The Folly of the World (5 page)

“What he did.” Verf nodded, the question not one at all, his eyes now focused on the dripping bandage wrapped around her hand. “He did that.”

The boys were rising, not unlike the heat in the room, but Jan stayed where he was, trying to find the girl’s eyes through the smoke. When he did, he could not read them. Her face looked almost beatific, and he supposed they both knew the game had changed and that now she stood between him and a safe shore. This had not been a very good idea, after all, Jan reflected, but even as he saw shell-hammers glinting in the light on either side of him, he found no room for regret. He never did.

“Nah,” said the girl, shaking her head. She was still watching Jan instead of her father. “Cut it on a shell. But seeing him gave me a fright—why I fell. Suppose it ain’t fully his fault. Suppose.”

“Jolanda,” Verf said sharply, “I’ve told you—”

“The devil it matters!” she shouted in her father’s face, the shift from calm to furious even more startling to Jan than her lying on his behalf. “You selling me to that poncey poot, eh? Three goddamn groot—”

Verf slapped her in the face. One of her brothers sniggered. She didn’t back down, and for a moment Jan expected her to leap on her father, possibly bite him.

“We haven’t fixed a price yet,” said Verf, and she nodded, gnawing her lip. Then she spun away and with a great deal of cursing set to packing her things. Turning to one of the thuggish lads still looming over Jan, Verf said, “Make sure she only takes a shift beyond what she’s got on. And a blanket, she can have
one
blanket.”

The haggling that came next was pitiable, and Jan would have been ashamed of himself if he were the sort of man who ever felt such emotions, but he wasn’t and so he didn’t. Four false groots later, he had an indentured servant named Jolanda, though the sealing of the deal was not without its odd wrinkle—the girl got into a fistfight with the brother overseeing her packing, and in
addition to catching a black eye, the young man would have fallen into the fire if his father hadn’t snatched him from the brink. After saving his son Verf waded into the row, which by this point involved most of the siblings, and Jan took the opportunity to go outside.

The wind whipped sand into his eyes as soon as he opened the door, and he banged his knee on one of the piss-and-char-stinking cauldrons in the dark, but it was nevertheless a marked improvement. Oh, to see the house burn, and to hear the whole miserable family scream—but the fewer bodies the better, an expression he had tried to bang into Sander’s pate. His anger flitted up and died out like the embers leaving the hut’s smokehole, and then the door squealed a final time. Verf booted his daughter down the stoop, blood dribbling from her nose and shining between her teeth as she landed in a crouch, sneering up at Jan. He was genuinely taken aback.

“I’d put a leash ’round her neck,” said Verf by way of good-bye to his daughter. “She runs off, it’s your fault, herring-fucker.”

The door shut, leaving them alone with the moon and the sand and the twisted sloe girding the trail. He waited for her to spring on him, but instead she exhaled a long breath and touched her bloody hand to her bloody nose. That was that, then.

“Don’t forget your knife,” Jan told Jolanda, and she pawed around in the sand where she had ditched it beside the door. He walked on to where his horse was tethered among the blackthorn, his back exposed, his gait steady, the night swallowing him like it takes all those who seek it. Finding the knife, she followed him.

A
dream come true, to be bound in blackness, to be constricted at every joint, to have the air turn to something thicker, heavier, hotter. To be noose-drowned, once and for all. Except drowning, really drowning, was altogether different from hanging, and from the pressure on his clouded skull and the scum slithering across his open, blind eyes, Sander realized he wasn’t on the end of a rope. He was underwater.

Canal. Drowning. Arms and legs wrapped in chains.

No, not chains. Clothes caught on something, trapping him down in the filth. Too dark to see.

Canal. Drowning.

Total bullshit. Not like this. Not without rope.

Sander fought his own garments, tearing through the membrane of his ancient tunic. Still snared, somewhere lower. Wriggling out of the tacky sheaths of his breeches, or trying to, his boots complicating the attempt. Really fucking dying down here, only a few moments from passing out again, and for good this time. One leg free and bootless, but the other held at the ankle. All his bones shrieking under his skin, belly feeling like he’d gobbled a plate of hot coals, dead fingers fumbling over dead flesh to get at the boot mooring him to the canal floor like a barnacle’s root.

The worn-out leather boot felt like jagged stone, cutting his fingertips as he blindly groped around for the buckle, the slimy webbing of his ruined clothes tickling his face as they floated away while he—

Release! Though, yeah, there was no way of knowing if his
foot had come free or if he’d gone and died on himself. Erring on the side of life, he wheeled his arms and legs, but there was fuck all means of telling which way was up in the black water. Funniest joke of all, to free himself from the bottom but drown for want of a top. Funny.

In darkness that was absolute on both sides of the water, Sander surfaced with a spume, which almost immediately became a significantly thicker sort of discharge. It is no easy thing to tread water and vomit simultaneously, but Sander had pulled the trick before and did so again now. The feat would likely have been impossible if the elbow he had pulled in the hanging hadn’t somehow righted itself during his panic-propelled thrashing at the bottom of the canal, or perhaps he had simply overestimated the injury when it had occured; Sander wasn’t the sort to question his luck in the best of times, let alone when the devil was clearly still kicking his balls. He couldn’t see shit, which was a problem, and he had no idea how long he had been down or where he might have come up, but as another eruption yanked his spewing face beneath the oily water, he tried to concern himself only with the present—it was black as sin, he was still in the canal, and he was puking his guts up like it was Ash Wednesday after a Shrovetide bender.

When his retching trailed off, the coughing began, but finally that passed, too, and Sander took stock of things—first and foremost, he felt like he was dead, which, to date, had always meant he wasn’t. Second, the citizens of Sneek couldn’t be close or they would have heard his ruckus and nabbed him. Third, where the fuck was he, anyway?

Sander awkwardly swam in the direction he was already facing, trying to stifle the anxiety that any reasonable swimmer might suffer at finding himself alone in black water of unknown depth and distance to shore. There were no stars above him, or anything else for that matter, which was supremely goddamn creepy. He told himself he had floated downstream and gone under a building. That didn’t explain how such a thing could
come to pass, unless the Frisians were so goddamn stupid they built their towns over water instead of channeling canals through them, but then with Frisians he supposed anything was possible. Better that than his having somehow gone blind, which was too dreadful a thought to entertain.

The black, aquatic experience was unpleasantly nostalgic for Sander, reminding him keenly of the well his father had tossed him in whenever the old man had caught his son sucking cock or stealing coins. The cocks invariably belonged to the other boys in the village, whereas the coin always came from whatever ineffectual hiding place Sander’s drunk begetter had settled on that particular day. Regardless of the crime, down into the well went Sander, and down slapped the lid over its mouth, blotting out the world above. At least the well had been full of water; the short freefall into the dark pool was the only part of the ordeal he remembered with fondness, and that would have been far less pleasant had it been followed by a dry landing.

After all the long days and nights spent treading water in perfect darkness with only slimy leaves in the autumn and tadpoles in the spring to keep him company, Sander had done his best to avoid similar situations. And, it must be said, up until this point he had enjoyed some success in that regard. If ever there was a hell built especially for him, he knew it would be just this: cold water, no light, and, worse than the well, no walls to cling to until his fingernails gave out.

Compounding matters, the demon it had taken Sander years of well-paddling to vanquish had evidently regenerated itself, growing strong again in his absence from black water—the unavoidable, obvious fear of what might be underneath him in all that darkness, watching. Sander always supposed his serenity in even the hairiest of hairy fucking situations he owed to his father and that watery pit—nothing was worse than not knowing what was beneath you.

The strategies he had honed as a young man to keep those
thoughts at bay had deserted him, or perhaps simply fallen into disrepair, and try as he might, he couldn’t stop worrying. The farther he swam, the more he wondered if he wouldn’t have been better off being hanged, and with that thought came the dreadful realization that this could have been their plan all along, staging an easily escapable execution only to drive him here, into whatever abyss they had prepared. He kicked harder, trying to get angry about it all instead of disheartened, and, as if by Providence, the canal became warmer, a sure sign he was approaching either shallow water or the wrong side of a latrine. Which wouldn’t be the worst place Sander had crawled from, if it came to that.

Almost safe now, Sander told himself. He
must
be under a building, surely, or the streets of Sneek, somehow. Where else could he be, to not have a hint of moonlight or starshine or—

His hand bumped something solid and he recoiled with a shudder, finding the unseen object far too long, yielding, and slippery for his liking. Then he smelled it, a pungent stench like frogs and fucksweat. Sander got his legs under him to swim back the other way—none of whatever the fuck
that
was, thank you kindly—when his feet brushed the mucky bottom, arresting his flight. Letting his weight settle, the squelching of canal filth between his toes made him wish he hadn’t shed his boots before coming to whatever midnight shore he now gained. He was naked and blind, and there was something awful in the dark with him—any two of those in tandem would be bad enough; all three was simply depressing.

Extending his fingers with the trepidation of a man seeking to pluck a golden ring from its unlikely position around the tooth of a dog of unproven disposition, Sander prodded the bobbing object. He felt a puckered rind give beneath his overgrown fingernails. Sliding his hand down what he was hoping was a soaked-to-softness tree branch, he located what could only be a clenched fist. He confirmed this by running his fingers back up the length of the arm to a shoulder, and gave it a push.

A corpse was nothing to worry about, and Sander relaxed as it
rocked in the water. Then the water exploded all around the body, and something small bit Sander on the wrist. It held fast, whatever it was, scratching bone, gnawing flesh. He clumsily took a step back and tried to snatch it off but slipped in the muck and flailed about. He found his balance, the water churning under his woolly chin, and another bite struck him, this time a sharp, gravelly pressure closing over the thumb of his free left hand.

Sander gave a hollow little scream, hoisting his right arm from the water and whipping himself in the face with the serpentine horror that had attached itself to his wrist. He made his left hand into the exact sort of fist you should never make if you value your thumbs, with that digit clenched to the palm by the fingers, and bore down on the greasy, mouth-tipped cable coiling around his hand and gnawing his thumb. He felt alien skin and bone give beneath his pressure, his thumb burning worse than ever as he crushed its attacker. The ropy creatures seemed thin enough, and so he brought his right arm to his mouth and bit the one latched to his wrist, which his mind was now calling
eel
, even if the rest of him was not of a mood to hear whatever it was his mind had to say at the moment. The thing was slimy and salty and his teeth went clean through it, a bitter, burning blood flooding his mouth as the length of it fell back into the water. He spit frantically, the numbing liquid convincing his mouth what his mind already knew, for every Low Country boy is taught that eel blood is pure poison.

The unseen surface of the water was roiling all around him, and he felt them butting their heads against his chest and legs, struggling to find a grip with their small mouths. He turbulently abandoned the bottom and made a swim for it. There were several terrible moments when Sander realized he had no idea if he was swimming in the direction of the shore that might not even exist or back the way he had come. Then his palm slapped down into mud and the bottom rose up to slide against his chest. Salvation, but before he could slither onto dry land, an eel nosed against his pouch, coiling its length around his very balls.

Dragging himself out of the water, Sander gave little strangled noises somewhere between barks and sobs as he snatched the monster from his privates and mashed it in his fingers. He was yanking the other eels off him then, a dozen of the snake-fish clinging to his skin and hair with their curved jaws. Spray was still reaching him from the agitated water and he scooted backward in the muck, shivering and slapping himself down to see if he had missed any of the creatures. He had never heard of eels biting much of anyone, say naught of being so fucking vicious about it, but he supposed he had ired a swarm or nest or whatever the fuck you called it. As his heart calmed, he felt around in the muck to retrieve any he hadn’t thrown back into the water in his rush to be rid of them; he only found four, and they were small ones at that, but if he could drain their nasty blood, a free dinner was nothing to pass up.

“Grue ruin ger drinner,” a voice said far too goddamn close for Sander’s comfort. It was a sticky, rattling sort of voice, the sound like a farmer trying to get a wagon wheel free of a muddy pothole.