The Folly of the World (10 page)

Which is precisely what she did.

S
ander hated to admit it, but the little fucking bitch had some serious grit. They had gotten into it at the tavern after she’d bruised his pouch, his usual disinclination to punch children overlooked given the nut-aching circumstances. If Jan hadn’t gotten him into a headlock and choked him unconscious, Sander might have seriously hurt the girl in his rage—short indeed was the list of individuals he would let live after such an offense. He returned to consciousness on the street, the trio having been ejected, forfeiting the coin Jan had already paid to stay in the loft.

The girl extended her hand to Sander where he lay in the alley, flashing him a loose-toothed smile as she said in a gruff voice, “
Time comes, don’t forget was you decided to bitch,
Uncle.”

It took Sander a moment to realize she was making fun of him, but when he did he returned her smile and took her hand. Just as he tensed to jerk her to the ground, though, the moon crawled out from under its cloud and shone on her puffy, dripping lower lip and fast-swelling cheek. Seeing that the damage was respectable enough already, he settled for viciously crushing her hand in his. Her face twisted in pain but she didn’t try to pull away, instead vainly trying to squeeze back as he mashed her fingers together.

“Enough of that,” said Jan. “You two get into it again, I’ll make you both regret it.”

Sander’s “Fucking doubt that” overlapped Jolanda’s “Fuck off,” and this time the smile he offered the girl as he got to his feet was more sincere. This only seemed to piss her off more, but that was the way with stupid fucking kids, he supposed, bust
them in the face and they think you’re all right, but try to be nice and they give you the rude lip. What was Jan thinking, bringing children onboard…

The next morning Sander’s head hurt like a right bastard, and even in the best of circumstances the float down to Dordt made him cross as Black Pete’s fingers when the devil made a promise. Going along the Merwe was fine, as the river was wider and deeper but otherwise not too much different, but near about when Papendrecht came into sight, you could also see—

“Christ’s crown!” said the girl, which was a pretty good curse, one Sander had every intention of stealing. He lolled his head back and stared up at the sail above him rather than deigning to acknowledge the stupid fucking meer. Of course the half-titted halfwit would piss herself over the world’s biggest mud puddle, she was just a kid.

“I told you,” Jan said, making Sander wonder just what it was the old rooster had coughed up in her ear. “
Much
better than the sea. The water’s sweet, or sweet enough, and the tides aren’t too stern at all. Wait till you see it on a sunny day, it’s like a lake of brandy.”

“I didn’t know,” she said, and stealing a glance, Sander saw her staring out from the prow at the great gray plain of water.

“Well, it wasn’t here a year and a half ago,” Jan said from where he sat behind her. “This was just where the Merwe met another river, and you could cut back around to Zeeland or go clear down to France and bring back all the wine your hulk could carry. But then a flood came along on Saint Elizabeth Eve, and found the place so appealing it decided to stay. Now Dordrecht’s got a lovely inland ocean to keep her safe from marauders.”

“It beautiful,” she said with a sigh. Sander wanted to throw her in, see how pretty she found it once she’d bobbed into a bloated corpse or three.

Ought to throw Jan in, too, telling her such fairy stories about the dreadful, haunted swamp-sea this place had become since the flood. Everything south and everything west and maybe
everything under them had been the Groote Waard, and such beautiful sward it was, pastureland and cropland and village land, and yeah, all right, some swampland right around the walls, too, sure. But mostly it had been green and gorgeous, and now it was all bleak, dirty water that sometimes revealed a ragged roof or a bony treetop lurking just beneath the surface like an old log in a creek.

And all for what? A little coin was the answer, was always the answer, no matter the question. Sander had heard that the reason the flood got all the way up here from the sea was that greedy fucking graafs had been aiming to finance their private wars on the cheap, and so ordered their peat-cutters to dig out the backsides of all the dikes. First big storm to come along pushed the waters right through the weakened barriers and up the rivers, drowning thousands upon thousands of honest folk what didn’t have nothing to do with peat-cutters or graafs, Hooks or Cods, and turning the whole place into a great festering lake. Oh, what Sander would give to lay his palms on the plaguebitches responsible, graafs and peat-cutters alike…

The vessel slid onward. Jan settled back against the gunwale and dozed contentedly, Jolanda stared all around in amazement, the boatmen fidgeted with the rigging, and Sander blew his nose into his sleeve. It looked like he had dipped his cuff into egg yolk.

As they progressed across the meer, a light drizzle began to fall, which cheered Sander somewhat—now at least Jan wouldn’t be able to dream through the passage. Sander’s cloak had long since lost any grease or oil its original owner may have waterproofed it with, but he didn’t mind being wet so long as he wasn’t also cold, and it had been a balmy if lead-tinted morning. The girl gasped, and Sander saw Dordt rearing up before them like some great shipwreck in the flood. Despite himself the sight of the city kicked Sander in the balls of his heart, was how he would describe it, a queasy, painful sort of feeling, and here he had only been gone from the place a week.

Before the dikes had broken, Sander had considered settling
somewhere in the vicinity when his wandering days were over—not close enough to his hometown to chance being recognized, of course, but
someplace
out in the Groote Waard. Get some fucking sheep, maybe, like he and his da had done. Only, yeah, with some tidy lad to share the life with instead of that old bastard, devil burn his bones. Here Sander was, back again, only the hut where he’d dropped out his ma was gone and the fields were gone and the whole fucking village where he had grown up was gone, and all memory of his asshole father, too, gone like his left eyetooth—so it wasn’t all bad. Looking at Jan, who had sat up and wiped the sand from his eyes, he knew the fancy bastard never would have settled for some sheep and a hovel even if Sander had risked settling down in the region, so maybe it didn’t matter that the flood had taken it all. Living in the city itself surely wasn’t such a step down, as stairways went.

They’d done a decent job building things up to accommodate the raised waterline, and the city walls were the city walls were the city walls, but now the great gray ring of Dordrecht was an island of stone and not a river town in the midst of bustling farmland, with huts and barns pushing up to the marshy edges of the place. Dordt was alone now, a great tombstone for the people of the sea-taken Groote Waard, and there was not a building in the city that didn’t have a watermark somewhere along its flank from where the flood had pushed in before admitting defeat and retreating back to its newly conquered realm outside the walls. Fucking place still stank like bog rot a year and a half on.

Jan was chatting with the boatmen as they maneuvered the vessel along the city wall jutting up out of the river, past the main entrance to the old harbor. Instead of mooring the boat there by the Big Head’s Gate, the arch of which was still crowned with scaffolding like a wooden coronet, the boatmen coasted south, passing the new harbor as well. Lousy Rotters meant to put in at the back entrance of the old harbor, Sander realized, and he pulled his hood farther down over his nose, trying not to let himself get worked up.
The only reason anyone coming down from Rotterdam would enter the old harbor the long way ’round was if they had some business with the militiamen in that particular gatehouse…

In the name of Christ and his precious mother, if Sander was that business he’d take every one of these treacherous, ball-washing boatmen to hell with him.

The gate was open at this entrance, and the boatmen steered them out of the current and into the canal that fed into the guts of the city like an architectural cunt. The half-finished tower of the Great Church rose on their left, but sure enough, these false bastards had directed the boat toward the right side of the channel, straight at a small dock just inside the city walls. The dock protruded from the gatehouse, and as Sander rose into a crouch he saw a door set in the building’s wall swing open and an ancient militiaman step out onto the dock.

Credit where it was due, whichever of the boatmen had recognized Sander and decided to turn him in had played it cool; Sander hadn’t suspected a thing until they’d gone for the back way into the harbor… but it would take a lot more than some old fucker and a couple of boaters to take out Sander Himbrecht, that was—

“You,” the militiaman called, pointing directly at Sander. “You there!”

This was it, then. Sander should have known better than to let Jan talk him into returning to Dordrecht. He’d been back twice already since Jan had proposed the plan, and begging fate for a third uneventful trip to the city had been greedy, he’d known that. He wondered if this old bastard on the dock was someone he’d personally pissed off in his youth—must be, to recognize him before the boatmen had even announced their bounty.

“Right, you fucking assholes,” Sander muttered, straightening the rest of the way up as the boat bobbed to the dock. “Let’s do this.”

“Outta the way,” one of the boatmen said, stumbling around Sander with a hefty crate in his arms.

“You there,” the militiaman repeated, still pointing at Sander. “Give Kees a hand, you churl! Twice as big, and standing ’round ’stead of helping. Ought to be ashamed!”

What?

“I got it, I got it,” said the boatman carrying the crate—Kees, presumably. He leaned forward over the bow, and as they came abreast of the miltiaman he clumsily deposited the load on the dock. “As promised, friend.”

“Come by after you’re settled and help me with a bottle of it,” said the militiaman as the boat glided past the dock. “But ditch that lazy lummox first!”

Oh. Excise tax dodgers. Sander was in such a good mood at being proved wrong about the boatmen’s reason for using the back channel to the harbor that he waved at the old militiaman instead of leaping onto the dock and working him over for taking such a surly tone. The geriatric gave him the fig, then knelt to retrieve his illicit crate.

They slid easily up the narrow channel, the backs of houses lining their approach like the sorriest fence you ever saw, to where the canal widened into the old harbor proper. There were fewer boats than usual at the slips, but leave it to the fool-headed Rotters to ease on over to the far end of the longest, greenest pier in the place, the quay running abreast of the harbor wall. Sander hopped out of the boat, whereupon he slipped on the slick wharf and almost went back over into the water.

The girl laughed, an ugly, braying noise, and jumped up after him—and slipped as well. She would have bashed her face into the harbor wall if Sander hadn’t snatched her arm as she fell, and after comically kicking her legs against the slimy pier for a moment she found some purchase and settled down into a crouch. She looked like a land-reared dog thrust onto a boat.

“Enough playing around,” said Jan, stepping carefully up after them and walking down to meet the excisemen at the foot of the quay. “I’ll get your entry, Sander.”

“Gone up,” Sander said, spitting an oyster of phlegm in their direction. “Shameless.”

“You pay to go into the city?” said the girl, slowly straightening up.

“More and more every fucking day,” said Sander. “ ’Fore the flood was bad enough, but now they really got you by the short and woolies—already paid to get out here, waste of coin to go back. Fucking sheepheads.”

“What?” said the girl, making Sander squint at her—was she really that thick? “What’s a sheephead?”

“Me and my da, we did sheep out in the country,” said Sander as they walked down the pier, the algae-speckled harbor wall on one side and rundown rowboats bobbing on the other. She took her time to avoid slipping, he took his to stall long enough for the taxmen to piss off back into their taxhouse overlooking the quays—never knew if one of them would recognize him, even if the boaters and militiaman hadn’t. “Sometimes had to get a sheep inside the walls, right, if we was planning on selling an old one off. Yeah?”

“Mmm,” said the girl watching her feet as she walked. She moved funny, like as not still wobbly-legged as a sea-shaken sheep herself from the passage.

“Out in the ward everyone’s got sheep, so mutton don’t get you much, but in the city people ain’t got room for ’em, so we can turn a better coin. But. Problem—Dordt’s run by greedy bastards who’d pimp their mothers if anyone would pay for the old bitches. They start some rumors, baseless ones, about our mutton making people sick. So the watch got instructions not to let us take our sheep in unless we bribe them good and proper, and if we paid that ransom, we’d be worse off than losing one to a wolf. So we’d…” Sander trailed off, seeing the excisemen hadn’t pissed off after all, but stood waiting for them with Jan at the top of the quay stairs. “Tell you later.”

The taxmen didn’t know Sander, thank the devil for a change, just wanted to give him the eye and the lip. After the sheepies went
back to their pen, Jan led the way over toward Varkenmarkt. The streets of Dordt were narrower than those of Rotterdam, and the air was thicker, wetter, colder, as if an invisible fog constantly haunted the city. The whole tone of the place had gone down since the flood, riverfolk trying to become islandfolk and doing a day-hire’s job of it—poor, in other words, piss poor. Shadowy figures watched them from doorways, as shadowy figures are wont to fucking do.

“What were you saying?” the girl asked Sander. “You never told me what a sheephead is.”

“He’s a sheephead,” said Jan, nodding at Sander. “A sheephead’s a person from Dordrecht.”

“You ruined my story, you twat!” Sander shouted.