The Folly of the World

by Jesse Bullington

  Then, success. As his hand fell to his waist, she considered whether she would risk riding his horse back to her hut to retrieve what food and supplies she could steal, or take the safer path and immediately ride north, sell the beast somewhere along the way, and with that fortune start a new life somewhere far from hair-pulling brothers and switch-happy father. Then she saw he was not loosening his codpiece but drawing a dagger, and Jolanda chose to take a deep breath rather than uttering the curse that pushed at her tongue.

  She dove and swam south, staying down as long as she could. She kept close enough to the shallows to give her legs the odd respite, but stayed underwater as much as she could bear. She only looked to shore after she had dived, quick-surfaced, and dived again over fifty times, which was as high as she had ever needed to count. The line of dunes were as familiar and distinct to her as her brothers, and she saw she was making good progress to the trail despite her exhaustion.

  She also saw the silhouette of the rider pacing her along the beach. She dived deeper, swam harder, surfaced briefer, but always he was there. The sun had nearly gone under when at last she recognized the gap in the dunes where the trail ran to her home, and she stopped fighting the sea, letting it hold her steady in its half-tender, half-cruel embrace. The rider waited between her and those dunes, as if neither she nor he had moved a jot from their original positions.

  He turned and looked at the trail, then dismounted and approached the water’s edge. Jolanda sunk deeper until only her eyes and nose bobbed above the water, but he looked directly at her, and while he still held her tunic in one hand, he also gripped that long dagger in the other, its edge catching the last light of day and burning like a brand. Jolanda knew from the many drubbings she and the fisherboys had exchanged by the trailhead that no screams would reach her hut, but before she could settle on another strategy, the man’s arm cocked back and the knife was spinning high into the air, a twinkling pinwheel that flew to her left and then past her, disappearing into a wave without a splash.

  She didn’t look back to see his reaction at having missed her, and so pathetically—she knew that she already stood little enough chance of finding the weapon without averting her eyes from the spot where it had sunk. She had only swum a short distance before a part of her protested at the impossibility of finding the knife, of swimming back into the colder, deeper water when she was so close to home and might break from the sea, evade the man, and gain the trail. At this point, however, he owed her at least a knife for her trouble, if not a horse as well, and she would need the one to take the other. And so she swung her arms harder, kicked fiercer, staying to the surface so as not to lose sight of where the dagger had fallen, an ever-shifting patch of sea like any other save that she had put it at thirty strokes away, and now she was but ten.

  The tide was coming in, pulling the bottom even farther away, and the sun was only poking over the edge of the waves. Jolanda dove. She was winded and barely brushed the sand before she had to surface. Resisting the push of the jostling waves took what little strength she had, but she dived again, her leanness carrying her down. Even with eyes hardened against the brine she saw little, the sun too low, the bottom too deep, and as the tide shoved her backward, she ran her hands over the rippled sand, a blind woman seeking out a single loose thread in an endless quilt. She came up gasping, dry-heaved twice, gulped the air, then went down again.

  And again.

  And again.

  Lights were coming to her, bright sparks inside her skull, and still she dove, her fingers dredging through the sand. Her hands were too numb to even recognize that they had found the knife until the salt intruded into her sliced right palm. She came up bloody-handed and howling. And dove again, brushing the bottom slowly, carefully, and then, finally, wrapped the fingers of her good left hand around the hilt, a smile not even the dwellers of that deep could see hidden behind her thin lips.

  III.

  The girl was only a few paces out when Jan found her again, the sneaky bitch having escaped into the liquid shadows after diving for his knife. She was crawling more than swimming, the breakers barely cresting her back as she dragged herself from the sea like some beast of legend. He walked toward her, and she must have realized she was spotted, for she flung herself to her feet and dashed out of the water, charging him with his own dagger.

  Jan felt his stomach lurch at the sight, marveling that she could even stand, and then she couldn’t, her legs giving out and sending her sprawling in the shells. She gave a cry, and then commenced vomiting with such vigor that Jan half-expected her organs to appear in the frothy stew. She kicked her arms and legs, drowning on dry land as she retched uncontrollably.

  When she stopped heaving, Jan approached her, the girl rolling onto her back and revealing herself to be older than he would have imagined from the size of her tunic, perhaps fifteen or sixteen. Her stomach and small breasts were striped red from the shells, and as he appraised her, the deeper cuts began to weep. Oddly, from the elbows down, her arms were almost as dark as the rest of her was pallid, and he saw that the sand coating her right hand was sloughing off in small red clumps. In her left fist his dagger jutted out, black as burnt sugar in the gloaming.

  “Get!” the girl managed, brandishing the knife, her accent thick but certainly no poorer than those of the people of Aalsmeer, or worse yet, the Frisians. She would do.

  “Are you mad?” Jan asked pleasantly. “You could have drowned.”

  He tossed the sandy tunic onto her and turned around, his practiced nonchalance belying the ear he cocked for the sound of feet pounding beach behind him. Only the rumor of sand dancing in the breeze. She wasn’t moving.

  Mounting his horse, Jan looked back at the girl. She stayed where he had left her, the tunic draped over her like the victim of some worse crime, her plain face staring at him with a look of stupid confusion. Jan had hoped it would be a boy.

  The trail wound through the sandy hills and ridges, and though he saw the lights of a village ahead, he stopped at the first hut he came to, a rather large, sand-blasted hovel set back in the blackthorn that coated the dunes. The bouquet of rotten shellfish, charred bone, and old piss permeated the place, and there were several rusty cauldrons set in the sand between him and the hut. Jan nodded, remembering how stained the girl’s arms were. This would be easier than he had thought.

  It wasn’t, as it turned out. They slunk from the shadows of the sloe, half a dozen lads between the ages of ten and twenty, all wearing the dull, tongue-lolling expressions of sleepy wolfhounds, their arms dark with dye, their eyes dark with suspicion. He would have taken any one of them over the girl, but she was the swimmer and so there was nothing for it.

  “Is your father here?” Jan asked them, but none spoke, and the tallest of them began to stroke the nose of the stranger’s horse. Jan reflected on how much easier certain things had been when he rode with Sander. Then sand-warped wood screamed in its frame and a man stood silhouetted in the doorway of the hut, a fire blazing behind him, and Jan dismounted with a sigh.

  Inside, the handsome stranger sat on one side of the fire and the father sat on the other, his six sons fanning out around him. It was silent, other than the popping fire, and hard to see through the haze of smoke—judging by the greasy violet stains surrounding the central firepit, the cauldrons weren’t always used outside. The shellfish they apparently used to manufacture the dye were kept in damp sacks that insulted the single room like sandbags protecting an island from flood, and the odor of marine decay was much stronger inside than it had been on the trail. One of the boys whispered in his father’s ear, and the man nodded.

  “Whadja say your name is?” said the father.

  “Lubbert,” said Jan. “And yours?”

  “A Frieslander?” The man scowled. “You a herring-fucker, Lob?”

  “No,” said Jan amiably. “But I’ve been known to lay the occasional eel.”

  “Eh?”

  “Only fish long enough,” said Jan, demons
trating with his fist. Several of the boys brayed at this, but the father remained unimpressed. He had heard dirtier.

  “Verf,” said the father. “You call me Verf. You said business. What business, stiffhead?”

  “A proposition,” said Jan. “I’m traveling back to Sneek, to my family and business. I’m a cloth-seller. I need a servant to help my wife with our new son, but, riding by, I thought—may I drink?”

  “If you have enough for me,” said Verf.

  “Certainly,” said Jan, taking a gourd of brandywine from the satchel he had brought inside. He wouldn’t have left his saddle untended in these parts if he could help it, but so things went. Taking a pull, he stood, hunched, and moved around the fire, bumping his head on the low ceiling and catching a lungful of wood smoke. He coughed. A boy snickered. He sat back down.

  “Ugh,” said Verf, grimacing on the drink, but swallowing anyway. “It’s spoilt.”

  “It’s supposed to be sweet,” Jan explained, which got an even deeper frown from Verf. The man passed it to his eldest son, and away it went into the shadows. “As I said, I’m a cloth-seller—”

  “Lookin for a slave,” said Verf.

  “Looking for someone to help with my wife, yes. I would pay them, of course—”

  “Apprentice them,” said Verf, and again Jan palpably missed Sander’s scowling countenance. People hadn’t interrupted him so much when Sander was around.

  “I have sons for that,” said Jan. “And obviously can’t have a tyro who’s helping my wife. Can’t have a man helping her at all, yes?”

  “No,” said Verf.

  “Exactly,” said Jan, eager to get it all out before the girl came home. If the girl came home—he hadn’t looked to see how bad the cut in her hand was. “I need a young woman who can—”

  “No,” said Verf again. “They look like girls?”

  One of the boys got into a crouch, the brandy gourd in one black hand. The kid actually growled at Jan, and he had the sudden, intense urge to murder every one of them and burn their hut to the ground. Rubbing his watery eyes, Jan pressed ahead.

  “I saw your daughter on the beach. Swimming. Just the age to help my wife, and—”

  “Saw her?” Through the smoke Verf’s face looked as purple as his fingers. “Wager you fuckin did.”

  More of the sons were rising in the miasma, and Jan bit the inside of his cheek. Not good at all. “Listen,” he said, “I saw her arms and knew her for a purple-maker. So I came to inquire after hiring her—I can find a servant anywhere, but one who can help with the dyeing of my linen is something—”

  “You sure you don’t aim to have her dye somethin else?” Verf breathed, his sons now edging around the fire like crabs moving in on a beached mackerel.

  “Dyeing some—” Jan began.

  “Like the front’ve your breeches with her fuckin maidenhead?” said Verf, and then, as if concerned he had spoken over his guest’s head, elaborated, “Her fuckin cunt blood?”

  The revulsion on Jan’s face doubtless helped his cause as he spit into the fire and said, “Christ’s cross, no! If I wanted that, I’d take it on the strand and not come knocking, don’t you think?”

  The eldest two boys were now on either side of him, and Jan saw they held shell-hammers aloft, ready to crack his kernel—he wondered briefly if dye could be made from human remains, but then Verf called them off.

  “Back, boys,” said the father heavily, as if it pained him not to have his guest murdered. “Want Jolanda to tend your wife and help you in the dyein, eh?”

  “Yes,” said Jan, trying not to reveal his relief as the sons retreated back to their side of the hut.

  “No,” said Verf, but then another of the boys cupped hand to ear and whispered to his father, who nodded and amended himself. “How much?”

  Jan dumped his purse of fake groots on the floor of the hut. He had no concerns over Verf recognizing the money as counterfeit—the cross-stamped coins were convincing enough that the dye-maker might circulate the lot of them without anyone being the wiser. They were thus just as valuable as genuine currency, and after Jan eyed Verf and confirmed from his host’s expression that the girl was as good as his, he returned the bulk of the coins to the pouch, leaving only three on the floor. Jan had no idea how much dye-makers brought in, but if the state of their home told him anything, they didn’t earn much. Unexpected, that, Jan mused; considering how infrequently he saw purple clothing, he’d have thought they would turn a pretty pfennig for—

  The door screeched and the girl, Jolanda, stood framed against the night, her left side hidden behind the doorframe, her hair jutting out like a hedgepig’s quills. She must have fallen several times along the trail, for thick scabs of sand clung to her face and arm and leg and tunic and bound hand, and she stared at Jan, motionless, eyes shining. She would have seen his horse, but came in anyway, he reflected, and again he took a chance on her not stabbing him in the back. Turning back to Verf, Jan saw that the dye-maker wore an inscrutable expression as he watched his silent daughter—sad or wrathful, bored or amused, who could tell on that driftwood-twisted face?

  “I—” Jan started, but was cut off by Verf.

  “We ain’t heatin the dunes, chit. Shut it and meet Lob.”

  “Lubbert,” said Jan, but no one cared.

  Jan heard her drop the knife in the sand before her sandy left hand slid into the light, and then she closed the door behind her. Her already too-high tunic was shorter than when he had returned it to her, the edge ragged from where she had cut it. If her father noticed, he did not say, nor did he comment on the binding that had already soaked crimson on her right hand. Instead Verf told her to get her arse to cooking for them and their new friend, Frieslander though he may be, and turned back to the handsome stranger. She made a lewd gesture as soon as she was behind her father, and Jan was unsure if it was directed at him, Verf, or all concerned, and then she disappeared into the thicket of siblings filling that side of the hut.

  “Three groots hardly seems—” Verf started, but then the girl gave a furious shout, one of her brothers presumably snickering something of import to her.

  “Sell me like a whore to that arsehole?!” The girl reared up before her father, the boys parting like some mythical Purple Sea around her. “Sell me?! To him?! You know what he did to me, on the goddamn beach?”

  Jan felt a sudden surge of nausea, like a ghost had reached its spectral hand into his stomach and set to rooting around in his guts. The ghost of avoiding an ass-beating at the hands of her brothers, Jan supposed, a possibility now dead as young Wob Visser of Aalsmeer. He didn’t move, however, recalling one of Sander’s provincial expressions about the difference between beating a man within an ell of his life and out of it altogether being a matter of how much the blighter fought back.

  “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.