The Tides of Avarice (53 page)

Viola turned toward Pimplebrains.

She didn't even need to speak the question. “No change here,” said the beaver hoarsely. “I'm the same as I've always been, sad's the tale to tell, but you two youngsters . . . yes, like Jasper here, I can see somethin's been happenin' to you. An' I'm pleased for you.”

No one spoke for a moment or two. When Jasper broke the silence, his voice was dreamy. “So perhaps it's only lemmings who're affected by the air in here, or by the Zindar food or the whatever it is that might be responsible. I've often wondered why the cannibals, who used to come here quite often before I took it over as my own territory, never seemed influenced at all. We know that the time when the lemmings began to settle down and stop their periodic death rushes roughly coincided with the time the Zindars left this world. Could it be that—?”

“That there's some affinity between Zindars and lemmings?” Sylvester finished for him.

“Those were roughly the lines along which I was thinking, yes. Maybe the Zindars changed our ancestors in some fashion, as a way of leaving something Zindar behind on this world. Maybe they tinkered with the way we're made, made us cleverer. That could be why we're more in tune with Zindar ideas than most others seem to be.”

“What about the cannibals who are lemmings?” said Viola. “You mentioned there were some.”

“Perhaps they were just never among the ones who came here,” said Jasper with another shrug, “or perhaps the vessel deliberately repels rogue lemmings like them. Lemmings who've turned so far from the principles the Zindars inculcated into our ancestors. I really don't know, my dear. These are all new ideas to me. It's as if the arrival of you two has rekindled my own imagination.”

“I don't think I like it,” said Pimplebrains, looking around as if he expected, at any moment, a ghost to leap out from behind a stand of corn. “I don't think I like the notion of other people bein' inside my head and meddlin' with what they find there.”

Nobody could think of any answer to that.

“What does it feel like when you're making things … disappear?” said Viola.

“It doesn't feel like anything,” Jasper replied. “I just do it, as if I've always known how to, as if it comes as easily as breathing or walking.”

“And the other tricks you talked about?” said Pimplebrains. “What're they?”

Jasper looked suddenly reluctant. “I'm not sure I should go into details.”

“Because you've just met me and why should you trust me?” said Pimplebrains. “I c'n understand that. Makes sense to me.” He smiled. Where Cap'n Rustbane's or Jeopord's smile might alarm the viewer because of the number of teeth they held, Pimplebrains' did the opposite; it alarmed the viewer because of the number of gaps. You had the immediate conviction that, if suitably enraged, the old beaver might leap at your throat and gum you to death. “Maybe later, when we's all got ter know each other a bit better.”

He let the sentence trail away. There was no guarantee they'd still be alive beyond the next morning. Some of the pirates outside might be happy enough to let them live, although it'd be stretching the truth a bit to believe that pirates like Cheesefang were actually their friends. But it was all too obvious that Jeopord would kill them the moment he thought they were no longer of any use to him. Even if they managed to escape Jeopord and his henchmen, there remained Kabalore and hundreds of Vendrosians, who'd kill them as soon as look at them for the sake of feasting on their corpses. There was only the tiniest of chances they could get to the shore without being seized or slaughtered by someone and once there, if they wanted to escape the island, they still had to think of some means of getting out to the Shadeblaze. It was a long way to swim.

It wasn't difficult to work out what the three lemmings were thinking. Pimplebrains carried on speaking as if they'd spoken their thoughts out loud.

“See, I think we're gonna get away from here just fine. Leastways, you three are because of your Zindar magic, so if I sticks right close to you there's a good chance I'll be okay too.”

“I wish I could be so confident,” said Jasper drily.

“You should be,” countered Pimplebrains, “because I can tell you've gained them Zindar abilities real strongly.”

Jasper's eyebrows rose, not for the first time since they'd met him. “What makes you say that?”

“Remember, back when you first found us, little Miss Droppy—um, really can't think where that came from. When Viola here was sayin' how impossible it was that she and young Sylvester had survived a voyage halfway aroun' the world, yet they'd somehow gorn and done it?”

“Yes.”

“Well, think how doubly impossible it is they should travel halfway aroun' the world and just happened to run into the one person in the whole of creation Sylvester's been lookin' for! Doubly? Not even that. A hundred times, a thousand times, a million times more impossible. Yet they done that too, and you know why I think they was able to?”

Jasper's eyes were glinting. “Tell me.”

“Because you brung them here.”

“I bru—er, brought them here?”

“That's what I said, brung. You din't even know you was doing it, most like, but you reached out with some strange Zindar power wot you din't realize you had, and you tugged your darlin' baby son to you as sure as he was a fish and you had him on the hook.”

Sylvester looked at the pirate with something like disgust. The idea of having a hook lodged at the back of his throat, why, he could almost taste the cruel metal already.

“Ugh!” he said, then added, “How could you say such a thing?”

“'Cause that's what I believe happened, is why.”

“Me too,” breathed Jasper. He turned toward Sylvester. “I'm so terribly sorry, son. If I'd known, I'd never have brought you through such peril, never wanted you to risk your life. Whenever I've thought of you and your mother, which has been many, many times each and every day, it's been of the happiness I hoped the pair of you found living in peace and tranquility in Foxglove. Not fighting battles and risking death.”

“Don't worry, Dad,” said Sylvester, beginning to grin.

“Eh?”

“You did me the biggest favor you could ever have dreamed of doing. You brought me out of a prison, a prison I didn't even know existed. All these harum-scarum adventures? I'd not have missed them for the world.”

“Me neither,” said Viola.

✿ ✿ ✿ ✿ ✿.

It seemed impossible as well for Jasper to have survived to come halfway round the world to find a precarious safety on Vendros. After Sylvester had swiftly recounted all that had happened to Viola and himself since they'd rescued a weasel called Levantes from the Foxglove River, Jasper related his own story.

At first, he told them, when he'd heard he was one of those whose turn it was to go on the Exodus in quest of the Land of Destiny, his heart had been full of exhilaration and eagerness, though the thought of leaving behind his beloved Hortensia and their infant son, Sylvester, hurt like a dagger being thrust into his side.

“I won't be away for long,” he'd kept telling Hortensia, “and when I get back here, everything's going to be so much better for the three of us. Once I know the way to the Land of Destiny, we can swim there and start building ourselves a new life, somewhere far from Foxglove and its villainous mayors.”

Each time he'd said this his wife had replied, quietly but with a stony determination, “No one ever has come back, Jasper. What makes you think it'll be any different for you?”

At last she'd stopped saying that. He'd thought it was because she'd begun to see his point of view. Now he knew it hadn't been that at all.

The great day came.

Jasper kissed his son goodbye, and he kissed the cheek Hortensia offered to him. Then, with a couple score of other lemmings, almost all of them male, almost all of them roughly his own age, he set off for the Mighty Enormous Cliff. They found Mayor Hairbell waiting for them there and, of course, High Priest Spurge, ready to pour upon them the blessings of Lhaeminguas for their quest. Jasper had been uneasy about accepting those blessings. He trusted Spurge no more than he trusted Hairbell, which was a lot less far than he could have thrown either of them, but the morning was bright and sunny and he didn't want to shatter the excited anticipation he saw on the faces of the other lemmings who were setting off with him on the Exodus.

Mayor Hairbell and the priest were flanked by a squad of drummers. Everyone else from Foxglove was blanketing the hillside that overlooked the Mighty Enormous Cliff a couple hundred yards back from the edge. Jasper imagined he could see Hortensia watching from there, Sylvester in her arms, but he knew this was likely self-deception; lemming eyesight is not the best.

The drummers began an insistent, slow, sharp beat.

Rat-a-tat! Rat-a-tat! Rat-a-tat! Rat-a-tat!

Jasper and his comrades gave the crowd and their dear ones a last solemn wave, then turned toward the Mighty Enormous Cliff and the misty gray expanse they could stretching out far beyond it.

The beat of the drums became faster, more dramatic.

Rat-a-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat!

Jasper felt his breath trying to clamp itself down somewhere deep inside his chest. With a huge effort he released a gasp, then sucked in air as if he might never be able to do so again.

Rat-a-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat!

Then the rhythm of the drums became a steady roar and Jasper knew the time had come.

Jostled by his friends, he ran as fast as he could toward the lip of the Mighty Enormous Cliff. Before, when he'd come to the cliff, he'd stopped just before he reached the edge.

Today, he didn't.

Today, he just kept on running, ever faster, even though there was no longer any ground beneath his feet.

“I think I blacked out when I splashed into the water. One moment I was falling, falling, falling. The next, I was fighting for my life against the crashing waves. The cold of the water seemed to want to freeze my blood in my veins. Through the spray, I could make out that a dozen or more of my fellows were already dead, smashed on the sharp rocks at the bottom of the Mighty Enormous Cliff. And the cliff itself, I could see that too. Its dark brown, nearly black face towered above us, stretching so high it seemed it must touch the sun. I knew there was no way back. I knew how savagely I and all my friends had been deceived. My suspicions had been correct. We'd been sent to our deaths by people who wanted us out of the way because we were troublesome to them.

“What could I do?

“All I could do was live. I couldn't give up and drown, like some of the others were doing. If I could only survive, then one day I might be able to get back to Foxglove and see these murderers brought to justice.

“It was the least I could do. Not just for myself, but for the wife I adored and the son I treasured. The rocks and waves hammering the others were dangerous. The rocks and the waves hammering them were death. Even though it seemed insane, I had to put distance between me and them by striking out toward the open ocean.

“It was desperately difficult pushing against the current, but I managed somehow. Soon it became easier, soon the waves were only great lazy swells that, though they tried to pull me back toward the Mighty Enormous Cliff, weren't too insistent about it. By now, the calls and shrieks of my onetime companions were faint and distant. Very soon, I could hear nothing of them at all.

“I could have drowned then too. Earlier, the water had seemed searingly cold. Now, I didn't notice the cold at all. The slow rise and fall of the waves had almost lulled me into a fatal sleep when something bumped me.

“At first I was angry. How dare something disturb my relaxation? It was a piece of driftwood, a log that must have been brought down to the sea by the Foxglove River not long earlier, which had selected me to save. Some last scintilla of common sense told me to grip it as tightly as I could, to climb right onto it if possible. Hours later, as the sun sank inexorably into the horizon, the darkness of the night was matched by my own inner darkness as consciousness left me.”

Jasper had no idea how long he drifted out to sea on the log. It could have been one day or ten. Had this been the height of summer he'd have been baked alive. Luckily, the weather was cooler and presumably cloudy, because somehow he lived long enough to be picked up by a slave ship, the Bugbear, out of the Ganshambling Islands.

This wasn't the best of all possible news, for obvious reasons, but it was fractionally better than being baked until he was lemming jerky or sinking to the bottom of the sea to be picked clean by carnivorous fish – or so Jasper thought later. At the time he was consumed by his own misery, as first he went through the rigors of recovery from near-death, then he had to acclimatize himself to rowing all day long under the lash of the slavemaster.

A year later, he and the other slaves managed to free themselves. The slavemaster who'd delighted in whipping them through rain and shine was strung by the neck from the highest yardarm, along with his skipper and the rest of the crew.

The slaves soon taught themselves (those that didn't already know) enough seamanship to sail the Bugbear wherever they wanted to. Then they ran into a difficulty they hadn't foreseen.

In the Ganshambling Islands, slaving is legal, and not just legal but the major contributor to the economy. Though the rebel slaves had done exactly what anyone else in their position might have done and liberated themselves, according to Ganshambling Islands law, they had committed a whole stack of heinous crimes and many other nations, despite the revulsion they felt toward slaving, recognized the legitimacy of Ganshambling Islands law and were prepared to send back there any fugitives they caught.