The Tides of Avarice (25 page)

His gaze strayed from her, creeping up the hull to the porthole. The black waves out there seemed as tall as the tallest pines and as broad as eternity.

It struck him, for all he'd said to reassure Viola, that the ship might founder and they might die in this storm.

The giant suddenly punched the underside of the vessel.

There was a crack like that of the cat-o'-nine-tails.

Sylvester, thrown upwards, hit his head on the ceiling.

Darkness descended.

Loudly.

✿ ✿ ✿ ✿ ✿.

What woke him were Mrs. Pickleberry's boots.

Viola's mom had never been the lightest-footed of lemmings but, ever since she'd donned the heavy mariners' boots Cheesefang had given her when she came aboard the Shadeblaze, her progress around the ship had been marked by what sounded like an orchestra of drunks falling downstairs, complete with their musical instruments.

It wasn't just that her boots were individually noisy. It was that there were four of them.

Viola was hanging on to her mother's shoulder as Sylvester's gaze came grayly into focus.

“Do you think he's dead, Mom?”

“No such luck.”

“Just because you've never liked—”

“His eyes are opening.”

“Oh, so they are! He's going to be all—”

“Little piggy eyes, they are. Like pigs have, only littler.”

“Well, of course pigs have piggy eyes, Mom! That's what pigs are for. Oh, I was so frightened.”

This last was to Sylvester, beside whom Viola was now kneeling.

“You were frightened? I thought I was—”

“There, there, sweetheart.” Viola's voice adopted a new, soothing tone, which, after a moment Sylvester recognized. He'd heard Doctor Nettletree use something very like it when dealing with people who'd been out in the sun too long.

“I'm going to be fine, I tell you,” he said irritatedly, trying to struggle to his feet.

“Are you sure?”

“Of course, I'm sure,” he snapped. “Mind you,” he added more quietly, rubbing his head, “I've got the most enormous bump back here. What happened?”

“Damn stupid ship hit a damn stupid monster wave,” said Mrs. Pickleberry as if that explained everything.

“Do you remember the storm?” said Viola, looking anxiously into his eyes.

“A bit of it,” Sylvester said. “We were talking about . . .” He glanced nervously around in case any of the crew might be nearby. “We were talking about how we might escape,” he whispered.

“Then, like Mom says, the Shadeblaze went nose-first into what must have been the biggest wave the sea has ever known, and …”

How does she know how big the wave was? thought Sylvester, still woozy. And how does she think she knows how big a big wave is? Not long ago, the closest she'd been to the sea was watching it from the top of the cliff. Now she thinks she's some kind of master mariner?

He shook himself. Where were waspish thoughts like that coming from? His head ached, not just the bump on the outside of it but the inside of it too, as if someone had challenged his brain to a boxing match and won.

“Thought the whole ship was goin' ta come apart at the seams,” confirmed Mrs. Pickleberry.

She's starting to talk like a pirate, Sylvester thought. When she's been talking with the crew, it must have rubbed off on her somehow. On the other hand, Mrs. Pickleberry's way of talking in general was not all that different, come to think of it. Her temper didn't differ much from a pirate's either, he concluded. She would be a perfect pirate.

“Nails poppin' out everywhere,” she continued. “Half the scum who keep this scurvy tub afloat were on their knees on the deck prayin'. And not,” she noted darkly, “to the Great Spirit Lhaeminguas, I'll be bound.”

Now that Mrs. Pickleberry had made him aware of it, Sylvester could hear a great clattering of footsteps overhead and much shouting of orders and curses like, “Avast behind!” “Man the bilges!” and “Bottle the spinnaker!” Clearly, now that the Shadeblaze was through the worst of the storm, the crew had a major job of clearing up and repairing to do.

“They'll not be disturbin' us a while,” Mrs. Pickleberry continued.

“Is that good news?” said Sylvester. Perhaps he needed some medical attention. A bang on the head could be a dangerous thing, he knew. He'd be a bit nervous about putting his well-being in the paws of any sawbones who might be part of the complement of a pirate ship, of course (they would be better at hacking off injured limbs than at treating cases of the vapors, no doubt) but this once he'd be prepared to chance it.

Perhaps a nice restorative tisane would set him right.

Mrs. Pickleberry gave a derisive snort, as if she could read his mind and didn't much like the headlines.

“Somethin' happened when that wave hit,” she said. “Somethin' the scumrats don' know 'bout yet.”

Sylvester and Viola looked at her blankly and she responded with a self-satisfied smile.

“But they'll find out soon as one o' them thinks ter come down here an' check up on us. That'd be that oaf Cheesefang, ‘s my guess. So we'd best get movin' if we wants ter investigate.”

“Investigate what?” cried Sylvester and Viola in exasperation.

“The secret passage, o' course.”

“What secret passage?” said Viola. She looked as if she were accustomed to dealing with her mother's obtuseness. Sylvester hoped he'd never need to become likewise.

“Come see,” said the older lemming enigmatically, going to the door and cracking it open a pawsbreadth so she could check the corridor outside. Satisfied, she beckoned them to follow her.

“I didn't know ships had secret passages,” murmured Sylvester to Viola as they left his cabin. “I thought it was just old haunted houses and that sort of thing that had secr—”

“Hush yer trap, will ya?” hissed Mrs. Pickleberry back over her plump shoulder.

The storm might be past, but the Shadeblaze was still shuddering and swaying underfoot. As they made their way along the passage, the three lemmings lost count of the number of times they bumped into the walls. There was a new smell too, in addition to the lingering odor of unwashed undergarments that tended to hang around the ship's living quarters. A post-storm smell, Sylvester concluded, a mixture of fresh brine and rotting organic material. He couldn't decided whether he liked it or not.

He hadn't before been into the cabin the two Pickleberries shared, and he was somewhat hesitant about following Viola in there now. He tried to keep his gaze fixed firmly on the back of Mrs. Pickleberry's head in case he might, out of the corner of his eye, spot some item of intimate feminine attire left inadvertently lying around. Of course, this made it very difficult not to be alert to the sight of anything wispy.

What he did notice out of the corner of his eye was that Viola was grinning at him.

He wondered if he'd started blushing.

Viola was depressingly good at making him blush.

“See?” said Mrs. Pickleberry.

“See what?” said her daughter.

“What I'm pointin' at, yer lummox.”

Between two of the vertical planks that made up the cabin's rough walls there was a long, black triangular gap. The boards must have heaved slightly apart when the ship was being tossed around by the heavy seas.

“It's lucky that wasn't an outside wall,” said Sylvester, wondering if he had the terminology right.

Mrs. Pickleberry looked at him in exasperation. “Then there wouldn't be a secret passage on the other side o' it, would there? There'd just be a lot o' cold salty water, an' you'd be drowning in it. Which,” she added sotto voce, “might not be a—”

“Mo–om!” said Viola.

Sylvester wasn't paying any attention. He'd inched forward, past Mrs. Pickleberry and had glued an eye to the gap between the boards.

Viola's mom was right. There was a bigger space behind here than there ought to be. He couldn't see enough of it to tell whether it was a secret passage precisely. He tried to visualize the corridor they'd come along to reach the females' room, to work out if there'd perhaps been a door or two fewer than there should have been, then twitched his head crossly. It was a hopeless exercise. He hadn't been paying attention.

Behind him, the two Pickleberries were still exchanging recriminations and gasps of outrage.

“Come have a look,” said Sylvester.

At first, neither of them heard him. Then Viola saw his beckoning paw.

“What?”

It wasn't said in the friendliest of fashions, but Sylvester decided not to let his inner bristling show.

“Your mom was right.”

“She was?”

“There's what looks to be a room behind here.”

“Yes?”

“'Course, it could just be a broom cupboard.”

“Doubt it,” said Mrs. Pickleberry tersely, joining the conversation. “Pirates don't use brooms. Filthy bunch of bilge rats, if you ask me.”

Sylvester tried to be conciliatory. “Or a lavoratory facility.”

“Doubt that too. Pirates don't use a privy.”

“They do,” Viola chipped in.

“Only when they has to,” responded Mrs. Pickleberry with the air of One Who Knows.

It was clear Viola and Mrs. Pickleberry were brewing up for a resumption of their spat. Sylvester didn't know what exactly had gotten into them but he wished it'd get back out again.

“Do you two not want to discover what's behind the panels?” he said, clapping his forepaws together.

Two uncannily similar pairs of eyes turned in his direction.

“S'pose we do,” Mrs. Pickleberry said grudgingly, for both of them.

“Then watch,” said Sylvester, not at all sure he was going to be able to do what he was about to try to do.

He reached a paw up to the top of the left plank of the two that had been jerked apart and dug in his claws. The end of the plank was just wide enough for him to get a good grip. He yanked on the end of the board as hard as he could.

There was a noise like someone ripping canvas apart.

The plank Sylvester had pulled came away from the wall in a shower of, firstly, dust then secondly, the husks of dead insects and thirdly, rusty old nails.

Behind it was a pool of blackness that yielded only reluctantly to the incursion of the cabin's lantern light. Motes swam amid air that seemed to have been lifeless for a very long time. There was a strong smell of damp mold.

“Wow,” said Viola at Sylvester's shoulder. All trace of the animosity between her and her mother had evaporated.

“Wow, indeed.” He smiled at her and looked back into the cabin. “Let me see if I can unhook that lantern from the ceiling.”

“Already done.” Mrs. Pickleberry handed it past Viola to him. “Mind yourself on the lamp, it's hot.”

It was too. Sylvester could feel the tips of the hairs on the back of his paw singeing as he held the lantern in the gloom.

Viola's breathing loud in his ear, he gazed at what the glow of the oil lamp revealed.

“It's another cabin,” she whispered. “A cabin that people must have sealed off years ago, decades ago. I wonder why in the world they'd have wanted to do that?”

“Plague,” said Mrs. Pickleberry matter-of-factly.

“Ugh, Mom.”

“'S true. That's why people generally seal off places. Because there's a deadly disease in there that'd spread like wildfire through the very air itself, cutting adults and children down alike with its toxic scythe, sparking painful, suppurating buboes all over their tormented flesh Shriveling up their secret organs until—”

“Shut up, Mom!”

“Only sayin'.”

“Well, stop.”

Paying little or no attention to their bickering, Sylvester had squeezed in through the splintered opening he and the storm had created, and was now standing in the center of what must once have been quite a splendid cabin. Along one wall, a row of portholes had been overgrown entirely by sea mosses and barnacles, so that only a sinister dark green light shone in from the outside world to supplement the radiance his lantern cast. The smell of mold and mildew was far stronger than it had been in the females' cabin; it was almost overpowering.

Sylvester took an extra step or two into the fuzzy green dimness. His feet sloshed through cold, shallow puddles that swayed from side to side with the rocking of the ship. He had to move carefully for fear of slipping. Looking down, he saw slick black water where a few unhealthy looking shellfish seemed to be trying to eke out an existence among swashes of what, at first he thought must be long hanks of hair shed by the head of some monstrous creature but which he soon realized, was seaweed. Somewhere near this part of its superstructure, the Shadeblaze must have sprung a leak many years ago. A leak not large enough ever to cause a threat to the vessel's seaworthiness, but enough to allow a slow, progressive invasion of small creatures and, of course, water. These had shared the interior of the cabin with what was already there, rather than replacing it entirely, so that it wasn't too hard for him to discern what the room must have been like at one time.

“It was a captain's cabin,” he breathed. “That's what it was. A captain's private cabin. I'm sure of it. This was the place where the captain who was master of the Shadeblaze before Rustbane used to come to relax or study.”

“But how could it be a—” Viola began, then stopped as her own eyes took in the scene.

In one corner stood a writing desk that must have been, in its day, a magnificent piece of furniture and still, even through its lumpy veneer of shellfish and rot, spoke of expense. Just as in Rustbane's larger and more public cabin up on the main deck, there were pictures along the walls, neatly spaced between the portholes on the hull-side wall and in almost a solid line on the other three. Time and the elements had taken their toll on the pictures themselves, but Sylvester thought he could make out traces of coastal landscapes where great sailing ships stood just offshore. The fitful light of the lantern made the flags and sails of the ships flutter, and the trees of the shoreline wave in the salty breeze.