The Tides of Avarice (29 page)

Two gizzards, in point of fact, because I had not been idle all this while. As soon as Chainfist Garth was sent off to meet his Maker, who must have been hoping the encounter could be put off indefinitely, he was followed, courtesy of my good self, by the very individual who'd despatched him along that road. An individual whose name I never did learn, even though, as I returned into the roistering coziness of The Moldy Claw's taproom, I thanked him silently for all the information with which he'd supplied me.

I was greeted by Jeopord.

“A new coat ye've got yerself, Skipper?” he said.

I touched the side of my nose in that universal gesture to indicate things better left unsaid. “I found myself getting a touch cold out there. Now, be there any o' that fine mulled ale I might sup to warm my soul a fraction?”

The ocelot laughed and asked me no further. Yet, often since that night I've asked myself if his suspicions were more roused than was at the time apparent. I have never been by nature much fussed about the prescriptions of fashion, nor about the stylishness of my own apparel. Leave such considerations to eyebrow-plucking fops like Rustbane, I say, while the rest of us boyo buccaneers get on with the serious business of pirating. But it must have seemed odd to more than merely Jeopord that I should depart the taproom with moderately respectable attire and return clad in a coat which had clearly been disreputable for many a long year and was now further disreputablized by the recent addition of a few knife holes and an effusive outburst of fresh bloodstains.

That I should have taken so long acquiring this novel garment must also have been fit matter for curiosity among my fellows, I think.

Still, none of them questioned me further at the time, and I assumed the matter must have been soon forgotten.

“He assumed wrong, the dunderwit,” said Mrs. Pickleberry tersely.

Sylvester had become so lost in the narrative by the old buccaneer, so completely transported into that long-ago courtyard where blood flowed as miscreants died, that the sudden, grating intrusion of Mrs. Pickleberry's voice made him start and almost drop the logbook.

“What do you mean?” he said once he'd got his breath back.

“Ain't it obvious? Jeopord remembered that night all too well, and, if he didn't, his crewmate, Hamish, did. Perhaps lots o' other crewmates too. They musta been talkin' all over this sorry barque about the night their Cap'n got his” – she waggled her fingers at her throat to indicate heavy sarcasm – “new coat. New coat my—”

“Mo–om!” said Viola.

“So that by the time Rustbane got to the Shadeblaze, whenever that was,” said Sylvester excitedly, “people like Jeopord were all ripe for his talk of mutiny.”

“That's the way I'm reck'nin' it,” asserted Mrs. Pickleberry her pipe clamped more firmly than ever between her jaws. Fortunately for Viola and Sylvester, it had gone out some while earlier, and she'd been too engrossed in Adamite's narrative to remember to light it.

It was vital, Sylvester suddenly realized, that she be kept engrossed. Accordingly he seized up Adamite's journal and started to read once more …

I had thought that, with the map in my possession, it would be a matter of mere moments before I was able to plot a course for the last hiding place of the magical chest of the Zindars, but few things ever go as smoothly as we anticipate them going. When we finally got back aboard the Shadeblaze after our carousing at The Moldy Claw, dawn was already fumbling its way over the horizon. Besides, I was too confused of wit by the strong ale I had been consuming to do anything more than fall into my berth and hope as I fell that no one had moved it in my absence. It occurred to me as I slumped off into sleep that my life might depend on my keeping it a secret from my men that I had come into the possession of a treasure map, at least for a while. I knew I had their steadfast loyalty, because any who'd exposed himself as insufficiently loyal had long ago departed for Davy Jones's Locker, but at the same time I was as aware as any that the loyalty of a pirate becomes a malleable entity when the prospect of undiscovered treasure is in the air.

Was there any among them I trusted enough to guard my back?

This was the question that plagued me the following morning, and what plagued me even plaguier was the answer, which was a resounding, “no.” Not even Jeopord, to whom I had given everything that he regarded as precious in life, not even him (and I was right in this, was I not?).

My analysis of Barterley Smitt's map was something that must be done under conditions of strictest privacy. Although all of the crew were under instructions never to enter their Cap'n's cabin without first knocking and seeking permission, I knew of old that secrets stored there did not remain secrets for long. There were too many comings and goings, especially in the times when I was elsewhere and going about my duties, for the place to be secure. If I started putting it under padlock and chain, the gossip would soon be racing like wildfire as to why I had taken this precaution, and again any hopes of secrecy would rapidly be forfeit.

There was only one option open to me.

I called to me the ship's carpenter, a scurvy ferret by the name of Levantes, and impressed upon him, under threat of a horrifically prolonged and extraordinarily gruesome death, that everything transacted between himself and myself should go with the pair of us to our salty graves. He knew my threat was not an idle one. Like any of the buccaneers of the good ship Shadeblaze, he'd seen the inventiveness of the punishments I meted out when my wrath was sufficiently roused, and he'd no wish that the same sort of fate should become his own. O' course, I had no intention whatsoever of keeping Levantes along for one moment longer than it took him to complete the task I had in mind, but I did not explain that to him. Besides, at least this way his death would be quick, quiet and relatively painless as opposed to slow, screaming and filled with unbearable agony.

What I wanted Levantes to do was this: If my own cabin could never be made a secure enough place for me to enact my studies of Barterley Smitt's sea chart, then I must have me another cabin made, a cabin that was itself secret. There were various places I knew about within the structure of the Shadeblaze that had been built by the shipwright as hideouts for the captain and his officers should the ship be boarded by foe. I was certain none other than myself knew of these – none other than myself and, now, Levantes. To him I revealed the location of one of these hideouts and gave my instructions as to how I desired it to be converted into a pleasant, but covert, study for my own personal use. This meant that not only must its existence be cloaked, but my access to it and exits from it be capable of complete concealment.

He was a fine carpenter, that ferret!

I sent all of the crew ashore for a long weekend in the fleshpots of Darkwater. All of the crew except a skeleton complement of perhaps half a dozen, the minimum necessary to keep the Shadeblaze afloat. Then I set Levantes to work constructing the new chamber. Since I might be spending long hours therein, I was determined that it be not overly spartan; his first instruction concerned an en suite jakes. That completed, I gave him a list of furnishings and accoutrments that included …

“He does rather go on for a bit here, the old rogue,” said Sylvester, breaking off from his reading to paw his way through the next few pages of the Cap'n's spidery, blotted handwriting. “There's a long list of everything he insisted should be incorporated into his new … his new den, really, because it's obvious he'd begun thinking of it as a secret personal luxury far beyond any strict utility it might have in connection with his research into the …”

He looked up and saw that Viola and her mother were staring at him, jaws slack.

“Oh, I'm sorry. I'm beginning to talk like old Josiah wrote, amn't I?”

“Uh-huh,” Viola concurred.

“It's a bad habit of mine.”

“Uh-huh,” said Viola again.

“Celadon's commented on it more than once.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I get the same way when I've been perusing musty old annals for too long, you see, and—”

“Sylvester.”

“Yes?”

“Just skip the old buzzard's list of household knick-knacks and get back to the story. I'm bursting to find out what happens next!”

“I'm just bursting,” interposed Mrs. Pickleberry sourly. “'Ow many more pages o' that thing yer got still to go?”

“Um, quite a lot.”

“Well, just wait yerselves up for me while I go and get my nose powdered.”

With rather more bustle than was strictly necessary, Mrs. Pickleberry left the room.

It wasn't long before she was back. If she noticed the blush that had invaded her daughter's cheeks she made no comment upon it.

“Get a move on then, laddie.”

Mrs. Pickleberry settled herself back onto the cabin trunk she'd been using as a seat, fastened her lips aggressively around the stem of her pipe, and focused upon Sylvester the incandescent stare of an audience that's been forced to wait too long for the star attraction to come onstage.

“Ah, right,” said Sylvester. He leafed through a few pages until he found where Captain Adamite's list ended, cleared his throat, and resumed reading …

The last item that Levantes installed in my new cabin was the great lantern. Without it, study of Barterley Smitt's map would have been impossible, yet I had sentimental reasons for not commencing that study until my cabin was fully rendered. Not to mention the very pragmatic one that, before I risked removing the map from the lining of the old and bloodstained coat, it would be wisest if my little friend, Levantes, were feeding the fishes. That way he couldn't inadvertently, in his cups or out of them, betray the existence of my secret chamber.

The lantern itself was a masterpiece, a rare antique that I had picked up many years ago during my voyage to the Great Misunderstood Continent. It took the form of a …

“More boring stuff here about the Cap'n's sense of interior decor, yah-de-yah-de-yah-de,” lied Sylvester, hoping it wasn't obvious to the two females that he'd begun to sweat profusely. If the continent's artisans designed all their furnishings like that it was no wonder the place was misunderstood.

“I'll just skip past this bit,” he said, “and …”

“But I've always been interested in design,” said Viola, eyes aglow.

“Not this design, I can assure you,” Sylvester muttered hastily, turning a page or two.

“Later?”

“Later, perhaps. For now …”

I had underestimated the ferret. Not just in the sense that his craftsmanship in the construction of the secret cabin surpassed anything I would have deemed him capable of, but also that he successfully pre-empted my disposal of his poxy carcass. Less than an hour after he'd accomplished his task, I crept to his bunk with my trustiest garrotte in hand, only to find he'd skipped his passage. Jeopord had returned from Darkwater prematurely, and so the ocelot and I combed the Shadeblaze from stem to stern in search of the little rodent, but we found neither hide nor hair.

“Where in blue blazes could he have gone?” wailed Jeopord petulantly at last. “And why?”

I had, of course, declined to take him into my confidence about the new cabin.

At last, I had to concede defeat. Wherever Levantes had taken himself, it was someplace we weren't going to find him, not if we searched for half a year. Darkwater had swallowed him up, the way that foul port had swallowed up so many.

“Never mind,” I said to Jeopord. “Carpenters aren't hard to come by. It's just that Levantes was especially skilled at his task.”

Jeopord gave me what was, with hindsight, a look of askance, but he said nothing.

Two days later, we set sail from Darkwater, heading due south toward the equator.

It was as good a direction as any.

Still I had not had the opportunity to look at Barterley Smitt's map. The coat lay over the back of the leather armchair that stood in front of my secret writing desk in my secret study, but I dared not start unpicking the seams while we were still within sight of port lest someone spy me in the act, seize the chart and vanish as Levantes had vanished.

That night, as the last images of Darkwater sank below the horizon behind us, I waited until all the crew bar the nightwatchmen were asleep, then, a guttering candle held high above my head, I furtively crept down the companionway from the main deck to my secret chamber. There was something in me of shame, I confess, that the all-powerful captain of a corsair vessel should be slithering thus in subterfuge aboard his own craft. Yet, there was also tumultuous exultation bursting in me like mighty ocean breakers come halfway around the world to crash upon the sand, for was it not this very night that I would—

“Aw, come off of it, Josiah!” cried Mrs Pickleberry, sitting bolt upright on her sea chest as if emerging from a trance, her pipe held in front of her like an offensive weapon (which was, Sylvester saw in a moment of insight, in a sense what it was). “We don't need to know about yer innermost motivations and junk like that,” Viola's mother continued. “Enough already!”

“I think he's just about to get back into the thick of things,” Sylvester nervously assured her. “He seems just, er, to have got a bit carried away there.”

Mrs. Pickleberry wrinkled her nose. “Well, get along with it then, you great lummox.”

The stitched seams of that antique coat did not long resist my ruthless dagger tip, and it must have been less than a minute before I had the garment reduced to its component pieces in front of me. And there, just as Chainfist's assassin had promised back in the courtyard of The Moldy Claw, was the map Barterley Smitt had secreted within. But what that worthy had not elaborated, for indeed he could not have known, was that someone's blade (perhaps that of the beggar who had slain Smitt, perhaps that of Chainfist when in turn ridding the beggar of the garment, perhaps both) had sundered the map twice, slicing it into three neatly separated portions. Those same lunges had covered the yellowing parchment with copious flows of blood, which it was going to be my task to leach out of the fabric so the lines and inscriptions would be legible once more. I knew this could be effected; I also knew it would take me many long hours and my full reserves of fastidious patience before the chore was done, but seeing the map in three gave me a notion.