The Tides of Avarice (18 page)

Amid all the rest that he was leaving behind, there was Viola.

Yes, it was painful that he would never see Mom again. Yes, the uncertainty of his dear mentor Celadon's fate (had the old fellow survived Cap'n Rustbane's brutal blow?) was an itch that Sylvester suspected would never go away.

But the loss of Viola …

Someone had made a vicious blade of shattered glass and thrust it into Sylvester's heart.

The only solace he could think of was that, after the slimeball's display in the town square, surely not even Mrs. Pickleberry would insist that Viola marry Mayor Hairbell. At least his true love had been spared that vile destiny.

And perhaps, on nights when the moon rose high in the mysterious sky and the heavens were filled with a richness of stars beyond all number, Viola would stare up at the universe's infinitude and feel herself wrapped in the eternal love of the one lemming whose heart for her had always been a pure and gleaming …

Sylvester shook his head angrily.

If his thoughts got any mushier he was likely to fall into them and drown.

He hoped Viola would be able to find someone else to fall in love with who would fall in love with her, and that she'd soon forget Sylvester. She'd be happier that way.

Hm. Still pretty high on the mushiness scale.

There was no sign of any guard as they passed through the town gate.

No wonder.

No one but a lunatic would put themselves in the path of a hundred or more bloodthirsty pirates.

Actually, I damn well don't hope Viola quickly finds some other lemming to love her. I hope she's miserable about losing me for a good long time and that, even if she eventually marries and has someone else's kids, it's always the name “Sylvester” that's on her lips as she drifts off to sleep. Because I'm not going to give up on her the moment she's out of sight. I'm going to be carrying a banner for her in my heart for the rest of my life. One day, however improbable it might seem now that I won't end my life at the bottom of the ocean, perhaps capricious fate will bring me back to Foxglove and I'll find her still waiting for me, those magical eyes of hers still filled with love for me …

He emerged from under the gate's shadow to discover that Rustbane had pushed back through the jostle of bodies to find him. The pirate had retrieved his tricorn hat.

“How're you bearing up, me hearty?” cried the fox. He attempted a piratical swagger but there really wasn't room for it in the mob.

“I'm, er, ready to look into the gaping jaws of Davy Jones himself and, um, laugh at fear,” Sylvester essayed. That sounded like the sort of thing a derring-do buccaneer should say.

Maybe I should have added a cussword or two, he fretted.

“That's the spirit, me bucko!”

The comradely whack Rustbane delivered between Sylvester's shoulders was enough to send the lemming staggering.

“We've got a nice surprise for you.” The fox winked. “Oh, you're going to be thanking Captain Terrigan Rustbane for this one, let me tell you.”

That wink was a bit … well, vulgar, if truth be told. Lewd. What in the world can the fellow be talking about?

About fifty yards beyond the gate stood a little posse of pirates. One of them was sporting a rapidly blackening eye. Another was bleeding from the nose. A third, lying curled up hugging his hind legs in the middle of the road and covered in a sheen of cold, oily sweat, was moaning softly.

Sylvester's brow furrowed. Whatever could be going on?

Then the little knot of waiting pirates opened up and he could see, standing among them with her forepaws tied together, the person he'd just been thinking about.

“Viola!” he cried.

And one other.

“Mrs. Pickleberry,” he cried as an afterthought, hoping his voice managed to convey the same degree of enthusiasm.

Rustbane seemed as surprised as he by the presence of Viola's mother. The fox did a double-take, then put his paws on his hips and began tapping his foot angrily. The pirates who'd been marching on all sides of him chose to discreetly melt away.

“What the devil did you bring the old trout for?”

“Lemming,” corrected Sylvester automatically, before he could stop himself.

The Cap'n turned an irate glare in his direction.

“Er, not trout. She's a lemming,” said Sylvester weakly, wondering if he were pulling himself out of the hole or digging it deeper. At least so long as I'm still talking I know I'm still alive. “Lemmings have four legs and hair, you see. And, ah, trout have … well, they—”

“For the triple-breasted goddess's sake, will you stop your gibbering?” Rustbane turned back to the battered little band who'd been awaiting them. “Couldn't you simply have got rid of the old bat?”

“Not bat,” began Sylvester, then pretended he'd just been coughing.

“Well, we tried, Skipper,” said a possum who looked as if he'd seen better days and was wishing he still could. “But, like, she 'ad her rolling pin with 'er.”

Rustbane nodded, apparently accepting this as sufficient explanation. They'd all witnessed the lethalness of Mrs. Pickleberry's rolling pin.

“An' she'll make a fine pirate,” added the possum hastily, pushing his luck.

“Hmmf,” said Rustbane.

The possum rubbed his forepaws together in an ingratiating way. “Got to find her a good piratical nickname, mind. Summat fitting, like. Too bad ‘Pigface' is already took, innit, cuz it'd suit her right down to the—aargh!”

“Definitely not ‘Pigface,'” said a raccoon pirate quickly as the echoes of a very loud thwokkk slowly faded. He gazed sickly down at the writhing form in the dust and did his best to look as if he'd never seen the possum before in his life.

Rustbane made up his mind. Earrings jingling, he delivered to Mrs. Pickleberry the most elaborate bow Sylvester had ever seen.

“A thousand welcomes to the crew of the doughty vessel, Shadeblaze, sweet matron.”

“Grmmple,” said Mrs. Pickleberry, fixing him with a skeptical stare.

“Sylvester,” called Viola softly, straining at her bonds.

Beside him, the two skunks tensed, ready to seize him again if it looked as if he might run towards her.

“Oh, let him go. Let the lovers unite,” said Rustbane in a disgusted sort of a way as he straightened up from his bow. “I'd hoped this might strike terror into young Sylvester's heart, and instead what do I get? The kind of scenes that'd have put even my sentimental old granny, whoever she was, off her supper. Go on, Sylvester, go on. Get your slobberfest over with so the rest of us can start concentrating again on being the scourge of the Seven Seas. I thought the presence of the luscious Miss Pickleberry among our company might help hone your memory of the map's details during our voyage.”

Sylvester ran to Viola and held her tightly to him.

“I'll find some way of setting you free,” he whispered into her ear.

“Don't you dare!”

“What?”

“D'you think Mom would've allowed them to catch me if I hadn't insisted?”

“Huh?”

“It was touch and go, I can tell you. In the end she only agreed if she could come along too as chaperone.”

“What's a chaperone?”

“I'm not sure. I think it's a type of pirate. Now, kiss me again, will you?”

It was difficult, under the searchlight of Mrs. Pickleberry's icy gaze, to kiss Viola with the full intensity the occasion demanded, but somehow Sylvester managed it.

“Why didn't you just run for the hills?” he said when finally, on the verge of asphyxiation, they pushed each other apart.

“And leave you unprotected at the tender mercy of a mob of murderous cutthroats?”

“I thought that was … I mean to say …”

She grabbed his ears and shook them affectionately. “You're going to need someone to look after you, Sylvester Lemmington. Otherwise you'll get yourself into all sorts of perilous scrapes. You're such a noodle, you know. No one's doubting your manly courage, of course,” she patted him on the chest, “but you need someone alongside you to be the brains of the operation, don't you?”

“Oh.”

“So—”

Sylvester kissed her yet again before he could say anything stupid.

“Daphne.”

With difficulty, Sylvester pulled himself away from Viola.

“Sorry?”

“Daphne,” repeated Mrs. Pickleberry.

Still Sylvester was baffled.

“My name,” she explained gruffly.

“And …?”

“Since we're about to be shipmates, you'd better start calling me by it.” She turned her gaze to Viola. “You too, you little flibbertigibbet.”

Viola looked dismayed.

“Aw, Mom.”

“Can't have your pretty boy here trying to stutter his way through ‘Mrs. Pickleberry' if there's an emergency in the rigging and all our lives hang in the balance. He's likely to strangle himself with his own gizzard halfway through the third syllable. Calling me ‘Mom' won't be no use either, since half these blaggards don't know who their real mom is and are likely to get confused. See?”

Sylvester felt his eyes slowly crossing as he tried to follow the logic of this.

Rustbane, who'd been eavesdropping, chipped in. “Daphne ‘Three Pins' Pickleberry! A fine piratical name. I like it. I like it a lot. Now, you fine fellows and, er, fellowesses, shall we continue on our way to the Shadeblaze, just in case our friend Mayor Hairbell manages to round up a posse of sturdy folk to pursue us?”

“This is your last chance,” Sylvester murmured to Viola. Mrs. Pickleberry – Daphne – could fend for herself. “If you're going to make a bolt for it, now's the moment.”

“But why should I want to?”

“We're going on a long journey, and the chances are slim that we'll ever come home. Danger will lurk around every corner. It's not just foes we'll need to be wary of, but our so-called friends.” He waved his arm to indicate the pirates surrounding them, who conveniently chose this moment to reinforce his point by looking as malignant and untrustworthy as possible. “We're going to see strange new places where every step we take could be our last. We're going to see horrors that'd turn the stomach of the toughest of lemmings. We're going to—”

“Oh, Sylvester,” interrupted Viola. She clutched her forepaws together in front of her chest and gazed at him with rapturous eyes. “That all sounds just wonderful!”

Sylvester knew when he was beaten.

“To the Shadeblaze it is, then,” he said resignedly to Rustbane.

“To the Shadeblaze!” cried the pirate king.

His men cheered, and began once more to stamp their heavy way along the road to the shore.

A couple of hundred yards out from the shore there floated a monstrous object unlike anything Sylvester had ever seen. It was made mostly of wood, or seemed to be, and there were windows in the side. It could have been a house bobbing upside-down in the water, except there were long, sharp bits sticking out both ends and three even longer poles sticking up from its top (or bottom) – if in fact it was an upside-down house, which Sylvester was pretty certain it wasn't. He was guessing this was what Levantes, and later Cap'n Rustbane, had called a ship – the Shadeblaze, no less.

From the upward-pointing poles there hung what appeared to be gray sheets.

It's obviously laundry day aboard the pirate vessel, thought Sylvester, smug in his growing knowledge of nautical matters. What very big beds they must have.

“The Shadeblaze,” Cap'n Rustbane confirmed at his shoulder. “Doesn't she look magnificent?”

“Why, yes, she does,” said Sylvester courteously, wondering why the black kitchen towel hung up to dry at the very top of the longest of the three poles had a skull and crossbones embroidered on it.

I hope Rustbane doesn't expect us to wash all the dishes, he thought.

Viola was regarding the ship with the same wide-eyed rapture she'd shown when he was telling her about the adventure awaiting them. Even Mrs. Pickleberry—oops, I must learn to call her Daphne or, even better, Three Pins. Even Daphne seemed impressed, although trying very hard not to be.

“It's a house on the water,” breathed Viola adoringly.

“Aye,” said Cap'n Rustbane. “That's exactly what it is, a house, a home. It's my home, you see, and you three are going to be my houseguests, in a way. Working houseguests, like. You three'll be working your furry little butts to the bone, I can warrant you that.”

“You mean we'll be pirates,” said Mrs. Pickleberry.

Rustbane gave her a big confirmatory grin. “Or corsairs, if you prefer. Sounds a lot better over afternoon tea if you say you're a corsair than you're a pirate.”

Along the beach were drawn up a score or more of long, thin objects that Rustbane told them were longboats. They'd use the longboats to get out to the Shadeblaze, since the option otherwise was swimming.

“Pirates can't swim,” he confided. “It's a law of nature.”

Sylvester remembered how poor Levantes had been at swimming. At the time, Sylvester had thought it was just the ferret's injuries that had made him that way, but perhaps pirates weren't supposed to swim.

“If we discover a pirate can swim,” continued the Cap'n, “we make him walk the plank. That gives him a chance to go swimming all right!”

Puzzled, Sylvester decided not to ask what walking on a plank had to do with swimming. He'd get to the bottom of the mystery soon enough.

He also decided not to tell Rustbane that he, Viola and Mrs. Pick—Daphne could, as lemmings, swim very proficiently. Their survival depended upon them playing the part of swashbuckling pirates, although what you actually did to swashbuckle was yet another thing Sylvester did not know.

This voyage is going to be extremely educational, if nothing else, he reflected.

Some of the pirates were beginning to leap into the longboats, and Cap'n Rustbane indicated to the three lemmings they should do likewise. The skunks who'd been escorting Sylvester jumped into the nearest boat and beckoned to him. As soon as the lemmings got close enough the skunks grabbed them and hauled them aboard, dumping them unceremoniously in the long pool of salty water in the bottom of the boat.

Rustbane decided to travel in this boat too. He waited until the vessel was packed with as many pirates as it could safely hold, then sprang aboard with a flourish, walking across the shoulders of his crew until he reached the bow.

“Cast off!” he cried.

Some of the pirates still left on the beach pushed the longboat out through the shallows until, heavily laden, it was afloat.

“Arm them oars,” ordered Rustbane.

Obediently, pirates grabbed the ends of long poles Sylvester hadn't paid much attention to. He saw now, as the crewmen swung the poles around, that the other ends were flattened out. The poles – or oars, as Rustbane had called them – fitted into little cups fixed along the sides of the boat.

Sylvester suddenly realized how these things worked. If you put the flattened ends into the water and pushed on the other ends, the flat bits would act like paddles to propel you along.

Moments later, his guesswork was substantiated, although the pirates pulled rather than pushed on the oars.

By now, all three lemmings had found a place where they could peer over the side of the boat and watch what was going on.

“Heeeeaaaaave!” yelled Cap'n Rustbane every couple of seconds and “Heeeeaaaaave!” responded his rowers in unison as they hauled on the oars and the longboat sluiced through the water.

As the longboat pulled farther and farther from the shore, they saw a few ascending strands of chimney smoke, then the rooftops of Foxglove came into view. Sylvester could identify the temple and, lower and a little more distant, the Library where he'd worked for so many years – for the most part happily. He hoped Celadon had suffered nothing more than a sore head, something to give him a good excuse for grumbling until the bump went down, and perhaps even longer than that. Then all thoughts of Celadon and even his own mother vanished from Sylvester's mind as the longboat entered the pool of darkness beside the Shadeblaze.

Viola slipped her paw into his and squeezed tightly. Whether she was trying to reassure him or seek his reassurance Sylvester did not know.

✿ ✿ ✿ ✿ ✿.

The smacking of waves against the hull and the creaking of the masts woke Sylvester early the next morning.

For a few moments he lay on his hard bunk wondering where in the world he might be, then all the memories of yesterday came flooding back to him: the fighting in the town square, the murder of Nurse O'Reilly, the march to the shore, the trip in the longboat out to where the Shadeblaze lay at anchor.

Viola.

Mrs. Pick—Daphne. Three Pins.

Setting sail.

Foxglove sinking out of sight beneath the horizon.

The realization that it was not in fact laundry day aboard the Shadeblaze, that those weren't big bedsheets and that the topmost piece of flapping cloth most emphatically wasn't a whimsically embroidered tea towel, and the relief that he hadn't let slip any remarks that might have betrayed his ignorance.

Supper. The discovery of what the pirates called “hardtack,” a supposed foodstuff that hovered uneasily on the borderline between edible and poisonous. The discovery of what the pirates called “grog,” which after a while made hardtack not just edible, but actually quite palatable. Grog was rather like Foxglovian apple wine, although it had a kick that was at least three times as ferocious.

There had been other events last night, Sylvester knew, but they were all rather muddled. That lemming dancing on top of the compass table, surely that couldn't have been himself? His mind insisted on putting the face of Mrs. Pickleberry on the lemming dancer, which seemed even more impossible.

It was, however, a thought horrific enough to thrust Sylvester firmly out of any remains of sleep he might have been luxuriating in.

That was a pity because, now that he was fully awake, he made another discovery about life at sea.

Years ago, when he'd been small and while Dad was still alive, Mom had shooed the two of them out the door into the back garden one afternoon, telling them they should go and do some “father–son bonding,” as she'd put it.

“That means we've got to play together, son,” Jasper Lemmington had said glumly. He'd just been settling down with the newspaper when the instructions arrived.

“Bladabladabingbingaboo,” his infant son had replied, that being his favorite word at the time (among the three he'd mastered).

Clenching his teeth yet more firmly on the stem of his pipe, Jasper Lemmington had dumped the eagerly squirming Sylvester on the seat of the little wooden swing in the garden. He made sure the boy was securely strapped in, and begun rhythmically pushing him.

It was at this moment that their neighbor, Mr. Frampington, emerged from the next-door house into his own garden.

“Fine day, Jasp,” Mr. Frampington (whose fault Mr. Lemmington afterwards claimed it all was) said.

That was the start of it.

Of course, Sylvester was far too small to understand anything the two older lemmings talked about, but he did know their conversation lasted an interminably long time.

And all the while his father continued automatically to push, push, push on the swing, steadily, steadily, steadily …

After more than an hour, Mrs. Lemmington came out to see how father and son were getting along, and found her husband leaning with one arm on the fence, the other dutifully pushing the swing, while he and Mr. Frampington conversed absorbedly about issues of the day.

Meanwhile, grinning grimly because he knew he was supposed to be enjoying himself, the infant Sylvester was clutching one rope of the swing like a lifeline and displaying a face the color of lime juice.

Sylvester, even though he was too young to really know what was going on, would never forget the eruption that ensued when Mrs. Lemmington made this discovery. She had always been regarded as somewhat demure in her demeanor, but not today. In the distant temple, priests ceased their chanting to wonder what the sound might be. Jasper Lemmington limped for a week.

But there was another eruption even more indelibly imprinted on Sylvester's mind.

Released from the fastenings of the swing by his raging mother, he'd been put down on the grass while she belabored her husband.

Walking had been a relatively new skill for Sylvester at the time. It was something of a hit-or-miss affair. Even so, he'd been aware that it had never been quite like this before. The world seemed to pulse closer then farther from him in the same rhythm of the swing. He attempted to put one foot in front of the other in the approximate direction of the back door beyond which, he reasoned, lay security.

The net result, he was later told, was that he walked around in a perfect circle, once and almost twice, then fell flat on his face and, well, that had been lime-green, too.

Even after he'd been put to bed following an extremely necessary bath, the world had continued to fluctuate in the same stomach-wrenching fashion. There had been no question of his having supper, of course. His stomach felt like a raw wound.

Matters were not helped by the fact that Mrs. Lemmington was not entirely finished with her criminally negligent husband, not yet. The ringing walls of the Lemmington home made it hard for Sylvester to find the sleep that would release him from the agony of his insides.

It was the first time he'd ever prayed to Lhaeminguas, even though he couldn't pronounce the name.

Now, aboard the Shadeblaze, he was feeling similar in every respect to the way he had that long-ago night. He couldn't work out if the aftermath of the grog was making things better or worse. Better, perhaps, because it was insulating him from how he'd otherwise be. It was the bobbing of the ship to and fro on the water that did it, as had been explained to him last night, not long after the nausea had begun. Explained to him none too sympathetically by a bevy of drunken pirates as he'd hung his head over the taffrail. It was just the same as the to-ing and fro-ing of the garden swing, only worse, because there was no getting away from it.

Sylvester pushed himself up on his elbows and stared out moodily through the porthole just above his bunk.

He saw an eternity of sea, its gray surface moving up and down.

That was a bad idea.

Flat on his back on the bunk once more, he looked at the splintered ceiling.

Nice ceiling. Pretty ceiling. Friendly, stay-in-the-same-place ceiling.

Outside, the boat hit a roller, a bigger wave than usual.

The whole vessel shuddered from the impact.

Not one part of the Shadeblaze shuddered more than Sylvester.

“Oh, this is misery – misery!” he cried.

There was a knock on the cabin door.

“I'm dead,” he called weakly.

Dead or not, he managed to turn his head enough to see that the person opening the door was Viola. The sight was cheering enough to raise his state of health to mere terminal illness.

“Good morning,” she said, bustling across the cabin to lean over his bunk and wrench the porthole noisily open. A strong smell of salt water and dead fish rushed into the room.

“Bleurgh,” moaned Sylvester.

“That's better,” said Viola. “A bit of fresh air'll see you right as rain in no time.”

“Bleurgh,” Sylvester agreed.

“I wonder what'll be for breakfast.”

“Bleurgh!”

She sniffed the air. “No cooking smells yet. I hope it's going to be something nicer than that horrible hardtack they made us eat last night. Oh,” she added, “what's the matter, dear Sylly?”

“Bleurgh.”

“Oh, you old fusspot. You know I only call you ‘Sylly' when I'm feeling especially fond of you.”

Desperately racking his brains for something to say instead of “bleurgh,” Sylvester tried to muster a few words.

“What's that you said?” asked Viola, leaning towards him.

“I said, ‘That's kind of you, dear, but I really don't like the name.'”

“I can tell a night's sleep out on the ocean waves hasn't improved your temper any, you old crosspatch.”

First a fusspot, now a crosspatch, and both of them old. Even through the miasma of his intestinal controversy, Sylvester saw he'd better do something to improve his “desirable boyfriend” image. He should be saying something both suave and incredibly witty, he knew, but in its current state, all his brain was capable of doing was wondering if he might be able to fit his head through that porthole …