The alley opened onto a lane between rows of squat, tightly packed houses, and glancing back over his shoulder, Sander saw the mob only half a block behind him, the hangman now leading them. Sander turned left, booking it for all he was worth down the narrow street. Left turned out to be a rather poor decision, as another group of militiamen rounded a bend before him, but he only ran faster, making it to another alley just before the new crew reached him. This avenue was clogged with low-hanging laundry, the lines of which Sander cut as he ran to bring the drying clothes down on his pursuers. Sander laughed to hear the shouts behind him become angrier still, and then burst through the last row of dangling sheets and toppled into the canal into which the alley terminated, Glory’s End flying from his hand as he struck the gray water and sank like a millstone.
Spring 1423
“Catching Fish Without a Net”
I.
A hush fell over the dingy, cramped tavern. Such an occurrence was not particularly rare, requiring little more than a dirty joke, even a bewhiskered one, but quiet the place did, and the handsome stranger smiled at the staring faces surrounding him. The fisherman he sat across from smiled back, an easy, dangerous sort of smile, and nodded.
“Settled, then.” Pitter extended his hand. “A double-groot.”
“One double-groot,” agreed the handsome man, shaking on the wager. It had taken them longer to come to terms on how many Brabant mites and Holland pfennigs added up to a Holland groot, and from there a double-groot, than it had for the stranger to make the acquaintance of Pitter, get him drunk, and share a plate of early chèvre with him. As they ate and debated currency with the unsolicited help of their fellow patrons, the barkeep apologized for the ferocious saltiness of the cheese—the kid had been born too early and lived but a week, and the tears of its mother must make their way down through her teats. The stranger was the only one who laughed at this, and he quickly withered it into a cough under the dour stares of the locals.
The handsome stranger’s name was Jan and he was from the Groote Waard in southern Holland, but he had told everyone he was a riverboat pilot named Lubbert down from Sneek. This deceit had instantly endeared him to the tipsy Friesland transplant Pitter, who had bought him a drink. The local beer tasted like a respectable brew Jan had sampled in Haarlem, if said beer had been filtered through a drunkard or two and returned via piss-stream to the barrel, but then Jan had not come to Aalsmeer for its ale.
It was a pretty enough village, small groves of alder and willow spotting the outskirts like patches of peach fuzz on the cheeks of a young man impatient to grow a beard. The quality of the lakes had inspired Jan’s decision to try the place instead of pushing onward to the sea, for they were dark, muddy pools carved from the peat by villagers in generations past and left to languish like bloody gouges in the earth that would never clot. The water might not burn the boy’s eyes the way the sea would, but Jan knew from experience a peat-pool would have enough silt swirling around to make things comparably difficult, and if he never had to ride his horse over another dune he would die a happy man.
The wager set, Jan followed Pitter out of the smoky common room and through what passed for streets in Aalsmeer to the fisherman’s house, half a dozen of the patrons accompanying them. Pitter had told him to leave his horse at the tavern, but Jan had insisted, his Frisian stallion clopping along beside them. They came to the willow-and-mud hovel Pitter shared with his family and an Urker down from the islands to visit kin, and Jan waited in the alley with the other tavern-goers while the strawberry-nosed gambler went inside.
The huddled locals said nothing, which suited Jan just fine. He had not come to Aalsmeer for the conversation. Pitter soon emerged with his eldest boy. The handsome stranger nodded at the youth, whose gangly arms and legs reminded Jan of a willow’s shoots, his olive eyes bringing to mind a certain stream outside of Papendrecht—if ever a lad symbolized the harmony between water and land it was young Wob. Besides that, his face was not as bad as his father’s, and Jan allowed himself a slight smile at the boy, now hoping more than ever that he would soon be out of a double-groot.
The procession traveled the rest of the way through town, picking up a few more spectators, which displeased Jan but could not be helped. If a next-time proved necessary, he would adopt a different strategy. Pitter blathered on about his son’s prowess, comparing him to an otter, an eel, a fine, fine fishy; father’s furry hand on son’s bare shoulder. Jan admired the sleek, bronzed skin of the lad, whose chest was only just beginning to show a few pinfeathers of hair; his chin smooth; his eyes, green as catkins, refusing to meet Jan’s bark-brown ones. Jan imagined those eyes brimming with tears, those tan cheeks roasted to a fine pink, and nodded to himself. The tone of the group had become celebratory now that young Wob was with them, the double-groot good as won.
Heaven burned in the west, as is its custom, and the merry troop came to the largest of the lakes nudging the outskirts of Aalsmeer. The water shone the color of cider before them. Jan tied his horse to a post set in the shore, and they marched onto a long dock jutting over the meer. Father slapped son lightly on the back and arms, Pitter’s face beaming with pride and eagerness. Well he might, reflected Jan; he wasn’t the one to be diving into a lake at sunset with the blooms of water lilies still only a promise of the pad-scaled shallows.
“Da,” Wob said, “are ya sure—”
“Good lad,” said Pitter, cuffing his son. “The sooner you’re in, the sooner you’re out, eh, Lubbert?”
“Hmm?” It took Jan a moment to realize he was being addressed—bitter the beer might be, but strong. Not unlike old Sander, whose ill-executed escape attempt in Sneek necessitated the whole affair Jan was currently undertaking. “Aye, that’s right, boy. Your father’s staked a double-groot you can win a swimming trial, and I’ll tell you here in front of all that if you win, I’ll give you a few mites yourself for the trouble.”
That earned a few huzzahs, and another one of those dangerous smiles from Pitter. The boy still would not meet Jan’s eye. He wondered if young Wob was a virgin.
“Now, Lubbert, we said he’s to dive for a shoe, then?” Pitter took an old iron horseshoe from his pocket and held it up, the rusty metal dull against the shining water. “You want to toss?”
“Indeed,” said Jan, taking the shoe and drawing the dagger he kept at his belt. The way Pitter’s lip twitched as Jan began scraping several bands in the rust confirmed that the fisherman had meant to cheat him. He wondered where the boy had secreted the shoe’s twin, or if one of Wob’s siblings had run ahead and dropped the double off the end of the dock. No matter. The shoe was soon striped, and Jan winked at Pitter. “Just so the boy’s not confused by any old piece of metal he feels down there. This one’s rough then smooth then rough again from the rust, aye, Wob?”
Wob looked even less comfortable than he had before, a light breeze skating across the water, and Jan stepped forward, making a show out of hefting the horseshoe. Then he slung it side-armed, the shoe skipping across the surface four, five, six times before sliding into the water. One of the tavern-goers whistled, another sighed, and a third spit. Pitter opened his mouth to speak, but then Wob was in after it, and seeing him come up a short way out, Jan chided himself for letting the boy strip unnoticed. Wob treaded water, gasping and paddling and looking as if he were trying to crawl out of the lake, up into the air.
“Farther on, yet,” Pitter called, but his son did not immediately proceed. “Go on, then, you’ll warm yourself directly!”
Wob threw himself ahead, the slapping of warm, hard skin on cold, hard water bringing a prolonged wince to his father’s face. Several of the spectators came forward to stand at the edge of the dock with Pitter, and Jan let them by, content to move backward on the pier. It was not as if his watching would impact the search, and he was happy to stand in the rear as useless suggestions and encouragements were cast out after the boy. It was growing dark, and the wind was picking up. Jan frowned.
Two of Pitter’s friends went back to the tavern, neither congratulating Jan on his impending victory as they passed. Again and again Wob surfaced, sometimes spitting, sometimes coughing, but always diving back down. Jan imagined that the boy’s skin was quite numb by now, and that must make it even more difficult. Worst of all, any light that might have stretched to the bottom would have long since been reeled in, leaving Wob blind and fumbling through the muck for a horseshoe that would have instantly sunk into the mud.
“The devil you will!” Pitter shouted. “Go back a bit, then, I told you, farther back!”
Wob’s voice came again but Jan could still not make out the words, warped as they were by wind and water. Pitter might have heard and answered with his shaking head, or perhaps his gesture was based on intuition for what complaint his son would lodge now that the sun was nesting in the cattails. Perhaps he was simply mourning for coins lost.
“If we come out in the morning—” One of the other men spoke for Pitter, but Jan cut him off.
“The bet was what it was. Was it not, Visser?”
“Stay the fuck where you were!” Pitter shouted again. “There, right there! Again, lad, again—that’s the spot!”
Squinting between the capped heads of the Aalsmeerers, Jan saw Wob gulp the air and sink again, bubbles rising to mark his descent, and Jan wondered if there were weeds down there, the sort that are both slimy and scratchy. He hoped so, envisioning the boy snared in long emerald strands, his hands digging in the lakebed for an arc of iron, eels weaving between his fingers, a faint glow shining on his bare skin from some sunken moon…
“Been down too long,” one man said, and Jan realized he was right.
“He’s got it now, is what,” said Pitter, but his voice was strained, a fishing line about to snap.
The surface of the lake was still save for the wind scratching along it. Pitter began to strip, but by the time he was naked one of his friends had stepped between him and the water, shaking his head. Pitter Visser screamed then, and spun away from the black lake, ready to fight Lubbert of Sneek, naked or not. But the man was gone, the post where he had tied his horse at the end of the pier barely visible through the spreading night, as if the lake had risen from its bed to cover the earth with its bitter, unrelenting darkness. When Pitter was absent from the tavern, which was more and more in the days and weeks and years to follow, the men who had stood with them on the dock whispered that the handsome stranger’s failure to claim his double-groot before quitting their company was further proof that the devil himself had come to Aalsmeer.
II.
It was still far too early in the year for anyone to be on this stretch of strand, but Jolanda nevertheless put the better part of a league between herself and the trail that led through the dunes before undressing and walking into the surf. Partly it was to get her heat up before entering the brutally cold water, and partly it was to avoid getting her tunic stolen by one of her shitbird brothers or the village fisherboys—if one of them were to be sent after her, or shirk his responsibilities as she had, he could appear atop the dunes and sprint to her wad of hemp cloth before she could gain the shore. Out here, though, she would see anyone walking the beach long before he arrived.
She slapped her lower arms with opposite hands, her indigo fingers leaving ivory stripes on the violet skin, and then the sea was washing over her pale feet. Breath-stealer, flesh-scalder. A cold neuking day, but she always preferred the cold to the hot—even winter nights in the crowded hut were too much like sleeping inside a panting mouth, the warmer waters of Snail Bay too much like bathing in fresh blood.
Jolanda turned and ran from the sea then, the skin of her feet breaking shells instead of the reverse, her breath returning and burning as she charged up the dune. Her run quickly degenerated into a back-sliding climb, and then she spun again, running back down, sand sticking to her sweaty body, settling in her short black hair. The water shone before her, the afternoon sun beckoning her onward. If she fell there, the shells would be merciless, but she had not taken a tumble in the sand for some time, and then she was past the tide-cast ribbon of pink and gray and white shells and was back in the surf, the water splashing and slowing her, a chill cousin to the snatching sand of the dune. Then she did fall, half on purpose, and the shock of the icy sea struck her dead for several moments, the girl forcing herself to stay pinned to the floor of the shallows as the waves pushed and pulled at her, coaxing her upward with the promise of an honest gasp of air. Down she stayed, then whipped herself up with a cry, on her knees in the sand, the breakers crashing over her chest and shoulders, the salt stinging the countless cuts and abrasions she suffered from smashing snail shells all the days of her memory.
More than anything, she wanted to dash from the sea, to pull her tunic over her wet body and run home, to lie down amidst the purple pots until she was smoked like a herring. Instead she clumsily fought the sea and herself and gained her feet, the wind burning her slick skin almost, but not quite, worse than the waves had, and she faced not the dunes but open water. Meeting the hard eye of the North Sea made her feel like Griet from the tales her brother Pieter had told her, Mad Griet, the housewife who harrowed hell itself, afraid of nothing, ready to wrestle the devil and tie him to a pillow if he gave her trouble. That was how Jolanda would always be, she told herself, fierce enough to face hell itself, and so a chilly day at the beach presented no substantial challenge.
In she went again, keeping her head underwater as much as she dared, the inevitable discomfort of her teeth chattering as much a deterrent to surfacing as the frigid water ought to have been to entering it in the first place. Soon she lost the bottom, and knowing full well how foolhardy it would be to swim on, she dove again and kicked her legs and shoved apart the endless curtain of water over and over again, deeper and farther. At last she came up spluttering, the odor of burning shellfish that had dyed her nostrils with its permanent stink as surely as the purple had dyed her arms now forgotten, her shitbird siblings and father forgotten, everything lost in the rush to breathe after being crushed so tightly by the ocean.
Jolanda did not notice the rider until much later, when she was swimming back in. Her skin was wrinkled and deadened, her heart pounding even when she floated languidly on the surface, and when she finally saw him she paused, much as her frigid body wailed at her to keep swimming and quit the sea as soon as possible. She treaded water, wondering if the rider could see her amidst the waves, and then his arm came up in salute, a small brown flag flapping in the sea breeze. Her tunic. Jolanda cursed.
The horse did not move, but the rider dismounted, walking toward the water and calling to her. She could not hear what he was saying and swam closer, knowing her best hope would be if he came into the water after her—she could outswim anyone, and if she happened to be exhausted at the moment, then no matter, for the cold would cripple him worse than weariness hobbled her. Reassured, Jolanda swam to shore.
She stopped when she was able to set both feet on the sand, the relief it gave her beleaguered arms and legs nearly carnal, like fingernails on a long-neglected back. The waves necessitated that she occasionally kick up and float, but she had no intention of coming any closer until she determined who he was—for he was definitely a man, she saw that now—and what he wanted. Part of her supposed she already knew, that it would be what the neighboring fisherboys were always pestering her for, but she told that part to hush.
“You’re all right, then!” The man had thick umber hair and a handsome smile, and he stood just beyond the reach of the waves, holding her tunic in one hand.
“Yeah!” Jolanda shouted back, wondering how best to get him in the water so she could steal his horse. She had never ridden a horse before, but had once goaded the man-child Luther into mounting a peddler’s carthorse outside the tavern to fine result, and if the idiot could ride a horse, then so could she. She squinted at the man, trying to determine if she knew him or not—the older men of the village all looked the same to her, which was
to say they all looked like sand-caked arseholes.
The stranger did not respond other than to stare out at her, and the longer they looked at each other, the more certain she was she had never seen him before. His high hat and clothes were obviously well worn, but none the poorer for it, with the garnet hue of his padded doublet and the fur trim on his cloak implying he might be a nobleman of some standing. But then, she had never seen a nobleman of any standing at all, and so couldn’t say for sure. He didn’t look like a sand-caked arsehole, in any event.
“How long have you been out there?” he finally called, cupping his hand into the sunset that wreathed Jolanda’s head.
“Long enough,” she answered, her teeth chattering worse than ever now that she was close to stationary, wave after frigid wave lapping over her. When he did not respond to that, she sighed and swam a little closer to shore, fatigue truly beginning to set in, and she raised her voice even louder. “My father come out. He just run back to start the fish. He’ll be back soon. My brothers too, surely.”
“No.” The handsome stranger shook his head. “You’re alone. No other tracks. The beach is always honest.”
Jolanda cursed herself for a fool, and swam even closer so that she could fully rest her legs and still flash him some tit. It had worked well enough to lure in any fisherboys whose belt pouches she had a mind to rifle, but the stranger stayed where he was. This presented a rather sizable problem—if he didn’t enter the water, she couldn’t very well give him the slip and beat him to the shore. She glanced down to make sure her oceanic bodice was still giving up glimpses of her nipples between the waves, and there they were, dark as wet sand and jutting out hard as shells, given the cold neuking circumstances, but still no move from the stranger.
The Folly of the World Page 2