The Folly of the World (42 page)

Sander had never given her his helm—he’d forgotten it in Dordt, the dunce—but her hood seemed to offer her anonymity enough, for none gave her a second glance. Seeing one footless soldier writhe in the sand while two men tried to hold him still and a third pressed a red-hot iron pan to the ruined stump of his ankle, black fumes that stunk of burning hair belching from around the cauterizing instrument as the living meat sizzled, she supposed they had greater concerns. And so should she, Jolanda decided, telling herself to buckle down, to get mean… it was time to fight as she never had before, it was time to get crazy, it was time to abandon mercy, to kill and kill and—

—Feast?

Aye, that’s what it was. They’d come to a break in the tents, but rather than a field of battle Jolanda saw the din was coming from dozens upon dozens of long tables arrayed along the strand. One of them was far enough out that the tide was lapping at the greaves of the men who refused to leave it, their bare white hands
tearing into cakes and breads a sharp contrast to the steel carapaces covering the rest of them. Pages hurried between the makeshift kitchens erected beside bonfires and the tables, delivering great racks of pork or lamb or maybe both, whole salt-roasted fishes, carafes of wine, and jugs of ale. Metal struck on metal as knife met plate, tankard met tankard.

Sander stood beside Jolanda, the two of them in the border of blackness separating the lamplight of the hospital tents from the bonfire glow illuminating the bizarre fete. Jolanda thought Sander looked as though he was going to be as sick as he’d been on the ship, but instead he belched out a, “
What?
”

“Come on,” said Jolanda, taking his hand. This was somehow more intimidating than a battlefield would have been. She pulled him forward, toward a cluster of red-and-white Dordrecht banners planted beside a table. “Let’s find out what happened.”

They didn’t get ten paces into the firelight before the cry went up: “Tieselen!”

“Jan Tieselen!”

“The Dordt Hook himself!”

“Graaf Tieselen!”

Jolanda and Sander froze as a good dozen of the yelling men rose from their nearby table and turned to stare at them. The biggest of them all, a burly, bearded giant, stumbled off his bench and advanced on them, his spattered armor glowing in the firelight, his eyes black as wounds. In one hand he held a jug and in the other an entire leg of lamb, its bloody end dripping in the sand. Jolanda recognized him at once, but before she could give Sander a whispered reminder of the giant’s identity, he’d stepped forward and called, “What’s all this, Von Wasser?” Jolanda nearly cheered the minor miracle of Sander’s remembering the hertog’s name—they saw him at church every Sunday, but to the best of her knowledge in nearly two years they’d never exchanged more than a dirty look. “What’s happened?”

“I’d put the same to you, but I know a spy when I see one,”
said Hertog Willem Von Wasser, raising his voice to a triumphant bellow as he went on. “You tell your Leyden master his vixen got hounded this day, and with vigooooor!” He gyrated and thrust his hips in a lewd manner while delivering this last.

“I see that,” said Sander, and Jolanda could scarcely believe how calm he was. If anything, he seemed dour rather than irate.

Jolanda heard feet kicking through the sand behind them and wondered if these drunk Cods were surrounding them, looking to be done once and for all with meddlesome Tieselens. When she spun around, however, she saw Lansloet and Drimmelin slinking over from the tents—apparently they, too, had realized no battle raged this night and were drawn to the smells of cooking food and warming campfires.

“He sees it!” Von Wasser howled, earning cheers from the scarlet-and-white-mantled group he had quit, but most of the other tables had gone back to their merrymaking and were ignoring the besotted giant. “At last, the Hook sees his ambition crushed, his traitorous—oof!”

Sander neatly seized the man by the beard and head-butted him in the face. Von Wasser stumbled back, dropping his jug and his lamb joint to put both hands to his face, and Jolanda felt the beach drop away beneath her, plunging her through a void of what-the-fuck: had Sander just killed them both? Great God in all his mercy, had Sander insisted they come to war as some sort of convoluted suicide plot? Had the madman panicked at realizing Wurfbain would come after him, and decided to end it all in one final glorious battle against whatever foe he could sufficiently antagonize into slaying him?

Before Jolanda could decide between drawing her sword and accompanying him to hell or fleeing back through the tents, every man at the table Von Wasser had left now rose as one and scrambled off their benches, advancing on the Tieselens. Sander dropped to a crouch just as the stunned, wobbling Von Wasser fell back, landing on his arse, but before the mob could charge,
Sander had straightened back up, having retrieved the hertog’s leg of lamb. He directed it at Von Wasser’s friends, most of whom Jolanda recognized from church as minor Dordt Cods, now that they were drawing closer between two bonfires. All of the other nearby tables had quieted at this display, and Sander issued what Jolanda was sure would be his final shit-talking:

“Alla you listen! With both ears!” Sander’s voice boomed louder than the waves, crackled with the heat of the bonfires, and he waved the shank over the entire assembly as he pronounced his judgment. “My name’s Jan Tieselen, and I’m graaf of Oudeland! I’m also the man bringing wine up to Dordrecht! Yeah, you heard—I’m out of Dordt, same as Von Wasser, same as all these mussels coming down on me!”

That got a few cheers from the observing tables, though Jolanda had no idea why. Sander waved the leg behind him, at her and the pair of cowering servants who hung back halfway between Jolanda and the tents, like spotted hares debating flight. He went on:

“I brought my daughter, Jolanda! And two servants! What spy brings his cook, pray?! We came to fight, damn your eyes, we came to fight! For Philip! For Holland! For Dordt!”

“He’s a Hook!” one of the lesser local Cods protested, and a grumbling arose from the mass of men as though they were a pack of half-dozing hounds Sander was tiptoeing through the midst of. The mouthy one who’d started the muttering must be a younger son, if noble at all, for Jolanda didn’t recognize him, but even the smallest adder could have killing spit. Before the complaints could rise to shouts or the Cods could resolve to charge, Sander began again, apparently shifting tactics:

“I come up in the East! But got to Dordt fast as I could! All you sheepheads knew my uncle… the graaf, the old Graaf Tieselen! Some of you must’ve been his friends! Just like some of you must’ve had your quarrels with him! Point is, you wouldn’t have taken him for no cunt! You wouldn’t have done him the way you done me!”

This earned Sander hisses, which was much more in line with what Jolanda had expected when Sander began his foolhardy speech. He flicked her a grin and then strode forward, to where Von Wasser still sat sprawled in the sand. A half dozen of the Dordt Cods began matching Sander step for step, closing the distance. Sander stopped before Von Wasser, staring down at him, and the hertog looked up, his face dark with blood or shadow, Jolanda couldn’t tell which. Sander addressed him, but still his pronouncement carried back to her, and any who cared to heed it, she supposed:

“I come to Dordt! Wanted to live up to my family name! But Wurfbain got his teeth into me! That fucking fox! And being from stranger lands than these, I took him at his word! And not
one
of you mussels set me straight! Not one! You
knew
he weren’t good for me! You
knew
he made me no good for Dordt! But you all just let me listen to him! Let me heed the council of a Leyden Hook! ’Cause no one had the grit to tell me I was a fool to listen to ’em! No one had the grit to tell me I was acting against my city! My people! My very
family
!”

Despite the popping of a dozen bonfires, the choir of agony behind them, and the crashing surf, it went very quiet as Sander surveyed the interrupted banquet, the line of men before him, and the sand-sprawled Von Wasser. Jolanda saw that other than the fallen hertog, nobody in sight was still seated, hundreds upon hundreds of men fanning inland to get a better look, standing on benches, tables, each other. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw that every break in the barbers’ tents was clogged with faces—they were utterly surrounded, cut off from escape, save for the sea. There was a thought… she shuddered, and knew she would die on the sand before she’d brave those winter waters.

“But no more!” cried Sander, extending the sandy lamb joint to Von Wasser. The hertog took it, and Sander pulled him to his feet. They stood facing each other, close enough to bite each other’s throats, and Sander went on, barking in the man’s face. “I figured it out! I quit Wurfbain! He’s wroth! Wroth as God! But I
quit him! He threatened to ruin me! To ruin my family! Threatened I don’t even know! And! I! Told! Him! To! Stuff it!”

Another nigh-sinister silence, and Jolanda knew they were good and truly fucked now—Sander hadn’t been so mad after all, there at the end, he had tried to explain, but it was too little, too late. It would take more than loudly crashing a feast to convince every Cod in Holland that the Tieselens had changed their Hookish scales, and now—

—Von Wasser went for Sander, and Jolanda set her foot to charge, hand on her sword, and—

—Von Wasser threw his arms around Sander, and a great cheer went up through the crowd. They had bought it? They had really, truly bought Sander’s mad story?

Aye, apparently they had, as the Cods of Dordrecht fell over one another to be the next to formerly introduce himself to the neighbor they had studiously ignored in public and certainly mocked in private. Much ado was made over Jolanda and her patchwork armor, and the confirmation that Graaf Tieselen had indeed brought two servants rather than squires or mercenaries made the nobles roar with laughter. This sat poorly with Sander, but there was no pleasing the dotty fool.

“Lady Jolanda,” said a shapely silhouette standing between Jolanda and one of the bonfires, the voice frustratingly familiar. “How wonderful that you and your father have… come around. May I invite you to join my table?”

Squinting at the black figure, Jolanda had no better idea of who the woman might be. Anything beat hanging behind Sander, though, as Von Wasser and the rest clobbered his back and rode him for being such a no-good-stinking-Hook for so long—either Sander would pick up on their condescending jokes at his expense and fly into a rage, or he would take what they said as sincere compliments and become even more of a conceited doofus than usual. And so Jolanda curtsied to the mysterious woman, saying, “It would be my absolute pleasure, m’lady.”

“Excellent,” said the woman, and as she turned back to the feast, Jolanda saw her face in profile and gasped—it was Lady Meyl, the widowed mother of Willem Von Wasser and the richest woman in Dordrecht, if not all of Holland. Jolanda had only met her the once, at the Hooglandse Church in Leyden; every time she had glimpsed her in the Dordrecht markets and church she had prayed the noblewoman would say hello, maybe even invite her to her manse, but not once had the imperious old biddy acknowledged Jolanda’s existence. Indeed, Lady Meyl was as skilled at avoiding your eyes with her own as Sander was at hitting your nerves, yet now Jolanda was following her to a royal table at an epic feast held beneath the winter stars on a windswept strand, the dowager’s pale, pearl-laced gown trailing in the sand behind her like something from a dream…

Jolanda’s initial disappointment that Lady Meyl simply planted her ample bottom on a bench rather than first introducing Jolanda to their tablemates was somewhat assuaged when she saw that there were no other ladies present, only a handful of noblemen clustered at one end of the bench. These braying fops were clearly as drunk as a brewer’s fart. The seat was rough and frigid under Jolanda’s arse, even through her reinforced leggings, and the nearly raw meat cooled within moments of being laid on the frosty plates. Ice crusts of wine spotted the board, with globs of frozen fat and cold-brittled bones strewn across table and bench alike. Jolanda’s first feast was shaping up to be a lot like one of Sander and Simon’s nights in, only outside on a beach in January.

“Well, well,
well
,” said Lady Meyl, pulling a fur blanket off of a snoring figure on the bench beside her and swaddling herself in the bristly thing until only her sharp face poked out. She resembled an enormous hedgehog. “This is a pleasant surprise, having you and your father join us. It’s ever so nice to see you again, Jolanda.”

“Indeed, it has been too long,” said Jolanda, taking a bite of the lamb a servant had brought her. Ravenous as she was, the
bloody, gamy meat made her feel like a wolf. “I trust in God that all is well with you, my lady, both here and at home?”

“It is pure shit, is what it is,” said Lady Meyl. She sounded tired, which, aye, made sense, late as the hour must be. “Between your father and that Van Hauer bitch, Zoete, Count Wurfbain has brought any substantial civic development to a standstill in Dordrecht. Now, now, don’t protest, I heard the graaf’s poetic speech and I’m
sure
that all is forgiven, but you asked if all was well with myself, both at home and here, and I am answering you in an honest fashion.”

“I do appreciate your honesty, my lady,” said Jolanda, breaking the plug of ice on a jug of wine and filling a goblet all the way to the top. Anything to get the taste of sheep blood from her mouth. “And it’s true I cannot claim to understand all that goes on with my father’s business and the politics of Dordrecht. But I am confident that from this day forth we will all enjoy a strong shift from whatever stagnation Wurfbain’s plotting has inflicted upon our city.”

“I’m
sure
you understand more than you let on, young lady,” Meyl grinned, showing that she had very few teeth left in her dull gums. That explained the bowlful of meat slurry she kept stirring up, to keep from freezing, and the whistling sound that accompanied every one of her matronly exhalations. “Clever as you are, I wonder you let that Hobbe push your father around as long as he did.”