The Folly of the World

by Jesse Bullington

  Satisfied she hadn’t filched anything from the workshop, Poorter held open the kitchen door and Sander, never one to stand on ceremony when he could sit on his ass, immediately took the nicest chair and would have put his feet up on the second best if Poorter hadn’t arched his eyebrows and pointed at the man’s mucky boots. Sander pulled them off, clods of filth spattering the woven reed mats covering the stone floor, and handed them to Jan, who had already stripped off his. Poorter noticed that the girl didn’t wear shoes, further confirming his suspicions that she was some beggar-child they had picked up for purposes best not inquired after. Unless… But Poorter dismissed the notion at once, the idea of either of them getting on a woman no more likely than his getting on an otter.

  “Arcubalistarius, I have need of your service,” said Jan after he had exhausted his empty platitudes and his two companions had set in on the leftovers Poorter had offered them, the same bluish mutton that he blamed for his morning’s bellyache.

  “Anything, my friend,” said Poorter, smiling back. “Provided, of course, that I can provide.”

  “Specifically, I have need of your floor.”

  “Indeed,” said Poorter, assuaging his irritation by admiring the amount of sour lamb Sander was putting away, the man first sucking the fat from the cobalt-streaked meat, swishing it about in his mouth, and then chewing the flesh itself with a relish that bordered on the obscene. The girl had nibbled a little but put the rest back on the plate they shared, the runny grease leaving the tips of her dirty fingers shiny. Her hands and forearms looked badly bruised, and at the thought of harboring some abused child Poorter felt his indigestion return. “For what duration?”

  “That depends entirely on uncontrollable elements,” said Jan. “But I’ll have an idea soon. I have to run some errands, if you wouldn’t mind keeping an eye on these two while I’m out, and then we’ll discuss duration over supper. My treat.”

  “Indeed,” said Poorter. “And shall I invite Laurent as well?”

  “That shouldn’t be necessary,” said Jan. “I’ll call on him this afternoon.”

  “Is that wise?”

  “Wiser than his calling here, given the circumstances. Where are you keeping my things?”

  “Stay here, I won’t be a moment,” said Poorter, ducking back into his workroom. He was a portly man, and not predisposed to haste, but he hurried between the cluttered tables with both speed and alacrity, eager to get back to the kitchen before his cutlery went missing. He lamented his lack of maid or apprentice for the umpteenth time, but the last pair he’d employed had eloped with one another and a small fortune in his completed crossbows and finer components, including a filigreed lock plate that cost more than he paid the maid in a month. If his guests were to steal the knife he had provided them with, he would be cutting his meat with arrowheads.

  Fishing out the satchel Jan had entrusted to him during the bastard’s last visit, Poorter returned to the kitchen door, but paused at hearing a quiet exchange between the men:

  “Can’t anchor me, you plaguebitch!”

  “No, but I can beg that you listen to reason. When we’re back, you can go out as much as you like, but until then do us both a favor and be patient. I’m sure he has some cards.”

  “I have a Karnöffel deck,” said Poorter, entering the kitchen when it became evident the conversation was over. “And a chessboard. I have much to do today but you two—where’s the girl?”

  The small kitchen had only the table the men sat at and another, narrower board beside the cooking hearth, and as she was neither at the first nor under the second, she was not in the kitchen. She had either snuck into the workshop after him and crept up into his loft or—the sound of retching came from the tiny closet in which he kept his chamber pot. Relieved, Poorter tossed Jan his pack, and the man began to strip without even loosening the drawstrings on the bag. Sander leered at him as he did, and Poorter wearily went back to the workshop, opening sash and shutter to let in what murky light dripped down with the resumed rain.

  Jan went out a short time later, his brightly colored velvet doublet, embroidered shirt, and spotless hose almost blinding compared to the dusky, dusty ensemble he had arrived in, glossy black turnshoes squeaking on the floor of the workshop, a hooded cape pulled over his freshly rinsed hair. The bucket in which he had washed his face and hair shone in the watery afternoon light, the sheen on the surface a greasy mirror to what remained on the plate Sander had cleared of mutton. But then the madman raised the dish and set to licking it, spoiling the dichotomy. The girl was out of the closet but looked far from hale, and the sight of Sander polishing the plate with his tongue brought a fresh grimace to her hollow cheeks. Poorter would have sympathized, had he been the sympathetic type.

  The front door closed behind Jan, and Sander immediately stood up, dropping the plate on the table with a clatter. “Right, that’s me out. Spot me a groot.”

  “I will not,” said Poorter, bristling at the demand, expected though it was. “And Jan—”

  “Is gone out, so that’s me, too. Five mites, then? You can afford it, I know you can.”

  “No.”

  “Fine.” Sander glowered at Poorter. “See you at supper.”

  “Plate,” said Poorter, nodding at the bucket Jan had washed in.

  “You heard,” Sander told the girl, who responded by giving him the sort of look that would stop a rabbit’s heart. Picking it up himself, Sander cocked his arm back as if he were going to strike her with it, but she didn’t flinch. Sander snickered, squatting over the bucket and rinsing the dish, and Poorter sighed. It was going to be a long visit.

  After the plate was washed, Sander made to leave without the girl, whereupon a debate ensued between the men as the urchin looked back and forth between them with growing disgust. She wouldn’t look Poorter in the eye and hadn’t said a word since arriving. Sander only relented when Poorter agreed to lend him a few pfennigs in exchange for taking the child with him, the child he had himself brought into the house. As Poorter closed the front door behind them, he saw Sander give one of the coins to the girl as they ambled down the street. If there was anything worse in all the world than a born cheat, Poorter didn’t know what it was, and he sat down on his bench to do some honest work before the robber crows again descended on his house.

  XI.

  Jo spent five nights in the house of Primm, nights that were even less comfortable than the days thanks to Jan and Sander banishing her to the dark workshop while they used the kitchen for their private purposes. Jan was, well, Jan as ever, but the company he kept put her out. Poorter was suspicious of eye, large of girth, baffling of mouth, and generally vain and self-important, with a fine powdering of cookie crumbs forever lingering, licelike, in his thin mustache. Unsettling as the rich crossbowman was, Sander was worse. Why a man such as Jan would take the company of Sander was beyond her, for the bully was loutish and often scary, and, unlike Jan, anything but good-natured when she engaged him in a slapfight.

  When they’d left Poorter’s that first Dordrecht afternoon, Sander had taken her to a cramped, smelly tavern in the shadow of an Augustinian monastery, insisting on buying her an ale and telling her some inane story. When she’d politely mentioned the inanity of said tale, they had gotten into it, and he promptly landed a smack to her ear that left her stunned while he laughed in her face. She lost her temper over it, tears in her eyes as she screamed at him not to hit her so hard. As she railed at him, he began breathing too fast, panting like a sick dog, eyes bulging like a cooked fish, and then he wordlessly stood and led her back to Poorter’s house. Supper that night had been miserable, with Jan and Primm talking obliquely about things she didn’t understand while Sander scowled mutely into his soup, as if something in the fishy broth personally offended him. He didn’t speak to Jo for two days.

  That first night, they had all slept together on the floor of the kitchen with Jan between her and the sulky man-child, but the second night Jan gently requested that she sleep
in the workroom while he and Sander conducted their business. Sander was in the privy and Primm already retired, and so, with the twin sources of her nervousness removed, Jo chanced engaging Jan—he had held forth quite a bit about Dordrecht and Holland and Duke This and Duchess That and Some Bitch during the long day of sitting in the kitchen, but rare was the occasion where neither of the other men were present.

  “Why?” she said, not caring if she sounded petulant.

  “Here,” said Jan, going to the door and tapping a small black gouge in the wood. It looked like a knothole, but when she inspected the other side of the door, she saw that it was dug out. In poor weather Primm would test his devices inside, and the targets he hung from the door were often insufficient to fully stop the quarrels from such close range. “Though I don’t know if you’ll like it.”

  “Eh?” She squinted at him, as though he were already on the other side of the peephole.

  “We’re lovers,” said Jan, lowering his voice despite his seeming nonchalance. “We’d like to fuck, though Sander’s the shy type, so he wants you out. Personally, I don’t care if you watch, but don’t tell him that.”

  Jo gawked at him, then giggled, than gawked again when she realized he wasn’t in jest. She could feel her cheeks flaring hot even as her belly went cold, and she turned to flee into the workshop before Jan saw her cry. It didn’t make any kind of sense at all; she didn’t even know men really did that to one another outside of insulting allegations, or how. That said, the source of her sudden shame and misery was much closer to her heart than an abstract confusion about the logistics of coupling.

  The workshop was dark, Poorter snoring above, and just as a sudden fury boiled up inside her and she spun to slam the door shut behind her, Jan appeared in the doorway, the fingers he had stretched out to the nape of her neck now grazing her throat. She froze, and he followed her into the darkness, his hand pressing in until the crook between thumb and forefinger was tight against her neck. His fingers closed softly, and she gasped as he leaned in, his face in shadow blacker than the bottom of a purple pot, his breath warm as the side of the cauldrons.

  “I want you to watch, Jo,” he said, breathing on her face, the smell of tart ale and coriandered pike almost seeming sweet. She closed her eyes from the heat. “And don’t you be jealous, understand? He’s just going to tide me over until you’re ready, and then I’ll be done with him and it’ll be just you and me, all right? But you need to watch, to see if you can please me like he can. It’s important.”

  She would have kicked him, she would have bit him or something, but she found her limbs had grown heavy, and even stepping back as he moved closer was like trying to swim in a wet tunic. His other hand landed on the top of her thigh, the fingers bunching up her shift, and she felt as if she were a fathom under the sea, her chest pinching, her breath gone, and then his fingers were on bare skin—she had stripped down to her underwear early in the evening, the heat of the cooking hearth driving the layers off her limbs like a butcher skinning a pig after roasting off its hair. She keenly remembered one of the fisherboys getting this close after tackling her in the dunes, remembered ramming him in the nose with her forehead and sending him crying into the blackthorn, but she didn’t move this time. Jan’s fingers withdrew slightly, the tips grazing her thigh as the shift pooled in his palm and spilled over, and then he was sliding up, between her legs, and she would have begged him to stop if she’d had the breath.

  “I’m mad for you, Jo,” he murmured, and she realized her difficulty in breathing came in part from his gently throttling fingers encircling her neck. He seemed to think this was sexy, but he was way out of order on that—it creeped her out, soured the whole thing. His other hand was hovering so close she could feel its heat through her patch of wiry hair. “Mad. But I want a woman, not a girl. So you watch, and think if you want to give me what I want to give you. After we retrieve what I’m looking for, we’ll have a talk and see. And then it’ll be just you and me from then on. All right?”

  Jo heard the privy door open in the kitchen, Sander saying something that was incomprehensible to Jo, coming as it did through a great depth of water or some colder, crueler substance. Jan drifted back out the door, like a rubbing-up rag caught by the wind at the edge of her father’s sandy yard, and then he pulled it shut after him, a beam of light stabbing out of the peephole to shine upon her heaving chest. It brought her to the surface, that light, and she fell to her knees, her breath coming in sobs, her knees trembling, her stomach roiling like it had after eating Poorter’s mutton the morning before. What in all the devils of the sea was wrong with him? With her, that she hadn’t broken his face for squeezing her throat the way he had? The rest of it had been all right, but that had been downright scary…

  When they started to make noises, she fled to the rear of the workshop, crawling under the table and crying herself to sleep. It was almost enough to make her miss her old life, miss the grunting, smacking, farting mass of brothers and father crowded together in the dark, the heat of them clinging to her like a tunic after a swim if she didn’t have time to let the air dry her before slipping it back on, and she shivered miserably, pulling her knees to her chest. Summer though it was, she felt a chill unlike any found in the deep, and wondered just what she had fallen into.

  The next morning Sander’s spirits seemed much improved and, finally breaking his silence toward her, he offered Jo a tug on his breakfast bottle. He wore an almost normal smile and joked about, as though nothing had ever been queer between them after his cuffing her in the tavern that first afternoon. She went along with it, but secretly hoped Jan would get sick of his craziness and run him off right away. It didn’t seem likely, however, knowing what she now did.

  Jan took her out for a walk, which restored Sander’s only just-vanquished grumpiness when he was instructed to stay behind. Jo let Jan show her the churches, and then the mint from whence he’d stolen a plate with which to conterfeit groots, but then she demanded to be taken to the harbor and sent home. He laughed and took her to the new harbor, but of course she had no coin, nor would she ask him for any, and so she just stared bitterly at the moldering quays and the bobbing boats.

  “I’m not going to coddle you, Jo,” he said lightly from behind her. “Nor will I apologize. What I do is my business, just as what you—”

  “I thought you were different from them,” she said, dismayed to hear her voice crack at the memory of the fisherboys harassing her, the sometimes-fun, sometimes-not attentions they gave her. He couldn’t have known to whom she was referring, but it didn’t stop him from answering.

  “I’m different from anyone you’ve ever met, Jo,” he told her quietly, the humor gone from his voice, but also the self-assurance that had galled her at first and then won her over with its certainty. He seemed almost melancholy, and she didn’t pull away when the hands that had touched her with such purpose the night before settled hesitantly on her shoulders, landing light as young gulls on the sloe branches before they’d learned the cockiness and bravado of their elders. “But then, you’re different from anyone I’ve met, too. You… frighten me, Jo.”

  She laughed at that, hating the ugly goose-honking sound her laugh had become ever since he’d put the crook in her half-healed nose. Turning to him, she saw how serious his brown eyes were under the cowl of the hood he wore despite the break in the rain, and she caught herself. “Don’t be daft. What you got to fear from me?”

  “You…” He paused, licking his full lips, and then shook his head, a fey smile again playing at his mouth. “You make me doubt things. About myself. Things I took for granted, like preferring fellows to lasses.”

  “Probably ’cause I look like a boy,” she said, averting her eyes and brushing the back of her short-cropped head with a wincing touch, as though she were testing a fresh wound.

  “No,” he said with that old confidence. “You’re a beautiful young woman, and—”

  Jo kissed him then, but with her eyes so tightly
shut she missed a direct connection and their lips only met at the corner. Before she could fall back in embarrassment or try again, he had seized her around the waist and crushed her to him. Their lips recalibrated and she desperately shoved her tongue into his mouth, their teeth clicking painfully together, and she found his squirming, moist muscle at the ready to play with hers. She thought of the inside of smashed sea snails and her stomach lurched. After a moment, or maybe an eternity, he pulled her away with that same prodding gentleness that filled her with such confusion.

  “I want many more of those when we’re done with this business,” Jan said when he caught his breath, for he seemed as dumb as her for a moment afterward. “But for now you keep on like nothing’s changed around Sander, all right?”

  She nodded, unable to look at him for a moment, and when she did, he’d somehow conjured up a beautiful blue cloak in his perfect hands. He was holding it out to her, which obviously meant she was to have it, but she couldn’t make her weak fingers take it. It hurt her eyes to look at the gift, and then he was moving behind her, wrapping it around her shoulders as he went on talking. For some stupid reason he was still hung on Sander, even though she’d already resolved to do as Jan wished—why couldn’t they talk about the cloak instead?

  “We need him, and I don’t need to tell you he’s got a temper. So I keep him happy for a little while longer, and then we’ll leave this stinking place, go somewhere new. But for now you’ll keep our secret.”

  It wasn’t a question in either of their minds, she figured. Even still, despite his reiterated request that she spy on them Jo fled back under the table that night, disgusted not only by the sight of Jan’s cock plunging between Sander’s beard-wreathed lips but also by some less definable quality to what they were doing, or how it made her feel. The fourth night they did nothing and allowed her to sleep between them, but she lay awake long after the light went out ruminating on what she had seen and what might lay in store for her, wondering if she could give Jan what he said he needed. She wasn’t an idiot, of course, and knew what might come after a sucking off, at least for men and women, but still—knowing what to do and choosing to do it were two very different pots of purple.