The Tides of Avarice (20 page)

“Was he,” Sylvester searched for something appropriately pitiful, “eaten by a shark? Or drowned trying to save a child's life?”

“Well, no,” said Rustbane, looking annoyed at the interruption. “Not in veritable point of fact, no. I stuck my cutlass into his liver and twisted it about a bit, is what actually happened. And still he wouldn't tell me what he'd done with his map, see? He died with a horribly supercilious sneer on his face, as if he'd won out by dying. Which in a way,” Rustbane hurried on, “he had. He'd gone to his watery grave. Well, it was watery by the time we'd given him the old heave-ho over the side of his ship, this very same Shadeblaze as has become your home. He'd gone to his grave knowing the secret of the treasure, and leaving me behind not knowing even what had happened to his sea chart showing the chest's location.”

“That must have been very frustrating for you.”

“Frustrating isn't the word. It was . . . It was . . .”

Cap'n Rustbane evidently found himself unable to speak.

“So, how did you find out what he'd done with the map?”

Rustbane's face cleared of its fury like sunshine bursting through an overcast sky.

“Ah, that, young fellow,” he said, “involved some cunning. And, as many people will no doubt have told you, there ain't no one cunninger above or below the high seas, nor even on land, as your good friend, Cap'n Terrigan Rustbane.”

The pirate let the final words hang in the air between them as if they explained everything.

Eventually, Sylvester broke the silence. “Yes, but—”

“Oh, I'm so terribly sorry. I'm quite forgetting my good manners. You can't have had breakfast yet. Let me summon the ship's cook to fetch you something appetizing from the galley. I haven't eaten anything myself this morning, so I'll join you in the repast. What's the saying? ‘The condemned lemming ate a hearty breakfast'?”

Refusing to hear Sylvester's words of protest, Cap'n Rustbane picked up a little brass bell from the midst of a snowdrift of tidal charts on the table and rang it. Immediately, the door burst open and Cheesefang appeared, cutlass tremblingly at the ready.

“Yer wantin' me to rip out 'is innards, Skip?”

“Er, not quite yet, my good man. Later perhaps, if you're good. In the meantime, perhaps you'd be kind enough to ask Bladderbulge to bring up breakfast for two from the galley.”

Looking disappointed, Cheesefang retreated. “Nothin' personal, mind. Just business,” he muttered to Sylvester through the closing crack of the door.

“Bladderbulge?” said Sylvester, not immediately recognizing it as a name.

Cap'n Rustbane rolled his eyes expressively.

“Yes. It's so terribly unfortunate, especially for a cook. Heaven knows what was going through the mind of his mother when she named him. Not much, I'd expect. Whatever, he's the only sailor in the whole of the Shadeblaze's crew who doesn't have a piratical moniker. Every time we try to invent one for him we, ah, fall short, as it were.”

During the few minutes it took for Cheesefang to fetch the breakfast-bearing cook, Bladderbulge, Cap'n Rustbane resisted Sylvester's timid efforts to extract further information about Adamite's map, brusquely fobbing him off with remarks like “Can't talk sensibly on an empty stomach, m'boy” and “Sausages! Sausages! I do hope he'll bring sausages!”

On one of the latter occasions, Sylvester, in frustration, asked the Cap'n his views on sausages and was treated to a learned philosophical discourse on the relative virtues of sausages made with different piquancies of spice. Sylvester had never thought he'd be glad to see Cheesefang again, but it was a relief when the rat arrived with Bladderbulge, interrupting Cap'n Rustbane's sausageophiliac flow. Bladderbulge proved to be indeed bulging. He was a rotund badger with a wooden hind leg and he sported a stump where a tail should have been.

With an imperious swing of his arm, Rustbane swept the books and papers from one end of the table onto the floor and indicated to Bladderbulge that he should set down his tray of steaming food there. Sylvester was surprised to see that each of the several plates on the tray had a shiny metal covering on it.

Bladderbulge lifted these off one by one with the air of a conjurer revealing that his scantily clad assistant has not, after all, been sawn in half. The smell of hot, spiced meats filled the cabin.

There were plenty of sausages.

“Good,” said Cap'n Rustbane firmly, seeing this. He pulled out a pair of low stools from under the table and sat himself down on one of them. Being so much smaller than the fox, Sylvester had difficulty clambering up on his, and even then the edge of the table was only at his chin level.

“You could try eating standing up,” suggested Rustbane, who was already halfway through his second sausage and was eyeing the heap of sardines on Sylvester's plate in a speculative way.

So, Sylvester stood on the stool and ate like that. He hardly noticed the food he was consuming, so intent was he on finding out more about Adamite's map. The very fact that he was eating anything at all was a small miracle he realized afterward, bearing in mind how he'd been feeling when he'd reached the Cap'n's cabin. The greasy food settled his stomach, and for the first time this morning – in fact, since coming aboard the Shadeblaze – he began to feel like his normal self.

The food seemed to change Rustbane's mood too, but not for the better.

As soon as Bladderbulge had cleared the plates away, the fox began to pace from one end of the cabin to the other, occasionally paused to dart a furious glance at Sylvester, then resuming his restless striding.

When at last he spoke, it was in a voice filled with harsh bitterness.

“Yes, I remember it all too well, those long months spent locked up with hard rock beneath my feet rather than the comforting sway of Mother Ocean.”

“It must have been miserable for you,” said Sylvester.

Cap'n Rustbane didn't hear him.

“The cell I was in had one tiny window, high up in the wall. I could perhaps have jumped up and clung on to the bars somehow to look out at the world, but the bastards had shackled my feet to the floor with just enough chain for me to reach the privy in the corner, which stank. All I could do, day in day out, was gaze longingly up at that tiny rectangle of light, made even tinier by the height of the wall, and imagine what was happening underneath the pathetically small fraction of sky I could see. There was a dark cloud there … Were people putting up their umbrellas and chasing each other laughingly through the rain or marching along, heads down with grim faces watching the water splash on the road in front of them? Ah, the scrap of sky is blue today … Is everyone out playing ball on every available patch of green grass, or are they fanning themselves with their hands and wishing they didn't have to work on such a hot day as this? You see what I mean?”

The fox halted abruptly and turned blazing eyes on Sylvester, who cringed as if Death itself had snuck into the cabin.

“You see what I mean?” the fox thundered again. Clearly, he wanted no answer. “There was nothing a person could do, trapped in there, except think of how he was going to avenge himself once he'd finally been released from that hellhole. Oh, I tried all the usual means of escape and just about all of the unusual ones too. Didn't I tell you we foxes are cunninger than just about any other creature? But they were no use, as I'd known before I tried 'em. So, all I could do was wait and do my best to count the days, and think of what I was going to do when those days were ended. The higher and higher the number of days I counted, the nastier and nastier the things I plotted to do to more and more people. That's how prison affects a fellow, you see.”

He paused again, swiping the side of his face lightly with his paw. “No, of course,” he mumbled, “you probably don't see, being a lemming. Lemmings aren't naturally vicious creatures, like foxes.”

Sylvester could have corrected him on this (it was obvious Cap'n Rustbane didn't know much about lemmings!) but decided it was safer to stay silent.

“The first time I was let out of prison, there were crewmates waiting to welcome me,” the fox continued, pacing once more. “Risking their lives, they were, because if the peelers – that's the name for the coastal police, in case you didn't know – had known who they were they'd have found themselves dancing from a yard arm quick as blinking. But they came anyway and hauled me off to a tavern and filled me full of good grog to celebrate my freedom, and when I told them my plans for vengeance they shook me by the shoulders and told me not to be so damn stupid. The best thing I could do, soon as I'd thrown all that good grog up again and could walk on my own two hind legs (well, with my shipmates to support me, leastwise), the best thing I could do, they said, was put as much of the world between me and the prison – and the people who'd put me there – as I possibly could, and as quick as I could.

“So, I took their advice, and off we sailed on the big blue sea, and I tucked my memories of that foul hole away at the back of my mind and thought I'd never see them again.

“That was the ending of my first time in jail.

“But then, like a numbskull, I only went and got myself caught again, didn't I? Luckily, it was in a different country, with a different judge, or I'd've had my neck stretched for sure. Because you can blather your way out of just about anything in front of a judge the first time, but you try it again he's going to see right through your blandishments and be twice as hard on you as otherwise. Whatever, even though the crowd was baying for blood, the judge took pity on my youthful innocence and off I went to jail again. If they hadn't told me it was a different prison and a different cell, I'd never have known. Same tall walls, same tiny barred window, same jakes as stank to high heaven no matter if I used it or not.

“And I plotted and schemed, and my dreams were full of satisfying cruelty and gore …

“The day I was let free, though, there were my old muckers from the pirate ship, and off we went to the tavern, and I had a headache and an acid gut for a week but I never hurt anybody for having put me away.

“Same goes the third time I was incarcerated – which was what I had been the first two times, only I hadn't known the word. They was a lucky judge and jury, lucky peelers …

“Then there was the fourth time. Ah, me, yes, the fourth time.”

The gray fox stopped at the side of the desk and leaned on his hands against it, looming over Sylvester like some enormous bird of prey. Looking into Rustbane's eyes, Sylvester could see deep pits of agony. Fury, yes – a crazy rage. Bitterness. A writhing serpent of vindictiveness. But, most of all, what Sylvester saw behind the screens of yellow–green was pain.

“The fourth time, it wasn't just me. The soldiers and peelers had caught near the entire crew of the Mollie O'Grady, which was the sweet vessel I sailed in under Cap'n Bosseye Skankangle, may his fine and twisted spirit be blessed in memory. There was sixty or more of us hauled into the assizes at Swivern. That's in Tarngonia, which is mongoose country, case you don't know. The judge was this little mongoose who was viciouser even than Bosseye, but all dressed up in long robes and finery so his viciousness looked civilized. The jury was worse – not that most of the judges I've come across pay much mind to what juries think. The chief of the coastal police stood up in front of everyone and told them there was no sense making much of a trial out of this, since we was all pirates and had been caught with our paws elbow-deep in booty and gore. Just string 'em all up, said this pillar of justice, 'less you want to boil a few alive for sport.

“The judge, peering over the top of the stupid little spectacles he affected, agreed with the police chief, and the jury and the audience obviously did too, because they were yelling and cheering and calling out for us to be torn limb from limb, not just hanged.

“Me, I squirmed my way to the front, and laid the most innocent gaze you ever did see upon the judge, who couldn't help but notice it. I swear to you, Sylvester, I made myself look so youthful and guilelessly misled that day it's a wonder no one offered to change my diapers. The judge hammered on his bench for quiet and sooner or later he got it. Of all the crew of the Mollie O'Grady I was the only one who got the opportunity to speak my piece in front of the court.

“And what I told them was all about my poor sick mother (I'd got that little speech down pat, all right!) and my half-dozen little brothers and sisters, some of 'em barely able to walk as yet, whose cute little furry tummies was empty and echoing. If I didn't want to just sit back and watch 'em all starve to death, the only thing I could do was to go to sea in search of wages so I could feed 'em. And how was I to know that the gentle sailors who offered me a job were really cutthroat pirates?

“I tell you, by the time I'd done there wasn't a dry eye anywhere to be found. Even some of my crewmates were bawling like babes on each other's shoulders. As for the judge, he'd had to take his little spectacles off a score of times to dry the insides so he could see.

“And the end result of it was that, while Bosseye and all the rest of the fine seafarers of the Mollie O'Grady were dragged off to the gibbet, I was thrown back into that same identical prison cell with the tall walls and the dinky little window and the lav in the corner that I swear they stunk up extra while I was sleeping at nights.

“That was the longest time I ever did spend in prison. And the last, by the belly of the triple-breasted goddess, the last!

“The day I was released, there was no one at the gate to meet me.

“They'd all swung, see? All my crewmates, all the people there were in the world that I could call ‘friend.' Back on that dreadful day when I alone had been tossed behind bars, they'd met their makers at the end of a rope.