The Tides of Avarice (12 page)

“Viola, you say?” interrupted the fox.

Again, Sylvester was flustered. “Yes, that's right. Viola Pickleberry.”

“I can tell by the way you've just tripped over your two hind legs, Master Lemmington, that you don't approve of this potential match?”

“Indeed I don't.” Sylvester's cheeks were hot.

The fox gave a soft, sympathetic chuckle. “Partic'larly because this Viola Pickleberry – well, you be a-havin' got your own heart set on her, am I right?”

Sylvester stared angrily at the ground in front of him. He hadn't actually tripped over his own hind—oops, he'd just gone and done it again.

“She and I are very good friends.”

“An item, the pair of you?”

“An, er, item. Yes.”

“Little loveybirds?”

“We're almost at the inn.”

“You'd trust this Viola Pickleberry with your life, wouldn't you?”

“Of course,I would!”

“I can tell you're a remarkable judge of character, young fellow,” said the fox, beginning to sound more earnest again. “It's a trait'll stand you in good stead later on in life. Even so” – Fourfeathers tapped the side of his own nose – “take a warning from me. However much you trust your darlin' Viola, don't trust even her with anything you be a-rememberin' about your time on the riverbank with me pal, Levantes.”

Sylvester swallowed. The idea of not trusting Viola with even one of his deepest secrets … Well, okay, he hadn't as yet mentioned to her the little cache of racily illustrated scrolls he'd discovered on a secluded shelf at the Library, but—

“Not even her,” the fox repeated, underscoring his point by patting Sylvester's shoulder firmly with each syllable. “You'd be a-puttin' her in danger if she knew. Him who's also looking for that object of mine – he'd have nary a second thought about torturing the truth out of her if he thought she possessed it!”

But then, thought Sylvester perplexedly, it's surely better if she does know, because she can tell him all about it at once, before he's properly got started with the torturing. If she doesn't know, the torture could go on forever, until she's, until she's—

The fox's voice intruded into his misery. “Be a-believin' of me, Master Sylvester Lemmington. I do be a-knowin' what I be a-talkin' about.”

Then they were at the Snowbanks Inn.

✿ ✿ ✿ ✿ ✿.

Fourfeathers was welcomed by the innkeeper, the fussy, gossiping Artie Snowbanks. “Oh, my, my, my, what a rare delight to have a fox amongst us! It doesn't happen very often, let me tell you, but we have different suites always made up and ready for whichever kind of creature should happen by. There is a badger and a mole room in the basement and then for foxes, a room (I'm sure you'll find it nice and comfy) on the ground floor, while upstairs—oh, and Mr. Fourfeathers, we have a visiting coach party of duckling majorettes and I must ask you on your honor not to pester them. And …”

Sylvester left him with a promise to return later in the evening, perhaps accompanied by Viola.

Remembering Doctor Nettletree's charge, Sylvester would certainly be back after he'd had his supper and told his mother what was going on, but he'd most definitely not be bringing Viola. He had the sense that Fourfeathers spelled danger to anyone who came into contact with him.

As he walked home, Sylvester had that creepy feeling once more that someone – someone who always kept just out of sight, but whose presence could be detected as the faintest of blurs at the very corner of Sylvester's eye – someone was watching him.

He quickened his pace.

By the time Sylvester get home that night he was feeling distinctly … muzzy. Luckily, Mom had gone to bed some while earlier, so she couldn't witness him fumbling three times before he could find the knob on the cottage's front door to open it. Fourfeathers had proved to be excellent company for the evening, regaling the regulars of the Snowbanks Inn with a seemingly endless string of anecdotes and jokes, most of them satisfactorily off-color, and also a seemingly endless supply of drinks. It had crossed Sylvester's mind more than once that people who were as generous as this usually didn't plan on settling their bills, but he'd shoved that thought aside. It was something for Snowbanks to deal with, not him – Snowbanks and possibly, he thought with a twinge of guilt, Doc Nettletree.

Dropping as few crocks and utensils in the kitchen as possible, Sylvester made himself drink several cupfuls of water before stumbling upstairs to his bedroom. Jumbled head or no jumbled head, he was determined that, before he stretched himself out on his bed and tried to stop the world spinning, he was going to take a quick look at that document Levantes had stuffed into his pocket.

Lighting a candle took an inordinate amount of time because of the danger of setting the entire cottage on fire, but the moonlight streaming in through his bedroom window was a help.

At last, sitting on the end of his bed, Sylvester pushed his spectacles firmly onto his nose and dug to the very bottom of his coat pocket, where he found the squashed paper.

Immediately, he could see it was incomplete. The edges were torn, and the sheet of paper, once he'd roughly flattened it out, had the shape of an irregular triangle. The portion he had was covered in numbers, incomprehensible symbols, and what looked like random squiggles. Holding it as steadily as possible under the circumstances, Sylvester peered at it in the silvery gleam of the moon and the flickering candlelight. In the bottom left-hand corner was a cluster of dozens of irregular shapes, one of the larger of which had a big, bold “X” marked next to it.

In the bottom left-hand corner there was an untidy signature. It took Sylvester several minutes to decipher the tangled handwriting:

Captain Josiah Adamite

“What in the world is this all about?” he said, not realizing until he heard the words that he'd spoken them out loud. He glanced nervously over his shoulder at his bedroom door, as if someone might be listening there, but the house was silent except for the distant, soft sound of his mother's snoring.

Levantes was willing to die for this, Sylvester thought. And he may not have been the only one who's lost his life over it. It's obviously of the greatest possible importance, and yet I haven't the first idea what it could possibly be.

There was no sense in continuing to tussle with the problem, not with his mind refusing to focus. Even had it not been for the numerous tankards of apple wine he'd drained (and he had a vague memory of there having been a few shots of artichoke brandy mixed in there somewhere as well) he was exhausted. It was long after his normal bedtime, and the sooner he got some shuteye the better.

Before he could allow himself to sleep, however, he had to hide the document somewhere safe. Somewhere where his mother wouldn't chance across it while she pottered around the house. Somewhere a burglar wouldn't think to look if Fourfeathers was right and that dreaded other person he'd warned about came to Foxglove in search of the paper.

Sylvester tried to place himself in the mind of a burglar, and found he couldn't do it. Lemmings weren't very possessive people. In Foxglove, if you wanted something that belonged to somebody else, the best way of getting it was usually just to ask them if you could have it. They'd tell you yes or no. It never occurred to anyone to argue with the decision. Theft was almost unknown among the lemmings, not because they were particularly virtuous, but simply because it was, for the most part, quite unnecessary.

In the end, he stuffed the crumpled document in the very bottom of his dirty socks and underwear basket. Any burglar would likely asphyxiate if he tried to burrow down that far. The Lemmingtons did their wash on a Tuesday, and today was still only Sunday – or (Sylvester glanced out through the window at the starry sky) make that more like Monday. Surely by Tuesday Sylvester would be able to think of a better, more permanent hiding place.

It was only as he stood up from the dirty-clothes basket, having come quite close to asphyxiation himself, that he realized he'd seen something odd when he glanced out at the sky.

Something that didn't quite jibe with the customarily placid nighttime Foxglove scene.

He was woozily prepared to write it off as just another side-effect of the apple wine, but some deeper instinct drew him back to the window.

Leaning on the sill, he surveyed the sleeping town. He might be the very last person in all of Foxglove to be falling into bed tonight.

There's nothing unusual out there. You were just seeing things.

Pink elephants, anyone?

Just as he turned gratefully away, he saw it again.

One of the stars was winking.

Except that it wasn't a star. You couldn't see any stars in that direction because the bulk of the temple blotted them out.

As Sylvester watched, the “star” winked back out of existence but then, a moment later, it blazed back into being again.

Stars didn't do that.

Even with a head in which a brass band was playing raucous dance music to the rhythm of apple wine, Sylvester knew that.

Wink! The “star” was gone again.

Someone on the temple roof was flashing a lamp.

But why would they do that?

Three times in quick succession the light blinked on and off, then there were two slower appearances, and then there was nothing but unbroken darkness until Sylvester shook himself out of the stupor he'd fallen into and pushed himself away from the window.

As he pulled the bedcovers up to his ears, he didn't know which he found more puzzling, the mysterious document Levantes had forced on him with its funny little squiggly lines and its arcane symbols, or the flashing light he'd seen on the gloomy temple roof. In fact, there may have even been more than one light now that he thought about it. Maybe it was just the candle flame burning an after-image onto his eyes or the apple wine playing tricks with his mind, but he thought he perhaps saw a fainter light floating somewhere far away out in the midst of the Great Wet. No, the light on the temple had been real enough, but not the other. No one would be adrift on the Great Wet.

Yet. Levantes had said he'd sailed there, and so did Fourfeathers.

Two mysteries to solve.

Both intractable.

Before he had the chance to choose between them, Sylvester fell asleep.

✿ ✿ ✿ ✿ ✿.

When Sylvester woke up the following morning, all he could see out of his bedroom window was a gray blur.

That accursed apple wine, he thought, angry with himself for being inveigled by Fourfeathers into drinking so much of it, but then he realized his eyes were, surprisingly, functioning normally. It was the day that was out of focus. A carpet of heavy-looking clouds filled the sky, and from them fell a slow, steady, depressing drizzle of rain.

Sylvester stretched his limbs, then froze when he had the disconcerting sensation that if he stretched any further one of them might fall off.

The apple wine was exacting its toll after all.

Breakfast was a painful experience, as was the walk to the Library. In order to distract his own attention from how the world seemed to be pulsing at him in a red and angry way, he tried to think of other things.

Anything complicated was out of the question but—oh, what are these sticking out the top of my pocket?

He'd completely forgotten until now about the four quills he'd picked up not long before meeting Robin Fourf—

Robin Fourfeathers!

He recalled that the gray fox had hesitated just a moment before telling Sylvester his name.

The rascal must have seen the tops of the quills poking out of Sylvester's pocket, added the first bird's name that popped into his head, and …

Sylvester stopped in the middle of the road and swore.

Of course. Robin Fourfeathers. How could he have been so stupid?

At any other time, Sylvester would have known what to do – run to Doctor Nettletree, perhaps, to tell the physician what he'd just learned, or sprint instead to the Snowbanks Inn to confront the impostor – but the apple wine was making his thoughts sluggish.

Best to get to the Library as quickly as he could in his dilapidated state, then decide on the right course of action when he was feeling a bit readier to cope with the world. The fox couldn't do anything too disastrous that might endanger the good citizens of Foxglove in the next hour or two, could he?

Could he?

✿ ✿ ✿ ✿ ✿.

Unfortunately, old Celadon was in the mood for conversation.

“I hope all the strange events of the past few days haven't upset you, young Sylvester.”

Why do people call me “young” the whole time? Sylvester's mind painfully blasted at him. Too loud, too loud! If only I could find a mental volume control.

He mumbled something in response to the older lemming, hoping Celadon would go away and leave him alone to his misery.

No such luck.

“You remember what I told you the other day, Sylvester, about the dangers of unsound thinking?”

Sylvester nodded, then regretted the gesture. “You can be reassured. I'm no longer thinking unsoundly.”

“I'm glad to hear it.” The Archivist rested his paw on the edge of Sylvester's desk and gave a creaking sigh. “It must have been tempting for you to revert to unsound ways after the shock of that poor ferret dying and then the appearance of the fox.”

“The two incidents didn't affect me like that at all.”

“Good.”

“Really.”

“I believe you.”

“Good.”

Celadon seemed to be settling in for a nice, long heart-to-heart with his younger colleague.

“These things, young Sylvester, are sent to try us. They happen every now and then, even in the best-regulated communities, like Foxglove here, but fortunately they don't happen very often, if you know what I mean. And when they do” – the elderly lemming shrugged – “when they do, the only way to deal with them is just to see them out. Yes, the best we humble archivists can do under the circumstances is muddle on through and—”

Sylvester's patience evaporated.

“Muddle on through and what?” he cried.

Celadon took a nervous couple of paces backward. “Ah …”

“And what?” repeated Sylvester, hardly recognizing the sound of his own voice. “I sit here day after day translating scriptures by ancestors of ours who were either batty or senile or too self-righteous to see one single hairsbreadth beyond the ends of their whiskered noses. In order to give themselves some purpose in life, to make themselves seem important, they wrote down these” – with a dash of his paw he sent a pile of untranslated scrolls to all corners of the room – “these myths.”

He picked up a parchment at random and flourished it like a weapon. Celadon backed farther away. A look of consternation crossed the older lemming's face as he realized Sylvester was between himself and the door.

“Look at this nonsense,” cried Sylvester, rising to his hind legs. “Some daft old dodderer tells us, like all the other daft old dodderers before him, that the Great Spirit Lhaeminguas Suicidalius ordains that at regular intervals swarms of lemmings should hurl themselves off the Mighty Enormous Cliff. After which Lhaeminguas himself will guide them to the mystical far shore of the Great Wet Without End – and only he has the ability to do this. It's not true, I tell you!”

“Perhaps I should call Doctor Nettletree,” attempted the archivist, but Sylvester didn't hear him.

“I know it isn't true! To ask me to pretend otherwise is to ask me to live a lie. I've met not one but two people who've come here from the far side of the Great Wet. They did it without the aid of the Great Spirit Lhaeminguas, or any other spirit for that matter, great or small!”

“And look what happened to them, eh, boy?” Celadon protested. “One of them ended up dead and the other one found himself in the Snowbanks Inn, which is almost as—”

“To everyone else in the world, what we call the Great Wet Without End is just an ocean, a sea, and it's not without end at all. There's land on the other side of it, and you can get from there to here, or even from here to there, riding in something they call a boat or a ship. It's nothing magical, nothing miraculous, although from what I can gather it can sometimes be dangerous. To the rest of the world it's just a perfectly normal way of getting around. You want to go from A to B and there's an ocean in the way? Well, you just hop on a boat or a ship and you float across it.”

“Perhaps this could be true but—”

“Of course it's true,” Sylvester interrupted. “And I've spent all morning wondering if I'm not the first lemming to have discovered it's true – wondering if there've been lots of others before me. But instead of anyone admitting it, we've all got to pretend that this … venerable hocus pocus,” he threw the scroll he'd been brandishing down on his desk and it bounced off onto the floor to join the others, “this holier-than-thou fable is somehow truer than the truth!”

Celadon made the mistake of trying to argue the point. “Well, in a way it is, dear boy. In a very deep and spiritual way it's true, you must see that.”

“I do see, and that's the trouble. I see that for centuries lemmings have been deceiving each new generation with fairy tales about where we came from and how we should be, when the truth's been right there in front of us! Oh, sure, we don't know everything. We don't know the whole of the truth, and perhaps we never will. But we know enough of it to know that all the philosophical ramblings and supernatural speculations in these treasured old manuscripts are nonsense.”