The Tides of Avarice (9 page)

He laughed at his own weak joke.

“Have you hurt yourself?” said Sylvester, speeding up his stride toward the stranger.

“Hurt? Me?” said the fox. “Oh, the limp, you mean. It's nothing, not really. I just stuck me foot in a pothole and got me ankle twisted for me pains. ‘For me pains,' get it?” Again, that high snickering laugh. “But it'll be fine in a couple of days once I give it some good resting, it will.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I'm sure.”

The fox was wearing simple farm clothes that were far too large for him, as if he'd borrowed them in an emergency from a much bigger friend. He'd had to jam his ears into his broad-rimmed straw hat to stop it from sliding around. His furry paws were studded with spiny burdocks. His slanted green eyes held a sadness that belied the forced cheeriness of his speech; those eyes seemed to have seen far too many things they'd rather not have seen.

Now that Sylvester was next to the fox he could smell the musty, moldy odor coming off the larger animal. Or maybe it was just the fox's clothes that smelled that way?

“Where am I, kind sir?” said the fox.

Sylvester gave a wan chuckle. “You're in the right place, if names are anything to go by,” he said. “This is Foxglove.”

“Ah, Foxglove. That's the home of the lemmings,” said the fox, nodding his head wisely. “If I do not be mistaken, young fellow, you're a lemming yourself. And a fine specimen of the lemming stock, if it not be too forward of me to be making mention of that fact.”

Despite himself, Sylvester felt his chest beginning to swell with pride. It had been a long time since anyone had called him a fine specimen of lemminghood. In fact, it might not ever have happened before.

“The home of the lemmings,” he replied. “Indeed it is. Where are you heading, sir?”

“To the nearest town in this area.”

“Well, you just reached it.”

“I'd been a-guessing that, me friend. It's lucky for me that it should be so fine a burg as Foxglove, ain't it?”

Something bristled at the back of Sylvester's neck, as if in warning, but he ignored it.

“I'm sure the folk of Foxglove will be glad to welcome you, stranger,” he said dutifully, “although” – he cast a doubtful eye over the fox's form – “I'm not sure we have any beds big enough for you to rest in.” Or doors big enough for you to get through, he added silently. But that's a problem you can face when you come to it.

“I'm perfectly accustomed to resting myself on the good, soft ground,” said the fox.

He suddenly lurched and grabbed Sylvester's shoulder.

“Ouch! Beggin' your pardon, young fellow, but it's this—” a long string of adjectives followed “—leg of mine. Musta hurt me dratted ankle worse'n I be having thought.”

Sylvester felt his knees beginning to buckle under the larger animal's weight. “Sorry to hear that,” he puffed.

“Still, it be only a trifle,” said the fox, relaxing his grip a little. “Just a little bit o' a twisted ankle that be hardly being any tr—ouch! Ouch! Owowowouch!—any trouble at all. I didn't mean to be a-botherin' you with me trivial ailments, young Master Lemming. This sheer, stark, nerve-strangling agony is the merest bagatelle, I do be assuring you.”

Again, Sylvester sensed that funny prickling of suspicion at the back of his neck. Again, he ignored it.

“Would you like to see a doctor?”

“Oh, I do be a-sure that's not being necessary. It's just a little—aargh! Ooya! Yikes!— twinge or two it be a-giving me, that's all.”

“It sounds a lot worse than that.”

“Well, maybe. This doctor of yourn, is he being a good one?”

“Doctor Nettletree is the finest doctor in the whole of Foxglove.” In fact, he's the only doctor in the whole of Foxglove, but there's no need to cloud the issue by telling this fellow that.

“Then I s'pose I'll be a-takin' your advice, young Master Lemming,” said the fox, still leaning heavily on Sylvester's shoulder. “Might I be imposing on your kindness enough to ask you to take me his way?”

“It'd be no trouble at all,” lied Sylvester gallantly. “I was just out for a walk. I was planning to go by Doc Nettletree's cottage anyway.”

The fox grinned, showing a lot of teeth. “Then you're a good person, you are.”

They began making slow progress back towards Foxglove. The stranger's limp seemed to be getting worse. Sylvester did his best not to pant too loudly from the effort.

“What's your name?” he said as the main gate of the town came into view.

The fox hesitated a moment before answering. “Fourfeathers it is they call me, young fellow. Robin Fourfeathers, and yourself?”

“Sylvester Lemmington.”

“A fine name, if ever I heard one.”

“What brings you to these parts?”

“I'm looking for a friend of mine, the very best friend a fellow did ever have. We were sailing on the silvery sea when a wave came along and tipped our boat right over, it did. We swam our own two different ways to the shore, and I ain't not been able to catch up with him since. My bet is he's a-lookin' for me as hard as I be a-lookin' for him, and that's why we ain't found each other yet. Leastwise, that's the way it seems to me. Say, could you have been a-seein' of him?”

Immediately Sylvester thought of Levantes, but surely that couldn't be. He'd never heard of a fox and a ferret being friends. Usually the two species were at each other's throats.

“What does he look like?” said Sylvester, stalling for time to think this through.

“He's a ferret,” said Fourfeathers, audibly wincing for the umpteenth time as he put his weight on his ankle. “Name of Levantes. Not perhaps the most prepossessing of fellows, he ain't, but—yaarrooo!”

The fox toppled sideways and fell into the ditch at the side of the road, clutching his leg and howling.

Sylvester had been just about to say that, yes, he'd met the fox's friend and to break the sorry news, but all thought of this fled from his mind as he gazed down at the writhing, squirming Fourfeathers.

“I could run and fetch Doc Nettletree,” he said hesitantly.

The fox opened his eyes a slit. The green was blurred by tears of pain.

“I'll be able to walk again in just a moment, young Master Sylvester,” he grunted. “This has happened before. It doesn't last long, I know.”

It doesn't sound like any sprained ankle I've ever come across, thought Sylvester. It's something different, something different … and worse.

“How did you truly hurt your leg, Mr. Fourfeathers?” he said once the fox's breathing seemed to have become a little easier. “That isn't just an ankle you twisted when you put it in a rut in the road, is it?”

The fox's mouth made a jagged little line. “Not exactly, no. Here, help me be getting back to my feet again.”

“What really happened?” said Sylvester a moment later, breathing heavily from the exertion of getting Fourfeathers back on to the road again.

“How far do we be from this doctor friend of yours?”

“Far enough for you to answer my question.”

“Persistent little bugger, ain't thee?” The fox breathed out heavily through his nostrils, turning things over in his mind. “Well, all right then, I'll tell. I be being a mite reluctant about it because, well, of me innate modesty.”

“Modesty?” Sylvester tried to keep the incredulity out of his voice.

“Yes. Many people do describe it as a-bein' my most endearing trait. Anyway, young Sylvester, I would ask you, once I be having told to you my story, just to carry on treating me the way you already are – not as anyone special. Not as a hero.”

“I think I can guarantee that.”

The fox seemed faintly miffed by the promptness of Sylvester's reply, but carried on nevertheless. “It cannot have been many miles from here—”

“Why're you lowering your voice like that?”

“To be creating a little atmosphere, youth.”

“Oh.”

“It cannot have been many miles from here that, ahead of me on the road, I espied … a cart.”

Sylvester waited. This seemed a bit of an anticlimax.

The fox, once he'd allowed time for his first, portentous sentence to sink in, continued. “A cart was not being the whole of it. There were also, standing by the side of the road, a mother mole and her diminutive offspring.”

“A mole? We don't often see them around here.”

“Pray, do not be interrupting. There was being the mother mole, like so, and beside her the infant mole, just so.” Fourfeathers tried to show the relative positioning with his front paws but, discovering that he'd have to unhook his arm from Sylvester's shoulder, abandoned the idea. “Here” – he bobbed his nose to indicate proximity – “you be having meself, Robin Fourfeathers, walking along in all innocence, minding me own business, in the direction of the molish duo, and there” – he squinted his eyes to give the impression of distance – “you be having the aforementioned cart speeding, hurtling even, toward the mole mother and the mole offspring, and not to mention, moi.”

“‘Moi'?”

“‘Me,' lad. It be a manner of speaking.”

“Ah.”

“Now, you be a-knowin' about molish eyesight?”

“Yes.”

“The lack thereof, I mean.”

“Yes,” said Sylvester. He wished Fourfeathers would get on with it. He wished Doctor Nettletree's cottage were a bit closer than it was. He wished quite a lot of things.

“I had a chilling premonition about what was going to happen.”

“Yes?” said Sylvester, a bit of testiness creeping into his voice.

The fox seemed to notice this. His eyes narrowed. “Are you yessing me?”

“I don't know what that means.”

The fox gave him a thoughtful sidelong look as they passed through the main gate of Foxglove. Sylvester noticed, although at that moment he did not register, that the sidelong glance just happened to turn Fourfeathers's face away from the lemming guard who was standing there, a ceremonial pitchfork firmly gripped in front of him. Sylvester gave the guard a wave of his free paw, and received a nod of admission in return. If the guard saw anything unusual about the sight of an obviously injured fox limping into the town he gave no sign of it.

“One thing I not be a-likin' of,” explained Fourfeathers, seeming to relax a little, “and that be impertinence to strangers.”

“I can assure you, my dear fellow, that I wasn't—”

“Least said, soonest mended.”

“Good.”

“Now, where was I?”

“You were having a premonition.”

“Was I? Oh, yes. Premonitizing, I was. I thought to meself, I thought, that pair of moles, they might well step out right a-front of that speeding cart. So I sped me own step, I did.”

“You did?”

“I just said so, didn't I? Anyway, the skies darkened. Clouds roiled. The birds hushed. The trees stilled. The air seemed to turn to ice.”

“And?”

“Sure thing, the little mole, without looking one way or t'other – not that it'd a done him any good even if he had, moles being as blind as bats is – without looking one way or t'other he, or she, lets go of its mother's paw and runs straight out into the middle of the road, letting out a lightsome little cackle of sheer happiness at the joys of the world, as moles is prone to do.”

Most of the moles Sylvester had encountered had such a gloomily suicidal bent as to make lemmings seem like laughing jackasses, but he decided to let it pass. Any more interruptions from him and Fourfeathers's story wouldn't be done by the time they got to Doc Nettletree's – not that Sylvester hadn't guessed the end of it anyway.

Or thought he had.

“I burst into a trot,” continued Fourfeathers. “And from a trot into a run, then from a run into a veritable flat-out sprint. Me lungs fair a-burstin' out of me ears, I reached that young, rapscallion mole just in time to whip him out of the path of the trundlin' cart wheels and threw meself clear, with the little one over me shoulder. The spinning wheels missed me by no more'n the thickness of a claw, they did, and I was being fair a-winded as I landed on me tum on the 'ard, 'ard mud of the roadway edge.

“But at least the younker was safe. That was what I was being a-thinkin' as I sat up and dusted meself down as best I was able. It was all worth it, these little sufferings of mine.”

The fox nodded to himself in a self-satisfied way. Sylvester didn't begrudge him the smugness. Fourfeathers really had been the hero he so obviously wanted Sylvester to say he was.

There was something missing from the story, Sylvester realized.

“Was it when you threw yourself clear of the wheels that you twisted your ankle?” he said.

If gray foxes could blush, Fourfeathers would have done so.

“Ah, not quite. No, not quite.”

“Then what did happen?”

“Like I've been of a-tellin' thee, moles ain't no great shakes in the seeing department.”

“They're almost blind,” agreed Sylvester, “although they can see real well underground, they tell us.”

“And this mother mole was no exception to the rule. All she could make out through the dim, fuzzy mists of her vision was that her spotty, little brat, wot had been right next to her but a moment before, was now bruised and battered on the far side of the road. What the great racket of creaking wheels and galloping hooves and cursing coachmen had been all about, she had no strong-founded opinion, having noticed nuttin of the cart going by. All she could be a-thinkin' of was that some great gallumpher – meaning me in case you's not been paying proper attention – had grabbed her horrible little progeny.”

Fourfeathers took a deep breath, as if forcing himself to remember something he'd tried to banish into the black vaults of oblivion at the back of his mind.