The Tides of Avarice (58 page)

“Even then. He's a talented feller, that Rustbane. 'S a pity he ain't a lemming, might make a better son-in-law than some I could mentions.”

Oh well, decided Sylvester. So much for the mellow Mrs. Pickleberry. That didn't last long.

“Where was I?” said Mrs. Pickleberry.

Viola reminded her.

“Well, as I was sayin' afore I was so rudely interrupted, off his plank Rustbane jumps, and into the water he goes – kerrsplosh – and he sort o' thrashes around a while to make it look good. Then—”

“But I saw him drifting away from the Shadeblaze,” said Sylvester.

“So you did.” Mrs. Pickleberry reached out and patted him on the side as if to tell him that even numbskulls could get a few things right, like stopped clocks. “There was one more thing Bladderbulge did when 'e was knottin' up the fox, an' that was ter leave a loose end o' rope free. As soon as Rustbane landed in the water, right after him went our little friend here.”

She gestured at Rasco. The little mouse grinned and bowed.

“I landed in the water,” he said, taking up the story, “and, oh, the waves were so high and the water so cold for a diminutive mouse like moi. But I plucked all my courage into a single pluck, and I swam to where the great big fox was splooshing in the sea, and I seized the end of cord Bladderbulge had left and put it between my teeth. With a cry of ‘bon voyage!' (my little joke, you see) I began to swim—”

“Very little,” said Mrs. Pickleberry firmly.

“—back to the . . . What?”

“'Very little,' I said.”

“Pardon?”

“Your joke.”

“I'm sorry, I don't understand.”

“Ye said yer joke was little.”

“I did. I know that.”

“I was just saying it was very little.”

“It was. Is that not what I said?”

“No. You just said it was little. Not very little.”

Rasco shrugged and put his paws up as if pleading to the heavens. “Little, very little, what difference does it make?”

“All the difference in the—look, just get on with it.”

“That is what I was trying to do, Three Pins.”

“Din' look like it to me.” She sniffed.

Rasco looked as if he might be tempted at a moment's notice to strangle someone, but carried on where he'd left off.

“I swam back to the Shadeblaze with the loose end of rope. As planned, Daphne was hanging a much longer piece of rope from a porthole of her cabin near the water level, and it was the work of a moment to tie the two ends together. Then, once she had pulled me into the cabin alongside her, all we had to do was watch Rustbane fall away behind the stern of the Shadeblaze until everyone else had got bored with the spectacle. As soon as that happened, we began pulling him in, like he was a mighty fish and we were the fisherfolk who'd caught him. It was a hard haul for two creatures so inconsequentially sized as ourselves, but luckily our two friends, Bladderbulge and Cheesefang, soon came to aid us, and before too long the good cap'n was bobbing in the wake below our porthole.

“Then came the part most difficile.”

Rasco looked around him as if, even now, there might be hostile spies listening. Sylvester idly wondered if anyone else had ever called Cap'n Terrigan Rustbane “good” before.

“You see,” said Rasco, “Cap'n Rustbane had to wiggle until—”

“Like a eel,” interposed Mrs. Pickleberry.

“Like an eel,” Rasco conceded. “He had to wriggle like an eel until he was directly against the hull of the Shadeblaze, his back to its timbers, and rub up and down against them, worrying at them so the sharp blade of the knife could cut through the rope.”

“Ahhhhh,” said Jasper. “So that's how you did it. The edge would never have cut through all the layers of rope but it didn't have to. Just one piece of rope, so long as it was the right piece of rope.”

“Then,” agreed Rasco, “all the rest would unravel. That was our plan, you see. And the loose coils of rope would drift away in the ocean current under the cover of darkness, so that by morning they'd be long gone and none aboard would be any the wiser.”

“While Rustbane would have crawled in through the porthole and be safely sleeping it off in Daphne's cabin, so that—”

“Not exactly,” said Rasco with a sidelong glance at Mrs. Pickleberry.

Jasper did a double-take then smiled. “Of course. The porthole might be big enough for you to crawl in and out of, but foxes are much larger animals than mice, and lemmings for that matter, so Rustbane wouldn't have been able to get through.”

“It wasn't just that,” said Rasco in a very low, embarrassed voice.

Jasper narrowed his eyes. “Then what was it?”

“My good friend Three Pins here, she—”

“Out with it!”

“There's the matter of whether it would be seemly to share her cabin with a—”

“With a fox? She's a lemming, for goodness' sake!”

Mrs. Pickleberry's expression was wrought of stone. It was clear she wasn't going to say nuffink, not nohow.

“She is,” said Rasco, in the tones of one venturing into a maze that might prove to have no exit, “a female lemming.”

“Pshaw!” exclaimed Jasper.

Viola bridled in defense of her mother. “It's easy enough for you to say ‘pshaw!'”

Looks like there might be stormy times ahead between Viola and her father-in-law too, mused Sylvester. Perhaps it might be best if my darling and I found a desert island somewhere to settle down.

“You're right,” said Jasper. “Shall I say it again?”

“My mother was rightly concerned about the … proprieties.”

Rasco cleared his throat, a sound like someone scraping claws along a nail file. A very small nail file.

“It was not Three Pins who was concerned about the, ah, proprieties of sharing a cabin with Cap'n Rustbane. It was, ahem—”

He stopped speaking. Everyone else except Mrs. Pickleberry stopped breathing as the implications sank in.

“Mom?” said Viola at last.

This is nuts, Sylvester decided. A moment ago we were all ready to ridicule Daphne for declining to share her cabin with a fox. Now we're ready to criticize her because it was the fox who got himself tied up in ridiculous knots.

It is at moments like these that imminent sons-in-law lay the foundations for years of future happy coexistence.

“Well,” he said. “What a stupid damn fox.”

After a long, reflective silence, Rasco somewhat tentatively continued.

“That Cap'n Rustbane, he is the athletic one, no? Even though he'd been in the icy waters for more hours than there are claws on a mouse's paw, once he'd shed the ropes that bound him, Rustbane wasted no time about scaling the side of the Shadeblaze. He climbed over the taffrail under cover of night, and found his way to the galley, where Bladderbulge hid him until—”

“Until we ran aground near the cannibal island,” concluded Sylvester.

Rasco nodded.

“Even after that, once Jeopord sent us ashore to what the ocelot thought would almost certainly be our gruesome deaths.”

“Gruesome,” said the mouse, nodding again. “Yes. I like that. Gruesome. Deaths? Not so good.”

“It was only once Jeopord and his landing party had got the Shadeblaze afloat and set off for the island themselves, hoping to find that the cannibals had killed us or we'd killed the cannibals – preferably both – that Rustbane came out of hiding.”

“You have hit the nail right on the thumb.” It was an expression Rasco had used before.

“So, Rustbane cared no more than Jeopord did what happened to us?”

A new voice spoke from somewhere in the darkness behind Sylvester.

“Of course I cared. Aren't you all, all of you, the very jewels of my heart?”

“You've been 'ittin' the grog,” said Mrs. Pickleberry breaking what was, for her, a very long silence. “You's smashed, Terry, isn't yer?”

The gray fox, teetering as he ventured into the glow cast by the brazier, thought about this for some while longer than he should have.

“I am,” he concluded, “stone-cold drunk.”

No one spoke.

“It's rather like being stone-cold sober,” Rustbane said, “only with one very significant difference.”

He looked from face to face, as if expecting somebody to start a guessing game as to what the difference might be.

“Good,” he said, when no one spoke. “I suppose you've been wondering what I'm planning to do next?”

“No, in fact,” said Sylvester.

“Then you should have been,” said Rustbane airily. “Always important to be thinking about your skipper's intentions.”

“Well, we weren't.”

“I'll tell you anyway.”

“Please do.”

“Not that I need to, you understand.”

“We understand.”

“You'll be aware that my crew of this joyous bark has been severely depleted by events of late?”

“Of course.”

“The Shadeblaze requires a full complement if she's to return to her former ways of buccaneering and ocean roving.” Rustbane seemed to be getting into his narrative swing, despite or perhaps because of the grog. “Accordingly, it is my plan to sail with this skeletal crew only as far as Hangman's Haven, then pick up, by bribery, coercion or just plain brute force, another forty or fifty cully boys of suitable skills and criminal temperament.”

“That may be your intention,” said Sylvester very carefully, “but it's not in fact what's going to happen.”

Rustbane sighed histrionically and struck a pose with his fist on his waist. “Oh no, not another mutiny, so soon after the last. I don't think my nerves could take it, dearie.”

“Not a mutiny,” said Sylvester.

The gray fox clapped. “Oh, good. So, what makes you think I'm going to obey your … requests? Come on, Sylvester. Do tell.”

“You're going to do what I say because I know where the real treasure of the Zindars is hidden.”

Jasper and Viola stared at Sylvester as if he'd gone crazy, or betrayed them or both. Despite all previous evidence to the contrary, he knew what he was doing. This was the new, Zindar-influenced Sylvester. He'd never thought as clearly as this in his life before. It was like bathing in cool spring water.

Rustbane froze, instantly sober. “But what about that huge edifice in the cave?”

“That was just the second prize, the runner-up award.”

“Then it's back to the island we go, and this time we're not leaving it 'til – by jingo! – Cap'n Terrigan Rustbane has the treasure of the Zindars trickling between his clammy little paws. Only” – there was a long silence, broken only by the slapping of wavelets against the Shadeblaze's timbers – “how do I know I can trust you?”

“What makes you think that you can't?”

“Let me see now,” said Rustbane, beginning to pace up and down on the deck, his chin in his paw. “There's the fact that you been long enough among pirates not to know truth if it came up and bit you in the leg. That's just for starters. Then there's the fact you might be thinking if you hoodwink ol' Terrigan Rustbane, genial son o' a gun as he is, you might be able to leave him in the lurch somehow. I didn't get to where I am in the world by not suspecting each and everyone, you know. It's the pirate way, see?”

“I believes Sylvester.” It was Daphne who'd spoken. “Even though he is a bit of an ar—”

“Mo–om!”

Rustbane nodded. Clearly, he was more inclined to take Mrs. Pickleberry's word for it than he was just about anyone else's. Put that another way: He was less disinclined to take Mrs. Pickleberry's word for it. She had, after all, masterminded the scheme that had saved his life. And she'd sacrificed Elvira for his sake.

“So, you think I should trust him?”

“I feels it in me waters, yes.”

The gray fox returned his gaze to Sylvester. “And where might the treasure be?”

Sylvester inclined his head with a smile. “We've been through all this before.”

“Threats of torture?”

“Yes.”

“Threats to kill your girlfriend? What was it dear Jeopord used to call her? Little Miss Droppydrawers?”

Sylvester refused to rise to the insult. “Yes, you tried those too.”

“Threats to hold my breath and scream?”

“No.”

“Should I try it now?”

“Not unless you actually want to hold your breath and scream, I wouldn't.”

Rustbane twisted his mouth vexedly. “We seem to be at an impasse.”

“We do indeed.”

“Supposing, just supposing, I was to entertain for one minute the conceivability of concurring with your wishes by way of bargaining for the location of Throatsplitter Adamite's treasure. Just supposing this – and it ain't no more than a fairy tale we're entertaining here, you understand – what exactly is it you'd be a-wanting me to do rather than head for Hangman's Haven as fast as the Shadeblaze's somewhat decrepit sails would permit?”

“Take us home to Foxglove.”

The fox appeared baffled. “Foxglove?”

“The home of the lemmings. Where you seized us.”

“Oh, that Foxglove! When you're as experienced a traveler as me too many of the places you've been tend to blur into one, as you'll understand. Daffy little place. Has a big library. An even bigger temple. A mayor and a high priest you'd rather flush down the jakes than say a how-d'ye-do to. I remember it. A nice spot to settle down if you want to watch your brain cells atrophy, I'd say.”

Again, Sylvester kept his temper in check. This was his home town the fox was slandering. He's just trying to needle you. Don't let him get away with it. He could see Mrs. Pickleberry was coming to the boil and he gestured to Jasper that he should try to calm Three Pins down.

“That's it,” said Sylvester. “Foxglove.”