The Tides of Avarice (52 page)

“They would have lived happily ever after, if it hadn't been for the fact that we lemmings, well, we're not nearly as stupid these days as our ancestors were – in fact, we've become one of the more intelligent species of Sagaria – but—”

Jasper caught sight of Pimplebrains's wrathful glower and gulped noisily. “Along with beavers,” he said hastily. “Mighty intelligent animals beavers are too. Certainly more intelligent than lemmings. Especially the ones that have hooks for hands.”

Pimplebrains' glower subsided and Jasper resumed his account.

“Our big problem, as lemmings, is that we're gullible. When we settled down, leaving behind our existence as wild foragers, we discovered the great advantages of sharing information with each other. In a way, it was a part of our learning to discover that the best way toward a new source of food isn't necessarily in a dead straight line. Today, if ever we did need to move to richer pastures, we'd send out scouts in all directions, and when they got back and told us what they'd found we'd believe their accounts. That's the sensible way to do it. That's the intelligent way to do it, as I'm sure our beaver friend would agree.”

“Harrumph,” conceded Pimplebrains.

“But,” Jasper went on smoothly, “our natural acceptance of what other people tell us is also a great vulnerability. We're instinctively truthful and, while we know we ought to scrutinize every statement for possible falsity, in practice we tend to believe whatever we're told.”

Sylvester groaned. He remembered how, half a world away, he'd been hoodwinked thoroughly by a gray fox who called himself Robin Fourfeathers, even though it'd have been obvious to the most simple-minded of lemming newborns that the fox was lying through his teeth – and he had far too many teeth to lie through. Sylvester had believed Cap'n Terrigan Rustbane because lemmings did believe what they were told.

His father was grinning at him. “It's been far too many years since last we were together, young fellow, but I can bet I'm reading the thoughts that're going through your mind.”

Somehow, Sylvester felt, it didn't seem as bad confessing to your father what a fathead you'd been as it was confessing to anyone else, or maybe it felt worse – he couldn't decide which, but he confessed anyway. He was still in the midst of the warm glow that had begun to envelop him when he'd figured out that the strange, shabbily clad lemming was his long-lost father.

And he was still swathed in the wonder he'd felt when Jasper had explained how he, Jasper, was still alive.

Wonder, yes, but fury also.

There were treacheries so deep they could never be forgiven, and not all of them were piratical ones. Indeed, the villainies of rogues and murderers like Cap'n Josiah Adamite and Cap'n Terrigan Rustbane, may Lhaeminguas in an especially forgiving moment rest their souls, seemed almost negligible alongside what had been done to the citizens of Foxglove by the successive generations of—

“The Hairbell family,” said his father. “They were the first to realize how we lemmings could be exploited, and they didn't wait so much as an indrawn breath before they started doing just that.”

“The Hairbell family?” asked Viola, perplexed.

“What makes you think your present Mayor Hairbell's the first of his lineage?” said Jasper.

“He may be the last,” snarled Pimplebrains, who was clearly moved by Jasper's account. Sylvester had a fleeting notion that Pimplebrains might be a lemming in exceptionally ambitious disguise, but dismissed it. It was easy to see, though, that the big beaver was infuriated by Hairbell's actions and rooting on behalf of the lemmings of Foxglove.

“There've been others?” Viola said.

“Right back to the very first days,” said Jasper. “Some of them have been called Hairbell, most have given themselves other names, but they've all had this thing in common. They all seem to spring up out of nowhere. What they say is that they're long and loyal citizens of Foxglove. The truth is that they hide in Mugwort Forest behind Foxglove and raise families there, and whenever one of the old mayors looks like he's just about to die there's someone new that comes along and starts jockeying for that office.”

Sylvester blinked rapidly. This was all becoming too much to take in in a single sitting.

“You mean we've been subjected to a long conspiracy by the Hairbell family?” he said.

“Exactly,” said Jasper.

“Why would they exploit us?”

“Because they were greedy.”

Pimplebrains looked confused. “They was?”

Jasper started tapping deliberately on the floor with the claws of his right forepaw, as if he were trying not just to say his words but write them down.

“Just because lemmings are small, and just because they're gullible, doesn't mean they're without resources.”

“I bin learning that.” Pimplebrains looked at Sylvester, then at Viola.

“Foxglove is perhaps the richest community in the whole of Sagaria,” said Jasper, leaning forward.

Pimplebrains's jaw dropped. So did Sylvester's.

“It's not something the lemmings advertise a lot,” said Jasper.

“I imagine not,” Sylvester said, once he'd cleared the dryness from his mouth. He imagined the scrolls at the Library might be worth a little, but surely not so very much?

“It's Mugwort Forest that holds the secret,” said Jasper.

“It has a secret?” Every now and then Sylvester thought he should venture into Mugwort Forest but, as he approached it, the ominous darkness between the tall trees and the creaking of the trunks as the wind blew them against each other would make the stiff hair stand up all over his body and he'd turn around and pretend he'd never really intended to go there in the first place. “What's in Mugwort Forest?” he said.

“What's in Mugwort Forest,” said Jasper, “is the treasure chest of the Zindars.”

“But that's impossible!” cried Viola.

Jasper smiled at her. “Why do you think so?”

“Because the treasure chest of the Zindars is here!”

“What makes you believe that?”

“The diary of Throatsplitter Adamite,” she said, looking to Sylvester for support. “What we were told by Cap'n Rustbane. The reason we're here.” She waved her forepaws. “Jeopord's obsession.”

Jasper's eyes narrowed. “Jeopord?”

“We've not quite told you everything,” interposed Pimplebrains ponderously.

There was another long explanation.

“You mean they're out there?” said Jasper at last.

“Yes,” Sylvester replied, “but we can deal with them later. You were telling us about Mugwort Forest, Dad.”

And, he thought, a very long time ago you were supposed to be watching me in my swing and you forgot about it. I love you very much, Dad, I could hardly help but do so, yet you're not the best father there's ever been.

Of course, he said nothing of this.

He just smiled.

The way lemmings do.

“After the last battle between the Zindars and their interstellar foes,” said Jasper wearily, as if this were a tale he might have told too many times before, “the only thing the Zindars wanted to do was flee – flee as far and as fast as they possibly could if it'd preserve their leathery hides. We think of them as gallant heroes, but it wasn't quite like that. They weren't the bravest of folk, the Zindars. They came to Sagaria because they thought it'd offer them a safe refuge. They didn't much care about the fates of the people who were already here. They must have been running since long before the first lemming took its first steps under the gaze of Sagaria's sun, and they weren't going to stop running any time soon. In a way, they were like lemmings, only their flights were on a vastly huger scale.

“They fled across interstellar space. Our ancestors fled across land and water. There's no real difference.” Jasper waved his paw at the unnaturally greenish light, the tidy rows of plants and the metal walls of the Zindar vessel. “Just technology, which is only a matter of convenience.”

“Mugwort Forest?” said Pimplebrains. “You were goin' to tell us about it.”

“The Zindars recognized their spiritual kin,” said Jasper.

Sylvester stared at him. “Lemmings?”

“But of course.”

“So they gave their treasure chest to the lemmings?”

“You're almost as bright as I was, back in the day,” said Jasper.

“And the lemmings hid it in Mugwort Forest?”

“Not immediately.”

“When?”

“After a few centuries had passed. After our ancestors had realized the funny-looking box they'd been given might hold something of value. After they'd broken about a million teeth trying to bite through the pretty brass lock on the outside of the chest. It was then that it dawned on them that this was an object that would probably be more valuable preserved than violated.”

“So they hid it in Mugwort Forest to keep it safe?” said Viola.

“That's about the long and the short of it,” Jasper said.

“And it's been lying there ever since?” While the two younger lemmings marveled over ancient mysteries and their spiritual implications, Pimplebrains was of a more pragmatic bent. “So we could just go there and dig it up if we knew where to look?”

“But you wouldn't know where to look,” said Jasper. He smiled at Sylvester, then at Viola and finally at Pimplebrains. “It's like the cleft at the back of the cave the cannibals call their Larder. You could think you were looking right at it when, in actual fact, you'd be looking right past it.”

“I don't understand,” Pimplebrains said.

“Nor me,” added Sylvester.

Jasper sighed. “It's something the Zindars learned how to do,” he began. “Why do you think they were able to live on Sagaria for so long before their enemies found them?”

An idea was beginning to form in Sylvester's mind. “Was it because this world of Sagaria is like a tiny island in an enormous ocean where there are countless thousands of other tiny islands, and all of them are a very long way apart?” His mouth went dry as he thought of the immensity of an ocean in which Sagaria was just a minute speck of land. “Going from one island to the next searching for the one that sheltered the Zindars could take thousands of years, maybe longer even than that.”

Jasper shot him a respectful grin. “You're beginning to comprehend something of where the Zindars and their enemies came from, my boy, and you're right. It would have taken a long time to find the Zindars' hiding place even at the best of times, but the Zindars made the search even more difficult using this … this concealment trick of theirs.”

He paused, staring at the ceiling far overhead.

“I don't know,” he continued more slowly, “if it was a mental ability of theirs or if it was some kind of a machine they constructed that deflected people's perceptions, that blinded them to the light, you could say. The machines the Zindars made, a lot of them weren't like anything anyone on Sagaria would recognize as being a machine.” He gestured around him. “Some of them are obviously machines, even if we haven't the slightest glimmering of an idea of how they work or even what they do. But there are others …”

Jasper stopped again, seemed to conduct a brief inner dialogue with himself, then shrugged.

“It's hard to explain,” he said. “It's even hard to think about and that's coming from someone who's done the next best thing to dwelling among living, breathing Zindars for all these years. That's what it's been like, holed up here in their vessel. I lose count of the number of times each day I expect to turn my head and see a Zindar looking right back at me. Never happened yet, but I'd not like to bet my life on the fact that it never will.”

Viola shuffled slightly where she sat and Jasper obviously realized he'd strayed off the point. Since he and Sylvester had pulled themselves free of that first, wonder-filled embrace, there'd been a lot of straying off the point. Father and son had so much they wanted to tell each other that again and again they found themselves trying to say it all at once.

“Whatever the truth,” said Jasper, “I'd been living here a few months – at least, I think it was a few months, although it's impossible to be sure of the passage of time in here – when I discovered that a few of the Zindar … talents were beginning to rub off on me. One of them was this trick of hiding things in plain view, like the cleft at the back of the Larder or the chest in Mugwort Forest.”

Pimplebrains was regarding Jasper with a coldly speculative gaze. “You say there are others of these tricks you've discovered how to do?”

“Not discovered exactly,” said Jasper, leaning forward a little in the direction of the weatherbeaten old pirate. “That'd imply I set out in search of the Zindar abilities. No, this was just something that happened to me. That's how I know the whole story of the Zindars without anybody telling me it. I just simply know. The only discovery involved was discovering that these abilities had somehow seeped into me, from the air the Zindars breathed all those aeons ago, perhaps, or the walls they brushed against, or—”

“Or,” said Sylvester in another unexpected leap of the imagination, “from the plants you ate.” He gazed at the growing crops. It seemed odd they were perfectly motionless. Always you expected crops to move, if only slightly, in the breeze. “Those are Zindar fruits and vegetables, you know, Dad.”

Again, Jasper shot him that respectful glance. “I can see there's something Zindar rubbing off on you too, son. Haven't you noticed?”

“I have,” said Viola. She smiled at Sylvester. “Your eyes are brighter and you seem to be thinking a whole lot better and more quickly. At first I thought it was just the joy of being reunited with your dad, but then I realized the same sort of changes were going on in me as well.”