The Tides of Avarice (19 page)

He was rescued from his quandary by the cabin door being opened again.

The new arrival was an old sea rat with an eyepatch that had once been black but was now spotted with green mold, as if behind it one might find an exceptionally ripe cheese. The rest of his face was little better. All in all, disgusting as his eyepatch was, it was difficult to look at him and not wish it were bigger. He was, nonetheless, a friendly soul as Sylvester, Viola and Three Pins had discovered last night. He'd taken them under his wing, making sure they got some supper and weren't shoved to the back of the grog queue. This morning, Sylvester rather wished he had been kept at the back of the grog queue, but that was no reflection on the elderly rat's kindness.

“Hello, Cheesefang,” said Viola brightly.

It seemed that Cheesefang, too, might have partaken too liberally of the grog, because his good humor of the night before had apparently evaporated. Rather than reply to Viola, he just scowled evilly at her.

“Cat got your tongue?” Viola gave the pirate one of her most charming smiles. Sylvester had never seen her this early in the morning before, and was dubious as to whether he ever wanted to again. There's something about early-morning irrepressibility that makes ordinary people want to hit things.

The rat's scowl deepened. “'M here on offisherl business.”

“Official business? My, that sounds important, Cheesefang.”

“Sharrap, wench!”

“Oo, you—”

“Sharrap, I said. 'M not here fer you.”

“Then who are you here for?”

“Fer 'im.” The rat pointed an ancient and pitted cutlass toward where Sylvester lay on his bunk.

“Me?”

“Yes, you. Gerrup. The Cap'n wants ter see yer, right 'way.”

The news cleared Sylvester's head like nothing else might have done. That Cap'n Rustbane wanted to see him at this hour of the morning, and had sent such a no-nonsense emissary to fetch him, seemed to Sylvester to bode no good, no good at all.

“I'll be right with you,” he said hurriedly, rolling himself from the bunk to the floor.

“Good,” said Cheesefang curtly. He gave Viola a look of purest venom. “As for you, ye bilge ra—er, bilge lemming, ye c'n just stay 'ere and rot for all I cares.”

The look she returned him made his own seem positively innocuous, and he cowered instinctively.

“Er, forget I said that, ma'am. It's just me piratical ways, see?”

“Hm.”

“I'm ready,” said Sylvester, patting himself down. “Shall we get moving?”

The rat looked delighted to be given a reason to escape Viola's steely gaze. “Yep. On the double. Can't keep the Cap'n waitin'. Mornin's ain't his best time, if ye sees what I means.”

Then why the heck has Rustbane asked to see me now? thought Sylvester. Why not leave it until the afternoon?

This was seeming worse and worse. As he followed Cheesefang out of the cabin, Sylvester paused in the doorway and looked back at Viola. Now that he'd vacated the bunk, she was sitting on the edge of it, worrying her forepaws together. She looked up and saw Sylvester's eyes on her.

“It'll be all right,” she mouthed. “I'm sure of it.”

“Gerra move on!” yelled Cheesefang. “'Less you want me ter skewer ye where the sun don't shine.”

Lurching across the deck, the point of Cheesefang's cutlass at his back, Sylvester began to wake up properly. As the Shadeblaze plowed her way through the waves, periodic showers of icy cold spray hit Sylvester in the face, revitalizing him. All over the deck, pirates were busily working: coiling ropes, repairing rigging, gutting fish, doing any one of half a hundred other tasks that Sylvester couldn't even begin to identify. It was a far cry from the scene of festivity and merrymaking of the night before. When a blast of spray made him tilt his head back, Sylvester saw a bat far overhead, suspended from the crow's nest, spying this way and that with a long black telescope. Above the crow's nest fluttered the flag that last night Sylvester had learned was called the Jolly Roger.

He and Cheesefang were heading toward the bow of the vessel, where the Cap'n's cabin was housed.

There's something about all this feverish activity on deck that's not quite right. It's as if Cap'n Rustbane is keen that everyone is kept constantly busy, busy, busy. Even if there isn't in fact anything much that needs to be done. Most of it seems to be just make-work. Perhaps his idea is that the more people work, the less time they have for thinking – something he doesn't want them doing too much of. He's the one to be doing the thinking, Cap'n Rustbane himself. I must remember, Cap'n Rustbane's the king on board this ship – in this world within a world. If I forget that, I'm likely to find my head separated from my shoulders, map or no map.

“Down 'ere,” said Cheesefang gruffly behind him.

They went down half a dozen wooden steps to face a stout oak door that hung slightly crookedly on its hinges. In the middle of the door was a copper plate, green with corrosion, in the shape of an anchor.

The rat shouldered Sylvester aside and knocked on the door.

“Enter,” came Rustbane's voice from within.

“That means “Go in,'” said the rat to the hesitant Sylvester.

“I know that.”

“Then do it.”

He did. The rat waited until he was inside and then slammed the door shut behind him.

Sylvester found himself in a large and comfortably furnished cabin, all polished oak and shining brass and overstuffed black leather upholstery. Hung around the walls were a dozen or more gilt-framed portraits of what Sylvester guessed must be pirate captains of yore. There were otters, minks, rats and even a human, and none of them seemed to have a full complement of limbs or bodily organs. What they had in common, Sylvester thought as he gazed around at the gallery of nightmarish faces, was that they all seemed to be sneering at him.

Where the walls weren't adorned with pictures, there were bookshelves galore, all of them stuffed to bursting point with leather-bound books. Sylvester felt the Junior Archivist and Translator of Ancient Tongues within him begin to stir. This collection of books was far beyond anything the Library back in Foxglove could hope to offer. Even Celadon had only rarely seen a bound book; Sylvester knew them solely from Celadon's lovingly fastidious descriptions. Squinting, Sylvester could make out a few of the titles and his eyebrows rose. These weren't just tables of the tides or nautical manuals, although there were a few of those as well. Instead, Cap'n Rustbane's library was made up of poetry, novels, plays and treatises on the sciences: physics, mathematics, chemistry, astronomy …

Sylvester realized he was going to have to revise his opinions of the Cap'n. This wasn't the library of a scapegrace sea dog, but that of a scholar.

In the middle of the cabin was a great oak table covered with heaps of books and papers. Cap'n Rustbane stood at the table poring over something, his back to where Sylvester stood at the door. Hanging from the ceiling above the table, a brass lantern swung lazily from side to side with the motion of the ship. The cabin had no windows, and so the lantern was lit, even though it was broad daylight outside. The lantern light, as the ship rocked, created ever-changing patterns of shadow all over the floor and walls.

“D'you know how long I've been searching for this treasure, young Sylvester?” said the fox, not looking up from his task.

“No.”

“Most of my life. All of my life, it sometimes seems.”

Sylvester made a noncommittal sound.

“Yes,” said Rustbane, “treasure. Glorious, wonderful, fabulous treasure. Treasure beyond all the riches a person could ever dream of. The kind of treasure that decides the fate of nations, of dynasties, of entire worlds. A treasure so splendiferous it could pave every street in all Sagaria with gold. A treasure for which whole armies have lost their lives and gladly so. A treasure that's fit to make the mountains hang their heads in shame as it o'ershadows them. A treasure that—”

If I sort of sidle over to the shelves as quietly as I can, thought Sylvester, I should be able to get a better look at some of those jolly interesting looking books.

“—in its radiant splendor makes the sun seem dim by contrast. Where are you going, young fellow?”

The lemming froze. Cap'n Rustbane still had his back to him and was earnestly scrutinizing some papers on the big oak table. Sylvester was certain the cautious movements of his feet had made not a single sound, yet somehow the pirate knew.

Sylvester had once had a schoolteacher like that. Bat Ears Thornapple. It was rumored that Bat Ears Thornapple had an additional pair of eyes in his hindquarters. He had also possessed a long wooden ferrule with which he'd delighted in rattling the paws of young lemmings he discovered moving or whispering behind him while he was writing on the chalkboard. Sylvester's knuckles still throbbed nostalgically any time he thought of Bat Ears Thornapple.

“Er, just moving one from one foot to the other. Pins and needles, you know.”

Now Cap'n Rustbane did turn around to look at Sylvester. There was a crazy glint in the fox's eyes. Sylvester reminded himself that the pins and needles excuse had never worked with Bat Ears Thornapple, either.

“Terrible thing, pins and needles,” said the pirate with sinister softness.

“Ye–yes. It is.”

“The only known cure, I think,” said Cap'n Rustbane, “is amputation of the affected extremities.”

“That's odd,” said Sylvester. “My case of pins and needles has cleared up. Just like that.”

The pirate snorted. “And that, of course,” he said, “is the other cure.”

Sylvester inwardly cowered. This was exactly like Bat Ears Thornapple, only worse.

“Now, where was I?” the fox said.

“You were talking about the treasure.”

“What an excellent thing to have been talking about. I must do it again sometime soon.”

“Oh, yes, please,” said Sylvester, his eagerness sincere. Anything to get the pirate off the subject of amputation. Sylvester, despite himself, began ranging over all the pieces of his body that could be amputated – that seemed almost designed for convenient amputation, in fact. Whoever had put his head on the end of a neck, for example, had clearly had easy severance in mind.

“Oh, all right then. You've persuaded me.” The fox drew a deep breath. “I lost far too many years of my youth to … to other things when I could have been hunting for this treasure, you see.”

“You did?” said Sylvester, expecting to elicit a few seedy confessions.

“Yes. I was, I'm embarrassed to say, a rather amateurish sort of a pirate when I first began.”

“You were?” Sylvester couldn't imagine Cap'n Rustbane being amateurish at anything, least of all piracy.

“Yes. Oh, I was pretty good at the actual buccaneering itself, you understand, and in fact I devised a couple of new techniques of pillaging that are still in use today, but I had the unfortunate habit of getting caught.”

“But didn't they—”

Sylvester stopped himself short. Under no circumstances remind this crazy fox of amputation, he told himself sternly.

“No, they didn't. I played on their sympathies, of course. Told them I was a very young fox – which I was – and that I'd reluctantly been forced into a life of crime on the high seas by the need to look after my ancient invalid mother. I tell you, by the time Terrigan Rustbane had finished with a court of law, even the most notorious hanging judges were weeping on each other's shoulders.” Cap'n Rustbane drew himself up to his full height, the fringes of his ears nearly touching the cabin's ceiling. “Many of them wanted to set me free, there and then, so I could run home and make an extra pot of chicken soup for my dear old mom, but The Law wouldn't let them.” The pirate succeeded in pronouncing the capital letters of “The Law.”

“But I thought—”

Cap'n Rustbane raised a paw. “You might have thought judges had the final word on what happens to the unfortunates brought before them, and for all I know this may be true in Foxglove. But in most of the rest of the world the judges are themselves under the direction of The Law. And The Law decrees that people found guilty of piracy on the high seas, no matter how well-intentioned, must be punished. So I spent more of my youthful years than I like to remember languishing in prison cells here, there and everywhere. I swear to you, Sylvester, I began to think the true color of the sky was blue with dark vertical lines.

“Still, my times of incarceration were not wasted. They taught me the error of my ways.”

“But . . .” began Sylvester, looked around him, mystified.

Cap'n Rustbane realized what his guest must be thinking. “Oh, no, I don't mean that. I don't mean they taught me to give up my life of crime. No, what they taught me was what an infernal nuisance it was getting caught. Sitting there behind bars for all that time, I recognized that the reason I kept getting caught was I kept leaving behind me people who'd seen me, and who could tell others what they'd seen. This was the single weakness in my modus operandi. The solution to my dilemma seemed such a simple one, once I'd discovered it.”

Sylvester gulped.

“I see you're ahead of me,” continued the fox with a smile that Sylvester wished he hadn't seen. “So, ever since then, I've made sure I don't leave behind me any surviving witnesses.”

Sylvester gulped again, louder this time.

Cap'n Rustbane clapped his forepaws together. “And it works!” he cried gleefully. “As soon as I instituted my new practice, I stopped getting caught, and that meant I stopped having to spend long, boring periods in jail. From there it was but a single step – well, more accurately, a single swashbuckling bound – to becoming captain of my own ship, and I've never looked back.”

“I, ah, can imagine,” said Sylvester.

“I'll tell you about that swashbuckling bound another time,” said Cap'n Rustbane in a softer voice, beckoning Sylvester to join him at the table. “Now, what you were really wanting to know about was the treasure, was it not?”

“Oh, yes,” said Sylvester. “The treasure. Lots and lots of treasure, you were saying.”

“I quite imagine I was. People who've heard about the magical chest of the Zindars – and exceedingly few people have, let me tell you – are apt to talk about treasure at length. Sometimes, dare I say it, to the point of tedium. But I shall be careful not to do that today, my little friend.”

Cap'n Rustbane put his arm across Sylvester's shoulders as if the two of them were lifelong buddies. He lowered his voice yet again, looking around him furtively as if all the portraits on his cabin walls might be trying to eavesdrop.

“You see, my boy,” he said at barely more than a whisper, “the magical chest of the Zindars is thousands of years old. It's been the ultimate prize for seafarers for as long as there has been avarice in people's hearts – which is, I should think, for about as long as people have had hearts to put avarice into.”

“Who were the Zindars?”

The fox smiled. “I'll be laying a wager that's something you'd like to know. Maybe I'll tell you another time, once I've decided I can trust you. And maybe, contrariwise, I'll come to the decision that I can't trust you after all, and you'll be dancing on the end of a rope or swimming among the sharks at the bottom of the ocean. We'll just have to wait and see, shan't we?”

The conspiratorial smile he gave Sylvester seemed to reveal more teeth than ever before.

“What I can tell you is this,” said the Cap'n, straightening up. He tapped the stack of papers in front of him with a very long and sharp-looking claw. “About fifty years ago, the greatest pirate to ever sail the seas of Sagaria – that is, until I came along, of course – the second greatest pirate who ever sailed the seas of Sagaria, one Cap'n Josiah ‘Throatsplitter' Adamite, heard a rumor borne by the wind of where the Zindar chest might be found.”

“It was just a rumor?” interrupted Sylvester. He was annoyed to find his own voice had instinctively dropped to a whisper to match Rustbane's.

The fox patted the side of his gray nose with the side of his paw.

“There's rumors and there's rumors, young Sylvester. This was one of those rumors.”

“Ah,” replied Sylvester wisely, as if he knew what Rustbane was talking about.

“By listening to the rumors, old Throatsplitter got himself as clear an idea as could be as to where the treasure of the Zindars was hidden, and he set down the results of his research in the form of a map.”

“Ah,” Sylvester repeated, shrugging guiltily. This time he did know what Rustbane was talking about. He wished he didn't.

“I see you know what map it is that's pertinent to this here discussion,” said Rustbane, his yellow–green eyes looking sad.

Sylvester was keen to change the subject. “What happened to Cap'n Adamite? Didn't he ever get to look for his treasure?”

The fox sighed. “The ways of the ocean can be tragic ones, dear Sylvester, as you'll learn in the days and weeks to come. Old Throatsplitter, who was as kind and generous a man as ever disembowelled his granny, came to a sorrowful end. I was there to witness it myself, oh rue the day.”