The Folly of the World (7 page)

“Aye, I get you,” said Jolanda. “Big man, big man. But if I don’t, that’s me in your service, not a slave, and when I get your thing I’m free to go, and with some coin?”

“Yes,” said Jan, very tired with the whole affair.

“That’s us sorted,” said Jolanda, yanking his sword out of the sand. He noticed she wasn’t straining to hold it aloft. “I wanna learn how to use one of these. You show me that, we’re good.”

“Why?”

“So next time I need to sort some neuking ponce, I’ll just poke his bacon ’stead of kicking his eggs.”

It was a sound point, and Jan nodded. Jolanda began sliding down the dune, but stopped halfway, cocking her head in Jan’s direction. He wondered if she would ask, and she did.

“What’s that
mildest repercussion
you said?” The sunset made the sword in her purple hand glow a deep red.

“You kicked me awfully hard,” said Jan with a smile. “So I’m going to break your fat nose, and then we shall be, as you say, sorted.”

“Break my nose?” Jolanda smiled back. “Would’ve been smart for you to leave that part out till I was down there with you, wouldn’t it?”

“I won’t lie to you, Jolanda,” said Jan, twirling the bar he had cupped in his hand and tossing it into the weeds next to Mackerel’s lowered head. “I won’t lie to you, I won’t rape you, and if you do right by me, you can expect fair treatment. That’s better terms than you’ll ever hear, and a busted hook as payment for bashing in my privates seems a light price compared to what most would charge.”

“And I just take it?”

“I’m not stupid, nor do I suppose you are. You come here and try to give me another kick, and if you land it, that’s a lesson hard earned for me, and if I make good on my promise, where your—”
But Jolanda was already barreling down the dune again, dropping the sword as she came. She was favoring her right foot, and he wondered if she had broken a toe on his groin. He hoped so. Then she was in the air, leaping the last few ells to land on top of him, and Jan sidestepped her, shooting out a fist as he did.

The blow caught her in the stomach and her pounce degenerated into a plummet, the girl landing on her face and gasping for air in the sand. Although it brought a queasy pinch to his crotch and a wince to his face, Jan gave her a sharp kick in the exposed armpit, rolling her over. Before she could move, he dropped down onto her chest, knees-first. Her eyes bulged, and from where he half-sat atop her, Jan considered the angle. Then he cocked her chin with one hand, nodded, and punched her flat across the face, snapping her nose—if he had hit her dead-on, he might have driven it into her brain, and that wouldn’t do at all, not after what he had gone through on her behalf.

The cracking of cartilage brought some movement back to the girl, and she spit blood on him as he darted out his hand again and snatched her broken nose. It took several sharp twists to get it set, and she didn’t make things easier, writhing underneath him like a landed shark. Finally her nose was straight as it was liable to be and both his hands were covered in sticky blood the color of the sea at his back, and he released her. She didn’t crawl so much as slither partway up the dune she had attacked him from, her noises not quite the sobbing he expected. No, he realized as he fished his sword out of the sand and retrieved his throwing bar from the weeds, she was cackling, clutching her face in her hands and honking with laughter, threads of viscous blood dangling from between her fingers.

“I’ll set to cooking supper,” Jan told her as he took Mackerel’s reins. “When you’re ready, I’ll take a look at your hand, see that cut from yesterday doesn’t need tending.”

Leading his horse back to the bole in the dunes, her deranged laughter at his back, Jan reflected that things could have gone far worse.

T
he light was blinding on both sides of the water, and then Sander realized he wasn’t bobbing in water anymore at all; it was his eyelids flickering, the sun driving nails of burning fire into his brain. Someone was pushing on his stomach, and he punched the Belgian, which sent the fucker rolling down the bank. He tried to sit up and vomited again, remembering with a start that this had happened several times already, and recently, save for the punching of the… fisherman?

The man was kneeling on the bank, clutching the ear Sander had struck. A small boat was dragged up on the grassy break in the reeds beside him. There was a net in the boat, and a length of willow with a line wound around it, and two oars—not a Belgian, then, but, yeah, a fisherman.

Belgian? What? Where? The details were already sinking back down in the murk of his headache-echoing skull, and wiping his mouth and peering around, Sander saw only the narrow river slicing through teeth-achingly green pastureland. No Sneek, or Under-Sneek or wherever, and, most thankfully, no slimy monsters. They had come out of the dark for him, and he had fought them all, the bone knife sticking in the first and leaving him empty-handed, hard knuckles hitting harder skin, the chirping Belgians mobbing him, driving him down into the muck, burying him alive, until—

“You’re welcome, then,” said the fisherman, scowling at Sander.

“Yeah,” said Sander. “Where’s Sneek?”

“Sneek?”

“Yeah, fucking Sneek,” said Sander, mildly less annoyed to realize the man was speaking proper Dutch instead of Stiffhead. “This river comes from there, yeah?”

“Dunno,” said the fisherman. “Maybe? Sure.”

“Heh.” Sander chuckled. “All right, then. Fucking stiffheads.”

“Frisians put you in there? I seen you floating in the rushes an—”

“Who the fuck else?” said Sander. “Think I jumped in?”

“I don’t—”

“Think they tried to hang me?” said Sander, his tone suddenly severe. The fisherman glanced at his boat, perhaps regretting his good deed. “Think they tried to do me in on account of my not fitting into their little fucking schemes, that what you think?”

“I don’t know,” said the fisherman, slowly standing up. “I—”

“No, you fucking don’t,” said Sander. “So don’t look at me like that, you value your billy-goat eyes, you—where the fuck are you going?!”

The fisherman didn’t answer, darting to his boat and shoving off into the water. He hopped in without a backward glance, and Sander scrambled up, wondering just what the fuck this so-called fisherman knew, if maybe he had been the one to tow Sander all the way out here in the sunshine, and if he really thought he could get away with the river so languid. But then Sander put his weight on his injured foot and toppled back over.

He lay cursing in the grass, grabbing his ankle and pulling his leg up to inspect the stinging sole. The cut wasn’t deep, but it hurt like God’s disfavor, the wound starting between his big toe and its neighbor and stretching a finger’s length down. That gave him pause, and by the time he’d remembered the fisherman, the plaguebitch had already nicked off down the river. A perfect time to assess the situation.

Tunic and breeches? Gone. Boots? Gone. Glory’s End? Gone gone gone, gone as the devil’s graces. At least it was warm, the
sun feeling right nice on his pruned skin—that was something. That, and the only real bits of him that hurt, aside from his pounding head, was his foot and the odd eel bite, so again, groots in his favor. And assuming the fisherman wasn’t lying, Sneek was a long way off, meaning the river had taken him far from lynch mobs and Belgians. Again, something. He was famished and needed clothes, but these were minor dilemmas in the overall scheme, and would be righted whenever he found whatever house or village the fisherman had run back to. So yeah, not so bad a state of things, as it went.

Being careful to step using only the heel of his right foot, Sander began hobbling downstream along the reed-skirted river. It was the direction the fisherman had gone, and if the current had delivered Sander from Sneek, then this was doubly the right direction to travel. As he walked he reflected on the state of the day and reckoned he must be far south indeed, given the warmth and greenness of the fields, which were all gray and dead in Friesland. It was one of life’s sweet wonders, to stroll naked on such an unseasonably warm day, the breeze drying your hair, the sun roasting your bottom, wildflowers tickling your toes even as their fragrance reached your nose… Then Sander paused, the water gurgling, the birds singing, and stared incredulously at the grassy meadowland that stretched to a border of darker green and brown, where a forest ran parallel to the river. Not good.

Sander resumed walking, limping along even quicker than before, as if he could somehow put distance between himself and the unsettling realization he had come to. Losing a few days for Sander was like losing an hour to daydreaming for anyone else, hardly the sort of thing to read too much into, but this was something else entirely, and boded exceptionally poorly. The farther he walked and the harder he tried to not think about the crocuses and cranesbills he stomped underfoot the more sense it made, in a very tragic sort of way. He came to a willow leaning over the bank, its leaves full and long, and gave a little groan to
see young sparrows wheeling though the branches. It was autumn, late autumn, saints knew, it was probably winter, and they had tried to hang him, and now, immediately after all that, here was some, some
tree
, flaunting its leaves, encouraging these stupid birds to wheel around and chirp as if
that
were acceptable, as if it were spring,
late
spring, as if snow wasn’t imminent, as if…

Sander sat down in the shade, the spongy loam itching his ass as he dangled his feet in the water. It was shockingly cold, which meant he wasn’t dreaming. If that other place, the dark with all the Belgians, if that was hell, and he had bested the demons and escaped, was this heaven? That made some kind of sense. But who was the fucking fisherman, a saint? The Lord God himself? No, that didn’t wash… But neither had the Belgians, and they had been real enough.

Hadn’t they?

Rubbing his temples, Sander lay back in the scratchy grass, the river hurting his calves with its chillness. What if, he speculated,
what if
he hadn’t actually died and gone to hell, what if he’d simply jumped into a canal and floated away, dreaming about Belgians? Good…

But what about his foot? Could have cut it on a rock, a root, anything. Good.

But why the fuck was it early summer—no, late spring, he corrected himself, as if that made a lick of difference, late spring… But still, he couldn’t very well have floated downstream, asleep, for half a bloody year. Could he?

Well, no. But he had lost days before. Usually where drink was concerned, but sometimes they just went away on their own and he would awake to find himself in strange places. Often bad places. Once he had come to floating in a well—that had taken some explaining when a farmer finally fished him out, wells in the Low Countries being exceptionally shallow but nevertheless easier to enter than exit. Could he really be sure it had been autumn when he was hanged in Sneek?

Yes.

Well, probably. But what had happened in Sneek?

He remembered a barkeep saying something that had set him off, but the memory wasn’t as clear as it should have been for having happened so recently. Whatever it was, the fucker had deserved what he got, though now that Sander was sober and seriously considering it, he couldn’t rightly say what had convinced him the man was working for his enemies. Hell, Sander couldn’t recall exactly what had made him think he had enemies in the first place, beyond the obvious enemies one makes by virtue of not being a stupid asshole like most people you meet in taverns. He grimaced.

What had happened, Sander surmised, was that he had gone off a little. Not a big deal if it only involved a few days out of sorts, a few fights, some mild convictions that everybody was out to get him… But killing bartenders, being publicly executed, and battling demons down in a giant fucking well were not the sorts of things he wanted to experience, real or dream, for any period of time, to say fuck all of blackouts lasting whole goddamn seasons. He was getting worse.

No, he
had been
worse, but now he was better. He might not know where he was, or even
when
he was, but he was himself, and he wasn’t mad. Like a sleeper shaking off a nightmare, Sander kicked his feet in the water and smiled to recall the Belgian fancy he had taken so seriously.

“Ho, friend,” came a voice that wasn’t as gruff as it probably aspired to be, and Sander sat up slowly, turning to meet the man. Men. Three of them, two leading horses and the third standing behind the others; the third was the fisherman, but Sander didn’t recognize the other two. That was probably good, he thought as he got to his feet, there was no reason he
should
recognize them, no way they could know him or he could know them.

“How is it, then?” said Sander, eyeing them more closely. The two with horses had dusty riding gear, and the one who had spoken
wore some sort of garish bronze medallion over his linen mantle. They both had swords drawn, and were quizzically staring at the nude man who had come from the river.

“David here says he rescued you from drowning, only to have you attack him,” said the man with the medallion. Some kind of rural militia-type, a warden or something, Sander supposed, the sort of cunt who came from the same fields as everyone else but got airs, got all important, got all fancy, taking graaf money to do graaf fucking business, as if the graaf really cared about protecting the men and women who worked the fields so long as he got his cut, as if his bullyboys were anything but that, as if—“I’m talking to you, loon!”

Sander came back to the moment, back to himself, and saw some underfed punk pointing a sword at him in the shadow of the willow. No, not a sword—
her
. The tip of Glory’s End winked at Sander even in the shade of late spring, and he answered her whisper with one of his own.

“What the hell you say to me?” the warden demanded, passing the reins of his horse to his companion and stepping closer.

“I said you’ve got my fucking sword, boy.” Sander’s grin shone more dangerously than the blade between them. “You give her back now, nobody gets hurt.”