The Tides of Avarice (67 page)

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.”

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 modestly. 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?”

“None of those, my boy, none of those. What there was inside the treasure chest of the Zindar was a wish.”

The childish voice is filled with a practiced disappointment. “Only a wish, Dad? Did you open up the chest and take a look at this wish?”

“No. I left it where it was.”

“Why?”

“Because if I'd have taken that wish into me, I would have been the most powerful person in the world, and it isn't right for any one person to have so much power. So, I didn't unlock the treasure chest, even though I knew how to. I just left that wish where it was.”

“Is that all you did with it, Dad?”

“No. I put a wish of my own inside the casket alongside the Zindar one. My own wish was very little, you see, so I was able to slip it in through the keyhole without any difficulties. And my wish is still there so that, someday when the time's right for the Zindar chest to be opened, they'll find my wish too.

“When I'd done that, me and your Grandpa Lemmington left your uncles Rasco and Nettletree to … to clear up things where we'd been digging up the treasure, and we took the Zindar chest back out of Mugwort Forest and all the way to the edge of the Mighty Enormous Cliff.”

“Why?”

“Because it was the right thing to do.”

“Why?”

“Because it was, that's all. With your Grandpa Lemmington beside me, I threw the casket as far as I could away from me toward the ocean, and we both watched it twisting and turning as it flew through the air, down, down and ever down, past the sharp and murderous rocks at the foot of the Mighty Enormous Cliff to land in the place beyond them where the waves muster themselves for their final attack on the shore.

“We thought the chest would float, but it didn't. When it landed in the water it made not the slightest splash, just went from air into water as if the two were really just the same. For a moment the seething waters stilled, so we could see as the chest sank straight to the bed of the sea, where it lay on the sand as if it had been there always.”

“Is it still there, Dad?”

“Yes. And sometimes – hardly ever, but sometimes – you can catch a glimpse of it if you're good enough and wise enough and clever enough. Maybe when you're older, Nimbus, you'll be one of those people who can see it. It depends, I'd say, on whether or not you eat up all your oatmeal for breakfast, and whether you're nice to your little sister.”

“But Da–ad, sometimes she's a pain in the—”

“It's only because she takes after your moth—ouch!”

The full moon looks down on them benignly. It's the only one, aside from Viola, who can hear Sylvester's tale.

“But if you do see it,” Sylvester continues, rubbing his shin, “no matter how good and clever and wise you are, you'll also have to be very, very lucky. You see, the treasure chest of the Zindars is hiding behind what some people call the Ninth Wave.”

“Surely the ocean's just full of waves, Dad? Isn't nine kind of a small number for a wave to have?”

“What's meant is every ninth wave, son. Sailors say that every ninth wave that comes to shore is a bit bigger than the rest. Then there are other people who say this mortal world of ours is surrounded by the Ninth Wave, and that only by going through the Ninth Wave (which is to say, unless you're very special, by dying) can you see into the world beyond.”