The Folly of the World (15 page)

“Precisely,” said Jan. “The poor were added to the sides of the
hill, so it grew ever outward, the priests went halfway up the slope, and the lords with their stones went atop it.”

“Ought to keep ’em inside the church like a proper place,” grumbled Sander, squinting into the depths. The water looked darker here.

“But then we’d have nowhere to sit,” said Jan. “Steady now, steady.”

The boat bobbed between two stones, green rushes scratching the sides of the boat, and Sander realized the blackness beneath him was likely gravedirt instead of impenetrable depth. Small consolation. Then, as he looked, a dark shape nearly as long as the boat appeared through the shallows, coasting under the boat. The vessel rocked as something brushed its bottom.

“Devil’s dick!” Sander leapt to his feet, yanking the oar from its rowlock and brandishing it overhead. “Was that?!”

“Sturgeon,” said Andrei. “Sit down so I can pole us.”

“Sturgeon.” Sander panted the word, glaring between the stones. “Sturgeon get that big?”

“Bigger,” said Jan, leaning over to grab the edge of the crypt. Bastard hadn’t seen it, Sander knew, but he couldn’t quite find the words to call Jan out. Sander resumed his seat, but something about the Muscovite’s manner recaptured his attention. The boatman was up again with the quant in hand, but rather than focusing on mooring the boat, he was staring at the front of the craft, at the back of Jan’s head. No, not Jan—the girl. And he was smiling a dirty fucking smile, the sort of smile Sander himself had worn when they’d put the noose around his neck back in that shitty Frisian town.

A sudden disgust tugged at his guts like a swallowed fishhook—the things men did to half-grown kids made him want to murder the world. The reason that wench back at the Rotter inn had gotten all lippy with him when he’d first introduced himself to Jo, after all, was nutsacks like this Muscovite here, fantasizing about screwing the poor slut before she’d even grown a proper pair of tits. Sander was sucking cock by her age, admitted, but boys
grew up quicker than girls, didn’t they, and even an eager lad like he’d been hadn’t let anyone up his backside until he was way older than her. Probably, it was impossible to tell how old a girl was at a glance.

Why the fuck should it concern him what this rublehead wanted to do to her, anyway? What Jan intended come full circle, that’s why. Little slut being doted on and given kittens to cuddle and treated like a countess instead of a piece of cunt, oblivious to what men saw when they looked at her, just… just dark, was what it was. Dark.

Unless she wasn’t oblivious. Unless it wasn’t so dark. Unless Sander was the oblivious one. Wouldn’t be the first instance, he allowed, wouldn’t be the first at all. Sudden as a strike at a fishing line, Sander realized all three of these plaguebitches could be working together to murder him, not just to cheat him out of what he’d worked so hard to secure, but straight up bloody murder in the fucking fens.

This thought, rather than being immediately spit out like a fleck of bone, was cradled like a jewel of good fat in his jowl, savored and worried and cherished, and the more he played with the thought, the more sense it made. This did not upset him, but instead brought on a certain equanimity that carried an almost metallic taste to it. His palm left the locked oar and brushed the pommel of Glory’s End, bringing a shiver of raw pleasure to both him and her, as if he’d pulled back his foreskin and brushed a feather over it. Come on, then, you ball-lavering dogdicks, come on and see if—

“See, Sander?” The Muscovite breathed behind him. “You see?”

“Eh?” Sander blinked, glancing up to see the Muscovite still staring ahead with that lewd smirk on his face despite Jo’s having climbed from the boat onto the crypt beside them. If he wasn’t spying on her…

“He is there, yes? Ahead, beside krest? Beside cross?”

What? Sander followed the man’s gaze and saw the huge silhouette
of the sturgeon, or perhaps another overfed fish, lying in the shadow of a grave marker. The fish was so large its smooth brown head broke the surface, giving the impression it was watching them. Then, as if his eyes had piked the monster, it churned the muddy shallows and was gone, leaving Sander shivering. Somehow, the Muscovite eye-fucking a giant fish was even more obscene than if he’d actually been sizing up the girl.

“Sander,” said Jan from just above him. “Come on up, lad.”

Sander frowned at his lover, Jan squatting atop the slimy, black stone of the crypt. There would be room enough for the four of them atop it, he saw, and the thought restored his faith in Jan, at least a little. Come what may, Jan wouldn’t sell him out for a fish-hungry foreigner or a mouthy sprat. He reminded himself how fervently he’d believed the flood itself had been some attempt on his life, personally, by enemies unknown, and how Jan had helped break him of that, what was the word,
conceit
. A niggling part of him protested that of course Jan would seek to disavow him of the truth, but Sander pushed it down, just as he always did. Jan might be working for them, granted, but if he was, Sander was certain the man did so in ignorance.

Reasonably certain.

Anyway, onto the crypt, the Muscovite giving him a leg-up. The girl was already up and had her back to them, staring down at the wide smear of mud and rushes that pushed up to the edge of the crypt on the opposite side, and Sander had the impulse to shove her in, tell her to swim the fuck back to the sea if she was so keen on getting wet. There was a bit of ebony mold or muck under boot, making the narrow slab dangerously slick, and without turning, Sander decided, “Muskie stays in the boat. Not enough room.”

“Sander—” Jan began, but Andrei waved it off.

“Is good with me. I like the island that floats to the one that does not.”

Sander hated the man for his acumen, and kicked a clod of
filth into the boat. The Muscovite’s eyes narrowed at this and he muttered something in his ugly fucking tongue. Sander winked at him.

“This is it,” said Jan. “Still up for it, Jo?”

The girl looked over her shoulder, and Sander smiled to see some of the iron had gone out of her. She looked scared. Then she nodded, once, but firmly, and Sander sighed. Stupid little slut.

“I can… I’ll… You want me to swim here? Bring something up?”

Idiot.

“That’s right,” said Jan cheerfully. “But let’s get settled first, have a bite and a drink.”

The Muscovite maneuvered his boat around the crypt to the wee mudbar on the far side of it and beached the craft in the filth, though it was obvious the ground was far from solid. There the man set to checking his net and then whetting the tip of his gaff hook, his cat sitting on the prow inspecting the muddy flat with the displeased air of a graaf surveying a frost-burned field. Jan and the girl had used an oar to scrape most of the muck off the crypt roof and sat with their legs crossed, sharing a loaf of rye and a cheese wheel. Sander was done with sitting after that interminable float, however, and paced as best he could—three steps down, two across, three back up, and then over and down again, the two assholes sitting in the middle of his circuit giving him dirty looks that he studiously ignored.

This was it, then. Oudeland. Jan’s birth home. Sander contemplated the stubble of reeds and boils of stone, the crumbling church spire over there across a stretch of open water, the spindly treetop behind them with what looked to be a ram’s skull caught in the branches, the few silhouettes of sunken buildings on the edge of his vision, the leagues and leagues of
nothing
vanishing into the mist. Hell, he thought, was water. He wondered at it, all this flood where earth had been, all this quiet where so
much noise had risen. Well, not exactly here; the graveyard had probably been pretty solemn and all, and his stomach flopped anew at the thought of his precise location. He imagined the corpse beneath them crouched in the corner of his tomb, skull pressed to the ceiling, eavesdropping on the thieves upon his roof.

Dreadful thought.

But then they all were, these days.

M
argareta, the cat Jo had held for most of the journey, eventually dared the mud to join them on the crypt, skipping over the quaggy island and springing onto the roof. Her legs were muddied almost to her belly and she immediately set to cleaning herself on the edge of the stone. Jo worried that Sander might give her a kick, for he seemed like that kind of a man. Her father would have, surely, or one of her brothers. Instead, he finally ceased his strutting and crouched down, rubbing the puss’s bobbing head with the back of his fist. Crazy neuker.

“There,” said Jan, pointing with the nearly empty jug of flat beer. At first she couldn’t see anything beyond the moored boat where Andrei napped, for the mist had thickened while they ate, but then she made out a patch of shadow in the miasma. A short distance from their roost the little isles of muck and reed that spotted the graveyard gave way to deeper, unbroken water, but a ways out another stand of rushes protruded from the meer. Squint as she did, she could see nothing but the small thicket of dark stalks.

“The reeds, then?” she asked, and trying to kindle herself for the chill of the swim, got herself properly annoyed. “Why aren’t we moored there, then? Like seeing me shiver?”

“That’s it, all right,” Jan said. “Means the roof hasn’t caved, at least not completely. We’ll take the boat over when we’re ready, but it’s too chancy to beach on it while we sit around—last thing we want is to knock some bricks loose.”

“It’s past time you told me what
it
is,
Lob
,” she said. “Can’t well find your shit if you don’t tell me the shape of it.”

“His fucking da’s house, is what it is,” said Sander. He’d swooped up the cat and held her under one arm, gesturing with the docile animal as he spoke. “Flooded as the rest, so he wants you to swim in there and get his ring.”

Jan nodded genially, which only irritated Jo more.

“There anything you’ll tell me, instead of my hearing it from him?” she demanded. “Swear that cuntbitch is more honest than you, and that’s saying something indeed.”

“Slander me at your peril, slut,” said Sander, pointing the cat at her. “Eager enough to use the words I taught you, even if you’re wrong about the how of it.
Cuntbitch
is only something you call women.”

“Didn’t teach me that, nor nothing,” said Jo. “My papa called me such more often than my name, and woman or would-be, I’ll call you whatever I see fit, shitbird.”

“Explain yourself, whore, or taste my fucking heel,” said Sander.

“I mean honest folk don’t tell them tales you’re always on about, all them myths and ghost stories and horseshit—”

“Explain the
would-be woman
shit you said, I mean. And anything I tell you is true as apples are green—even a stupid little kid like you’ll know that lying in a graveyard’s not even possible, why they hold councils and such in—”

“I’m in love with you, Uncle Sander, and think you’re a handsome fellow with all kinds of clever about you,” said Jo, her eyes closed and her gaunt cheeks puffed out in a smile. “I’m also the countess of fucking Burgundy.”

“Goddamn cuntbitch!” Sander shouted. “Bringing all kinds of ruin on yourself, saying such things in a churchyard! I didn’t mean it wasn’t possible, I meant it wasn’t possible without damning yourself, sure as spitting on a church door!”

“Yeah, ’cause that’s what you said, Uncle.” Jo rolled her eyes as the man seethed, and she again worried for the safety of the cat he held.

“In any event,” Jan said easily, “it’s time to go in. I don’t wish to be out here any longer than necessary.”

“Spill your fucking guts already, you lying piece of gooseshit,” said Jo angrily. “He might not shut his goddamn mouth, but I’ll take that to your never unhinging yours.”

“The less you know—” said Jan, but Sander jumped in, clearly eager for a last word or twenty.

“Tell the wee cuntcrease, already!” Sander’s spittle rained down on them. “You’re going in there to get his da’s ring so he can pretend he ain’t a bastard, so he can pass himself off as something fine and dandy in Dordt and elsewheres. You get the ring, he gets himself graafed, and that’s the whole fucking truth from an honest man to a stupid goddamn slut without the sense to use words for what they do. You know what’s good for you, you’ll swim off with it yourself and cheat the cheater of his loot!”

“That’s quite enough, I think,” said Jan in the sharp, clipped tone he adopted when he was annoyed.

“I don’t know what he said,” Jo replied, looking back and forth between them. “What’s going on? You’re a… what?”

“Better you—”

“No!” Jo stood. “You explain it,
Jan
, or I don’t swim. Your choice.”

“Remember this,” said Jan, but he was looking at Sander. “It’s like Sander said. My father was graaf of Oudeland. He fucked my mother, the widow of a local miller. She bore me, and as his wife gave him nothing but daughters, he took an interest in me—tried to play it off, of course, as something other than what it was, but when I grew older my mother told me the truth of it, and when I confronted him, he admitted to being my sire.”

“So you really are a rich man,” said Jo in wonder. “I’d started thinking you were lying about that, too.”

“Not yet,” said Jan stiffly. “He was a strange man, I realize now, or I should never have discovered what I did; he never would have done the things he did. He was… touched, my
father. Wracked by demons, fight them though he did, and I wonder if that had something to do with it.”

“Demons,” whispered Sander, his eyes widening as he dropped the cat. She threaded her way around Jo’s legs as Jan finally stood as well. It cheered Jo to see that Sander seemed surprised by this admission, but the seriousness of Jan’s expression unsettled her. Unlike Sander, who saw spirits in every moonbeam and portent in every bird cry, Jan had never spoken of such things, and it troubled her greatly that he did so here, in a flooded graveyard she would soon be diving into. A strong regret for pushing the issue warred with a gloating pleasure at having finally got him to open up.