The Folly of the World

by Jesse Bullington

  “Is that it?” Jan called over his shoulder to the rowers, and Andrei ended his song as abruptly as it had begun.

  “Da, good eye, Rutte!”

  “Jan,” Sander barked. “Jan!”

  “Doesn’t make his eye bad, zhopa.”

  “San. Dur,” said Sander. “Sander. Call me more of that noise and see.”

  “I see good enough, Sander, I do!” said the Muscovite, still half-turned on his bench, a smile forever lingering at his lips like herring grease after a summer dinner. “But do you?”

  Sander saw, all right, he saw just fine. He and Jan had talked it over the night before and both agreed the boatman couldn’t be trusted, although Jan had it all backward—he thought the shifty emigrant was too straight, whereas Sander could see that the Muskie was as crooked as a pig’s tail. After working with Jan to locate their destination shortly after the flood, and now the Hollander’s return with two assistants and three bulging satchels, the foreigner was bound to suspect a treasure hunt. That he had not said as much upfront and demanded a cut there in the tavern where they had discussed the terms implied he meant to cheat them out of the lot, like as the devil doing sin.

  Everyone had heard stories about breaker crews hiding in the massive meer the Groote Waard had become, some of the pirates simple opportunists salvaging what they could from the towns the tide gave up, others the former villagers themselves without means of subsistence beyond banditry now that the lands and livestock they had worked were gone—if the landowning graafs and hertogs were desperate, pity then their farmers and shepherds. Assuming Andrei spent as much time on the meer as he claimed, then he would be working with or for some crew or another or he would have lost his boat and likely his life long before—there being fuck all in the way of taxable worth out here, neither graaf nor city was inclined to waste a groot patrolling the waters for brigands. If the Muscovite colluded with some breakers to rob Jan and company, then the only question was whether he would have given his confederates the probable location of the treasure itself or, as Sander suspected, arranged an ambush spot somewhere on the way back to Dordt.

  Point was, the plaguebitch may have fooled Jan, but he wasn’t fitting Sander with no woolen blinders—whoever heard of an honest Muscovite? Obviously the villain intended a robbery.

  Sander dearly hoped so, yes he did.

  A low mist had come up, clinging over the surface like a cold stew’s skin, and twisting around for a look, Sander saw tendrils of it catching in thin dead branches jutting out of the meer. The limbs—twigs, really—extended in a field for at least fifty paces, or swimmer’s strokes, or whatever, and beyond them the haze thickened. The bottom of the boat scratched over something, which brought an unhappy surge in Sander’s belly.

  “Careful, now, careful,” said Andrei, slowing the boat with his oars and then pulling them in as far as the rowlocks allowed. He clicked his teeth as Sander did the same. With the oars, that was—clicking your teeth at someone like you were addressing a horse or a dog was a good way to get your ugly head split, in Sander’s estimation. This would be a fine place to do it, too; endless gray water, gray little sprays of wood rising from it, gray drifts of mist hanging, boxing them in, and a gray sky above… Place could do with a splash of color, red or otherwise.

  The fingers of willow that remained above the surface had long since relented to the water’s intrusion, and rather than snapping, they bent away from the boat, rubbery as the arms of squid. Looking over the side, Sander could make out a tangled maze of murky limbs leading down into darkness. The sight of the arboreal reef brought him a sudden and acute dizziness, and he closed his eyes, trying to find his suddenly cagey breath. It had been easy to forget where they were when he was intent on the rowing, or daydreaming about Jan’s cock, or daydreaming about kicking Jan in the cock for his cruel, selfish attitude, but now, with a willow wood underneath them instead of the other way around, Sander found himself unable to avoid the grim truth—his whole life up until he’d had to quickly quit the place a few years ago was beneath them, waterlogged and dead as a drowned hound, and they were floating above it all like… what’d the Muskie say? Like angels.

  Or ghosts.

  It was a chill fucking thought, and Sander tried to turn his mind from it by opening his eyes and focusing on the task of hating the Muscovite, who had stood and used a long quant to guide them over the forest, pushing off of the sunken limbs with his pole. Besides, Sander’s village might have been just like the prosaically named Oudeland, but it wasn’t as if they were actually above his birthplace…

  “There,” said Jan, not even trying to hide his eagerness as he pointed to a low thicket of rushes a short distance off. “Look, the water’s down from last time!”

  “Good to fish here,” said Andrei, setting his pole back in the boat and resuming his seat at the oars as they drifted out of the treetops. “You can see them, lots and lots.”

  “Is that a house?” the girl asked from the front of the boat. She had barely spoken above a whisper, but it was so quiet here that Sander heard her perfectly. Following her gaze, he saw a thin ridge rising a thumb’s length from the water, and, as they left the willows behind and came abreast of it, Sander saw it was indeed the top of a sunken building’s wall. His hand strayed to the medallion at his neck, the one Jan had tried in vain to convince him to discard instead of threading on a new cord, and brought it to his quivering lips. The crude figure on the bronze disc was a saint, Sander had decided, which particular saint it was varying on the circumstance. Right now she was Saint Walpurga, for obvious reasons. This place gave him the creeps, his mind unsure if the decomposing visage of his father, a bone-wielding Belgian, or both were lurking inside the flooded house beside the boat.

  “You’ve been out here since, then?” said Jan, looking intently at the Muscovite. “Do a lot of fishers work these towns?”

  “Nay, Hollanders are scared. No, not scared. They are… sueverny?” Andrei examined the mist sliding around them and found what he was looking for there between the water and the vapors. “Superstitious. They are superstitious, do not fish here. They say, V tihom omute cherty vodyatsya.”

  “Fucking doubt they say that,” said Sander.

  “Hard to translate. In deep water is… Nay, in quiet… In not-moving river… hmmm.”

  “Still waters run deep, yeah, I’ve heard that,” said Sander. The expression had never made much sense to him.

  “Still! Yes, still water,” said the Muskie. “Thank you, Sander. They say, in deep, still water of a river, there lives the demons. Yes.”

  “Ah,” said Jan. “But you’re not superstitious.”

  “Nay. My nets bring in some bones of people who go in flood, some bones with meat on them yet, da, but no demons. No ghosts. Just bones.”

  “Bones with meat on ’em,” Sander said quietly, making no move to resume rowing himself. What the Muscovite said about demons in the river was even more puzzling than the proverb about still waters running deep, and a good bit more unsettling, too.

  “Some,” Andrei shrugged as he dipped his oars again. “Some not. Some just teeth, just bones. Busy fish. Fat fish.”

  “And you sell them, the fish you catch out here?” It took a lot to give Sander pause, but this sufficed. The Muscovite was an even dirtier prick than he’d suspected.

  “Fat fish,” said Andrei, making a slurping noise. “Carp and bream and eels eels eels, nets full of eels.”

  “Eels,” said Sander to himself, wondering how this could get any worse.

  “Ah,” said Jan. “There’s the graveyard, past the church spire. Moor us against that crypt.”

  That was how it got worse, then. How in the mercy of all the martyrs was there a graveyard out here? Total bullshit. If there was anything worse than a cold, dark body of water it was a graveyard, and a graveyard in the middle of a cold, dark body of water was a possibility so hideous it had never before crossed Sander’s mind. He’d not set foot in a churchyard before, but then he�
��d never kissed a jellyfish, either, and still knew that was a bad idea. No whistling, no winking, no cursing, no visions of cock, no visions of violence, nothing to attract notice, just quiet, peaceful thoughts. A light veneration of the saints, maybe.

  “How’s it above water?” the girl asked, and Sander hated that she’d pointed out something even less natural about the place—instead of being safely tucked under a wet mantle at the bottom of the meer, a few slabs broke the surface, fencing the breaks of young rushes into uneven rows, and the boxy top of a crypt reared before them, all mossy and horrible.

  “Early on, a Tieselen graaf wanted a lake to fish here in Oudeland,” said Jan. “So he dug one. He planned to burn off the peat and catch the salt, as was common wisdom even in those benighted days, but Oudeland also had the priory, the land split between church and graaf. The priest insisted a part of the cleared earth be used to build up a proper churchyard, for one could not dig a man’s depth without drawing up water, and the old churchman feared to have his bones resting in wet mud instead of dry earth. So between the church and the graaf’s house a hill was erected, and to ensure it was high enough above the waterline, they simply built it over the old potters’ mound.”

  “Aha!” Andrei chuckled. “Is the way here, there, all places—poor man on bottom, rich man on top.”

  “Precisely,” said Jan. “The poor were added to the sides of the hill, so it grew ever outward, the priests went halfway up the slope, and the lords with their stones went atop it.”

  “Ought to keep ’em inside the church like a proper place,” grumbled Sander, squinting into the depths. The water looked darker here.

  “But then we’d have nowhere to sit,” said Jan. “Steady now, steady.”

  The boat bobbed between two stones, green rushes scratching the sides of the boat, and Sander realized the blackness beneath him was likely gravedirt instead of impenetrable depth. Small consolation. Then, as he looked, a dark shape nearly as long as the boat appeared through the shallows, coasting under the boat. The vessel rocked as something brushed its bottom.

  “Devil’s dick!” Sander leapt to his feet, yanking the oar from its rowlock and brandishing it overhead. “Was that?!”

  “Sturgeon,” said Andrei. “Sit down so I can pole us.”

  “Sturgeon.” Sander panted the word, glaring between the stones. “Sturgeon get that big?”

  “Bigger,” said Jan, leaning over to grab the edge of the crypt. Bastard hadn’t seen it, Sander knew, but he couldn’t quite find the words to call Jan out. Sander resumed his seat, but something about the Muscovite’s manner recaptured his attention. The boatman was up again with the quant in hand, but rather than focusing on mooring the boat, he was staring at the front of the craft, at the back of Jan’s head. No, not Jan—the girl. And he was smiling a dirty fucking smile, the sort of smile Sander himself had worn when they’d put the noose around his neck back in that shitty Frisian town.

  A sudden disgust tugged at his guts like a swallowed fishhook—the things men did to half-grown kids made him want to murder the world. The reason that wench back at the Rotter inn had gotten all lippy with him when he’d first introduced himself to Jo, after all, was nutsacks like this Muscovite here, fantasizing about screwing the poor slut before she’d even grown a proper pair of tits. Sander was sucking cock by her age, admitted, but boys grew up quicker than girls, didn’t they, and even an eager lad like he’d been hadn’t let anyone up his backside until he was way older than her. Probably, it was impossible to tell how old a girl was at a glance.

  Why the fuck should it concern him what this rublehead wanted to do to her, anyway? What Jan intended come full circle, that’s why. Little slut being doted on and given kittens to cuddle and treated like a countess instead of a piece of cunt, oblivious to what men saw when they looked at her, just… just dark, was what it was. Dark.

  Unless she wasn’t oblivious. Unless it wasn’t so dark. Unless Sander was the oblivious one. Wouldn’t be the first instance, he allowed, wouldn’t be the first at all. Sudden as a strike at a fishing line, Sander realized all three of these plaguebitches could be working together to murder him, not just to cheat him out of what he’d worked so hard to secure, but straight up bloody murder in the fucking fens.

  This thought, rather than being immediately spit out like a fleck of bone, was cradled like a jewel of good fat in his jowl, savored and worried and cherished, and the more he played with the thought, the more sense it made. This did not upset him, but instead brought on a certain equanimity that carried an almost metallic taste to it. His palm left the locked oar and brushed the pommel of Glory’s End, bringing a shiver of raw pleasure to both him and her, as if he’d pulled back his foreskin and brushed a feather over it. Come on, then, you ball-lavering dogdicks, come on and see if—

  “See, Sander?” The Muscovite breathed behind him. “You see?”

  “Eh?” Sander blinked, glancing up to see the Muscovite still staring ahead with that lewd smirk on his face despite Jo’s having climbed from the boat onto the crypt beside them. If he wasn’t spying on her…

  “He is there, yes? Ahead, beside krest? Beside cross?”

  What? Sander followed the man’s gaze and saw the huge silhouette of the sturgeon, or perhaps another overfed fish, lying in the shadow of a grave marker. The fish was so large its smooth brown head broke the surface, giving the impression it was watching them. Then, as if his eyes had piked the monster, it churned the muddy shallows and was gone, leaving Sander shivering. Somehow, the Muscovite eye-fucking a giant fish was even more obscene than if he’d actually been sizing up the girl.

  “Sander,” said Jan from just above him. “Come on up, lad.”

  Sander frowned at his lover, Jan squatting atop the slimy, black stone of the crypt. There would be room enough for the four of them atop it, he saw, and the thought restored his faith in Jan, at least a little. Come what may, Jan wouldn’t sell him out for a fish-hungry foreigner or a mouthy sprat. He reminded himself how fervently he’d believed the flood itself had been some attempt on his life, personally, by enemies unknown, and how Jan had helped break him of that, what was the word, conceit. A niggling part of him protested that of course Jan would seek to disavow him of the truth, but Sander pushed it down, just as he always did. Jan might be working for them, granted, but if he was, Sander was certain the man did so in ignorance.

  Reasonably certain.

  Anyway, onto the crypt, the Muscovite giving him a leg-up. The girl was already up and had her back to them, staring down at the wide smear of mud and rushes that pushed up to the edge of the crypt on the opposite side, and Sander had the impulse to shove her in, tell her to swim the fuck back to the sea if she was so keen on getting wet. There was a bit of ebony mold or muck under boot, making the narrow slab dangerously slick, and without turning, Sander decided, “Muskie stays in the boat. Not enough room.”

  “Sander—” Jan began, but Andrei waved it off.

  “Is good with me. I like the island that floats to the one that does not.”

  Sander hated the man for his acumen, and kicked a clod of filth into the boat. The Muscovite’s eyes narrowed at this and he muttered something in his ugly fucking tongue. Sander winked at him.

  “This is it,” said Jan. “Still up for it, Jo?”

  The girl looked over her shoulder, and Sander smiled to see some of the iron had gone out of her. She looked scared. Then she nodded, once, but firmly, and Sander sighed. Stupid little slut.

  “I can… I’ll… You want me to swim here? Bring something up?”

  Idiot.

  “That’s right,” said Jan cheerfully. “But let’s get settled first, have a bite and a drink.”

  The Muscovite maneuvered his boat around the crypt to the wee mudbar on the far side of it and beached the craft in the filth, though it was obvious the ground was far from solid. There the man set to checking his net and then whetting the tip of his gaff hook, his cat sitting on the prow inspecting the muddy flat wit
h the displeased air of a graaf surveying a frost-burned field. Jan and the girl had used an oar to scrape most of the muck off the crypt roof and sat with their legs crossed, sharing a loaf of rye and a cheese wheel. Sander was done with sitting after that interminable float, however, and paced as best he could—three steps down, two across, three back up, and then over and down again, the two assholes sitting in the middle of his circuit giving him dirty looks that he studiously ignored.

  This was it, then. Oudeland. Jan’s birth home. Sander contemplated the stubble of reeds and boils of stone, the crumbling church spire over there across a stretch of open water, the spindly treetop behind them with what looked to be a ram’s skull caught in the branches, the few silhouettes of sunken buildings on the edge of his vision, the leagues and leagues of nothing vanishing into the mist. Hell, he thought, was water. He wondered at it, all this flood where earth had been, all this quiet where so much noise had risen. Well, not exactly here; the graveyard had probably been pretty solemn and all, and his stomach flopped anew at the thought of his precise location. He imagined the corpse beneath them crouched in the corner of his tomb, skull pressed to the ceiling, eavesdropping on the thieves upon his roof.

  Dreadful thought.

  But then they all were, these days.

  III.

  Margareta, the cat Jo had held for most of the journey, eventually dared the mud to join them on the crypt, skipping over the quaggy island and springing onto the roof. Her legs were muddied almost to her belly and she immediately set to cleaning herself on the edge of the stone. Jo worried that Sander might give her a kick, for he seemed like that kind of a man. Her father would have, surely, or one of her brothers. Instead, he finally ceased his strutting and crouched down, rubbing the puss’s bobbing head with the back of his fist. Crazy neuker.

  “There,” said Jan, pointing with the nearly empty jug of flat beer. At first she couldn’t see anything beyond the moored boat where Andrei napped, for the mist had thickened while they ate, but then she made out a patch of shadow in the miasma. A short distance from their roost the little isles of muck and reed that spotted the graveyard gave way to deeper, unbroken water, but a ways out another stand of rushes protruded from the meer. Squint as she did, she could see nothing but the small thicket of dark stalks.