The Tides of Avarice (6 page)

Then he heard something in the stillness that had fallen between them.

“What's that?”

“I heard it too,” she said. “On the other side of the—”

“Like someone—”

“—gasping and gulping for breath—”

“—when they've been kicked in the stomach.”

“What a violent thing to say, Sylvester.”

“Well, ah, I've seen it happen on the sports field and …”

“But never done it?”

“Of course not! What kind of a lemming do you think I am?”

“Why're we talking about you? Perhaps there's someone in trouble over there.”

They both stopped talking and, as if in response, the sound of someone gasping for breath was joined by another strange noise, like something struggling and squelching about in the mud. They could just make out, on the far side of the river, a place where the tops of the rushes were twisting and thrashing.

Then a figure burst into clear view on the opposite bank.

A tall, slinky ferret.

As a rule, lemmings steered as far clear of ferrets as possible. The skilled predators had an agreement with their more placid allies that there was to be no snacking, but every now and then the ferrets forgot. This particular ferret, though, didn't look as if he'd present any danger. Clutching his shoulder as if to staunch the flow of blood, he was barely able to stand on his own two feet.

“What's he doing so far from home?” Viola whispered.

“Help!” called the ferret weakly.

Although ferrets occasionally wandered far afield on quests of one inscrutable nature or another, for the most part they dwelled in their own settlement on the far side of Mugwort Forest. But Mugwort Forest was behind Sylvester and Viola, on the same side of the river as they were sitting. The wounded ferret was coming from the direction of the Great Wet Without End. Injured as he was, he must be trying to make his way home – perhaps to die. Except, of course, nobody could remember anyone ever coming home from the Great Wet Without End.

The ferret wobbled a couple of times on the edge of the water and then, with a despairing cry, fell in. He managed to push himself to his knees in the shallows, and started floundering towards them, but his energies shortly gave out and once more he was submerged. He was in more danger than he knew. The river bottom dropped off sharply, the shallows by the shore giving way abruptly to treacherous depths.

“Come on!” cried Viola, throwing her rod to one side.

Before Sylvester could move a muscle, she had hurled herself into the black water and was swimming strongly toward the commotion that marked where the ferret was struggling.

Sylvester dithered for just a few seconds longer. Ferrets were notoriously good swimmers – far better than lemmings, in fact. They were certainly whole orders of magnitude better than Sylvester. There was every chance this particular ferret, though wounded, didn't need help from anybody, least of all a pair of lemmings.

He stopped his thoughts, aghast at himself. What was he thinking?

Ferret or no ferret, Viola could be in danger!

He plunged headfirst into the cold river, and was immediately forced downstream by its slow but relentless current. He came to the surface gasping, and for a moment was completely disoriented, the water streaming in his eyes. Then the sounds of splashing penetrated his blind funk, and turning his head he could see that Viola had already reached the struggling stranger. She was looking back at Sylvester, clearly wanting his help.

“I'm coming,” he cried, though most of what came out of his mouth was water he'd been in the process of swallowing.

Swimming did not come naturally to Sylvester. Like most lemmings he was not frightened of the water, he was just slow at moving through it. The uncoordinated movements of his limbs as he pulled himself along could not have been more different from the sleek efficiency with which Viola swam.

It seemed to take him forever to reach her, but at last he was treading water beside her.

“Where's the ferret?”

She nodded grimly downward. “I've got his leg. At least, I think it's his leg. Every time I try to grab any other part of him he just slithers out of my grip.”

Sylvester groped underwater and got hold of what seemed to be some kind of leathery garment. A jerkin? The whole thing had happened so fast and he'd been so startled that he couldn't remember what the ferret had been wearing.

Hoping for the best, he hauled with all his might.

He was in luck. It was indeed the ferret's jerkin he'd managed to snag. The back of the injured creature rose above the surface.

Letting go of the ferret's leg, Viola took a couple of strokes and fished beneath the water. Soon she had the ferret's head out of the water.

“I can't keep this up for long!” she panted. “Try to roll him over.”

Sylvester gave a heave on the leather jerkin, and obediently the ferret's body turned. The only trouble was that the turning had the effect of submerging Sylvester himself. He didn't want to lose his handhold, but it was either let go or drown.

He came up sputtering. Now that the ferret was on his back, it was easier for Viola to keep the stranger's nose and mouth out of the water, but the current was doing its best to tear the slippery body from her.

Flailing blindly, Sylvester got a foreleg around the ferret's waist. With his other three limbs he strove to keep himself afloat.

“My hero,” cried Viola tersely. “Let's get him to shore.”

During the ordeal the current had been pulling them along, and they were now perhaps fifty or sixty yards downstream from where, just a couple of minutes ago, they'd been placidly fishing and canoodling. Luckily, they'd also drifted quite a lot closer to the bank.

A floating log appeared out of the night, coming at them. Sylvester thought it was going to brain him, but at the last moment an eddy made it swerve to one side and instead he was able to snatch a protruding branch as it swept past.

“Hold on!” he shouted at Viola.

He sensed rather than saw her nodding her agreement before a gush of water, created by the slowly turning log, splashed him in the face.

Now that he had the log to hold on to he didn't think they would drown immediately, a fear that had loomed very large in his mind ever since he'd dived into the water. Nonetheless, they had to get to the bank or they ran the very real risk of being carried out into the infinite expanse of the Great Wet. He kicked with his hindlegs, hoping against hope to be able to influence the log's movement in the direction of the shore, but his efforts didn't seem to be making any difference.

Then there was a thump beside him.

Holding the ferret's head above the water by one of the creature's ears, Viola had thrown her free arm over the log. She must have deduced what Sylvester was trying to do. Now she could add the force of her limbs to his, and she was a far more powerful swimmer than he was.

The log lurched in the water, as if protesting the sudden addition of extra force, but began cruising in fits and starts towards the near bank.

“We're getting there!” yelled Sylvester elatedly. “We're going to make it.”

Afterward, he was never able to remember how they negotiated the final few yards and got themselves and the ferret up onto the bank. His next clear memory was of himself and Viola standing over a form that was terrifyingly, chillingly, dishearteningly still.

Viola was the first to voice the near-certainty both of them felt.

“Do you think he's dead?”

Sylvester thought he probably was, but didn't say so. He crouched alongside the ferret and put one furry ear against the cold, wet chest.

He heard a faint but steady pounding.

“He's alive!” cried Sylvester. “We've done it, Viola. We've saved him!”

He wanted to dance and sing with her in celebration, but his legs felt like lead. She was grinning like a mad thing, and he found he was doing the same himself.

“You stay here with him,” she said. “I'll run and fetch Doc Nettletree.”

Sylvester knew better than to argue. She was the faster runner. As well as the better swimmer. Her legs probably weren't four great, heavy weights that would simply slow her down.

No, that wasn't right. You couldn't run slower with heavy legs than without any legs at all. What he meant was …

By the time he'd got the thought sorted out in his mind, Viola was gone.

Sylvester sat up and looked around him. He was alone except for the limp, ominously silent ferret lying on the ground beside him. There was nothing to hear except the sound of the great river. That and an occasional whisper as a stray breeze pushed its way through the tall reeds. The moon had dipped behind a cloud, so that the only sign of its presence was what looked like a pale ghost, flapping robes and all, in the sky. By way of compensation, there were about a hundred million stars.

He shuddered. He was freezing cold and soaking and he had rarely in his life felt so exposed and lonely.

To take his mind off his situation, he began counting the stars. After about the tenth time that he'd lost count, the moon sailed clear of the obscuring cloud, dimming everything else in the sky, and he gave up. He turned instead to look at the ferret beside him.

Because of the general lemming distrust of ferrets, Sylvester had seen only two or three of them before in his life. Usually, when there was a ferret around, sensible lemmings were too busy pointing the wrong end of themselves in that direction to do much observing. Even so, this specimen seemed very oddly garbed. In the moonlight it was impossible to distinguish the colors of his different garments, but the oddly puffy shirt he was wearing looked to be white. The jerkin he wore over that (the jerkin that had probably saved his life, because it had given Sylvester something strong to cling on to) was presumably leather-colored. Even darker in the pale light were the ferret's trousers; they bulged as if he might be storing supplies in there, and they reached only as far as his knees, where they were tied tight to the short fur by some kind of cord. There was another cord around his neck, and as soon as Sylvester noticed this he reached out to loosen it; he found it was attached to a weird three-cornered hat that had been hidden, crushed, under the ferret's head.

“A wonder you didn't strangle yourself,” he said almost chidingly to the motionless creature.

In its right forepaw the ferret was tightly clutching something that looked like a piece of crumpled paper; Sylvester chose not to investigate further for the moment. What held his attention the most was a strange mark on the ferret's left shoulder. Probing gingerly in the near-darkness, Sylvester soon discovered this was a hole with dirty smudges all around it. He gasped as he realized the hole went not just through the jerkin but also through the shirt and the flesh of the ferret.

Sylvester gulped uneasily. I am not, not, not going to be sick.

“What could have done this?” he asked the moonlight.

He decided not to lever the ferret off the ground to check that indeed the hole went all the way through. That was Doctor Nettletree's job, surely, not his.

I am really not going to be sick.

I am not even going to think about being sick.

Well, okay, maybe I'll think about it, but not much. Just enough so that I won't actually be it. A fine sight it'd be for Viola when she gets back if she discovered me covered from head to foot in—

An iron band sprang into being around Sylvester's throat.

“Who're ye, matey?” said a hoarse, threatening voice.

Sylvester tried to get out at least a croak.

“Answer me quick, or I'll have yer liver on a stick.”

Sylvester thrashed his arms about to indicate his predicament. The one saving grace of it, a distant part of his mind coolly thought, was that, with his throat blocked off like this, even if he wanted to be sick the puke would just have to stay inside him.

His message seemed to have reached his captor, because the grip on his neck eased.

“Tell me now.”

“S-Sylvester L-Lemmington. J-Junior Archivist and T-Translator of Ancient T-Tongues.”

“Oh really? And what's a harchivizzer when it's at home?”

“Archiv-vist. Not a . . . what you said.” This isn't the time to be correcting his grammar, you oaf!

“Ye one o' those mental defectors?”

Sylvester tried to draw himself up proudly, but when he did that the ferret tightened his stranglehold. “N-No. I told you. I'm an archivist. P-Please don't h-hurt me.”

The ferret drew his face even closer, so Sylvester could feel the harsh rush of hot, foul breath on his cheek.

“He mustn't find me at any cost,” the ferret muttered to himself.

“Who?”

Instead of answering, the ferret said, “He'll kill me if ever he finds me, he will. It's been many a year since he's had to take more than the one try at killin' someone, and his passion'll be high to make sure he finishes the job he started. So hide me, ye great lump. Hide me somewhere I can never be found.”

Back in the river seems a good option, thought Sylvester, who was becoming rapidly fed up with being threatened by someone whose life he'd just saved.

“Not until the doctor's had a look at you.”

“Doctor? Doctor? Yer fetchin' a sawbones, are ye? It'll be the death o' me, I tell ye. Before I let a sawbones touch me I'll—”

“Oh, shut up!” snapped Sylvester. “Doc Nettletree's jolly good. Hardly any of his patients die. You're damn lucky you've got a medic as good as he is coming to look at you.” He warmed to his theme. “You're damn lucky to be alive at all, in fact. Viola and me, we could just have left you to drown. I'm beginning to wish we'd done exactly that, now, instead of risking our lives to save some ungrateful piece of scum.”

I shouldn't have said all that, should I?