dad?” Viola’s imitation of her son’s voice is unsettlingly accurate.

  “Yes, it’s true,” responds Sylvester as if he were indeed replying to Nimbus. “The greatest treasure in the world, it was. More than that, the greatest treasure there’s ever been in the world. It belonged, way back when Sagaria was young, to some people called the Zindars who were visiting here from their home somewhere beyond the stars. When they went away again, they left a chest of treasure for when the time came the world was ready to receive it.”

  “How did you find it, Dad?” If it weren’t for the pressure of Viola’s arm on his, Sylvester would swear it was his son doing the asking.

  “A combination of luck and guidance,” says Sylvester mod
estly. Grandpa Lemmington was there.”

  “I love my grandpa.”

  “I know you do. He was there and so were your uncles, Rasco and Nettletree.”

  “Was Grandma Lemmington there? Or Grandma Pickleberry?” This is an old and oft-told tale and the questions hold no surprises any longer.

  “No, they weren’t.”

  “Uncle Cheesefang?”

  “Nope.”

  “Or Mom?”

  “No. I left her at home because she was being a total pain in the—”

  “Da–ad!” Her grip on his arm becomes like a vise.

  “It was just your two uncles and Grandpa and me,” Sylvester hurries on. “And, oh, a couple of other people you don’t know. It was up in Mugwort Forest. Your Grandpa Lemmington was really the one who found the spot where the Zindar treasure was buried.”

  “Then why wasn’t it his treasure?”

  “Because someone else, one of those other two people I mentioned, thought it was theirs, you see. And that person was someone who couldn’t be trusted to have the treasure. So I ended up having a fight with them, and by the time I’d won the fight the treasure had become mine.”

  “Yet you just gave it away, without even looking in the chest?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Why’d you do that, Dad?”

  “Because it was the right thing to do.”

  “But the treasure of the Zindars was yours by now, wasn’t it, Dad?”

  “Yes, it was, but I discovered the thing about having treasure is to make sure you’re the one who owns it, that it’s not the treasure that owns you. And if it doesn’t own you, then it’s easy enough for you to decide not to keep it, if you don’t want it.”

  “Why would anyone ever not want treasure? Were there lots of gold rings and ruby bracelets, Dad? Were there perfumes fit for a princess and paintings so fine it hurt your eyes to look at them? Were there pieces of eight so many they flowed through your hands like a waterfall? Were there cloths spun from sunlight and butterflies with wings of dreams?”