The tide was out now, obviously, but the two men sat where the red came and went, dangling their legs off the end of the warehouse dock. Whenever they called it a day, they’d march through the mud to retrieve their trophies, but for now best to keep the feet dry and the tongue wet.
“I declare, Coz, this is the life,” said Sander after a long pull on the finest of the last shipment’s Burgundy. Spicy and nutty, with a delightful sting to the mouth that was like climaxing after a serious case of woad nut. He’d never cared for wine before getting into the business himself, especially not unwatered stuff, but now he hardly had a taste for anything else. Remembering the days of mashing berries into his spoiled beer to mask the taste, Sander grinned and took another drink.
“The life, Jan, or simply a life?” said Simon, reloading his bow with a bit more vigor than he usually applied. The lad have some kind of pea stuck in his pisser all of a sudden? How could anyone be raw after nailing a moving rat at fifty paces?
“Tell you, Simon, you don’t even know,” said Sander. “You don’t. I’ve lived more than one, and this, this, right here, with you, and this wine, and these rats, this is the one to keep, the one to cherish.”
“And how do you think the rats feel about being included in your perfect life?” said Simon, an errant yellow canine protruding in that fetching way it had of escaping his wine-purpled lips.
“Rats?” Sander considered this with more care than the question perhaps deserved, but then he was… what’s it… magnanimous, these days. “I was a rat, I wouldn’t very well blame the man with the cross for taking me out. Couldn’t look myself in my ratty little mirror and pretend to be truthful. Hell, I can’t blame people too much for hating me, and I’m not even a rat.”
“No,” said Simon as he aimed his weapon, but it sounded an awful lot like “No?” for Sander’s liking.
“Shit, no,” Sander said vehemently. “Hate is normal, normal as breathing. No, wait, hate’s not it—I don’t hate rats, not at all.”
“Really?” said Simon, and fired. Not even close—the quarrel spit up mud a good ten steps from the nearest rat, which went scurrying into the jumbled mass of refuse. “That raises the question, then, of why you take such delight in their slaughter.”
“Slaughter’s fun,” said Sander, loading his bow. Time to remind this lippy little terrier who was king of the rat-killers. “No. Shooting is fun. I can’t begrudge a rat being a rat any more than a rat can blame me for popping him with a bolt any chance I get. All part of the plan.”
“Whose plan?” Simon said, spoiling Sander’s shot. His missile sailed clear over the top of the island, which rose a dozen feet above the slime. The thought of plans dictating events pushed Sander toward familiar paranoid flights, but he gripped the railing rather than descending. “I said, what plan?”
“Huh?” Sander blinked at Simon. Where’d he get off, asking such things? “Yeah, I got plans for the rats. Not out here just to be an asshole, killing rats for no purpose.”
“And what plan might the humble rat play into, pray?” asked Simon, picking up the bottle.
“Kind of plans don’t concern you,” grumbled Sander, his mood as bitter as his belly had turned. Needed to remember not to drink past the halfway mark on the bottle, leave the sediment for Simon. “Go on and fetch the kills, I’ll pack us up. It’s gotten cold out here for my taste, and I’m inclined to return home.”
“If we give it another bottle or so, Coz, the tide will be back enough to row out rather than—”
“Go on, you lazy dastard!” said Sander, giving Simon a hard enough slap on the back to send him off the pier. The mudflat swallowed the contrary fucker to the knees as Sander laughed and laughed, getting wearily to his feet. “I’m cold now, Simon, so get the rats and I’ll grab another bottle for the row back. And take care you don’t tear ’em up getting the bolts out—I got schemes for those rats, I do.”
Simon squirmed out of the mud by clinging to one of the pier’s posts, forcing a dreg-speckled smile up at Sander. The graaf hurried him along by fumbling with the silver-braided laces on his codpouch and freeing his cock, whereupon he pissed down at his cousin. As Sander watched Simon make his heavy-footed way across the mire, he let out a long sigh and savored his urination. If this wasn’t the life, such a thing didn’t exist. Long way from Sneek, long way from the well, long way from the flood.
As if contradicting him, the glimmering edge of the meer caught his eyes to the south, where it came crawling back home like a guilty dog. The goddamn meer, cloudy as a tempest, dark as the tideland he was cutting into with his piss; molten gold transmuting to bubbling lead. The tide itself wouldn’t bring in much more than a kingdom-wide puddle, but beyond that, out where they hadn’t been able to even half-ass the drainage project like they had on this side of Dordt, there was the real meer. Somewhere out there rose a church tower and a graveyard, and a dead tree standing sentinel, guarding the weapon Sander had no longer been fit to wield, a relic of battles exceeding his ken, the one queen he’d ever bowed before: Glory’s End. That drowned village was also the grave of his once and forever king, though, wasn’t it, the putrid bower of his—
“Jan!” Simon cried, and Sander shuddered, as he sometimes did when people called him that instead of Graaf or Your Worship or what have you. He blinked at his cock, and put it away without shaking. Stupid thing had just been airing out there for saints knew how long, yet it still set to dribbling soon as it was back in warm, dry linen. Fucking Simon was likely bogged down in a patch of sinkmud and wanted a hand out, the wretch. “Jesus, Jan, Jesus!”
The mud was only up to Simon’s calves, what was he whinging about? The fool was at the edge of the heap, where the solid flotsam and gelatinous jetsam merged into the walls of Trash Island’s rat city. Unseaworthy bits of boats, lost planks and bolts of cloth, the errant drowned sheep or cow, and all manner of random, unidentifiable filth pushed together to keep the rats dry in beds lined with stolen hay, where they fucked out a hundred rat babes a night and dreamt of inheriting a nicer hole, perhaps a wine-crate manse in Tieselen Town, where—
“Jesus, Jan, Jesus!” Simon called again, and then hunched over. Usually Sander was the one with stomach complaints, but there was Simon spitting up in the muck. Jesus, indeed. Sander lowered himself onto the tidal flat, sucking his teeth as he let go of the edge of the dock and sank almost to the tops of his boots.
“What?!” Sander bellowed, hoping to avoid the march, but the man just kept hurling out the dinner he hadn’t even paid for. No doubt he’d be wanting another supper invitation now, Sander thought coldly as he began to sticky-step it across the bog. Sander wouldn’t be surprised if the cunt had put his own fingers down his throat to effect the result, get a pity feast. Ah, wonderful, there was icy mud sliding down around his ankles, how lovely. “I said! What?!”
Simon was wiping his mouth as he straightened, and pointed a shaking hand at the piled garbage. The lad really looked rough, his face near as milky as Jo’s, except of course she was supposed to look like that, whereas Simon was normally a shade duskier, and here he was, ashen and quivering. Huh. Sander felt his palms get itchy, felt himself wishing he hadn’t cast his mistress into an arboreal scabbard many leagues of water away—the poncey sword at his side might have fine etching on its blade and a rope of velvet wound through its hilt, but he’d yet to draw real blood with it, and an unproven sword was the only thing worse than a flood, a strange dog, or a bloke who thought himself wise. Was that how it went?
Trash Island had grown since the last time Sander had actually hiked or rowed out here instead of sending Simon to collect their quarrels and trophies. It hadn’t expanded up, but out; the walls of current-compacted drift looked tight as ever, but now whole villages of rats and marsh-roaches bordered those edges, their oily ponds shining with rainbow sheens, their fields of refuse pushing up a bumper crop of water maggots. Just for a moment, Sander imagined an awl-toothed Belgian devil hunkered down in the heart of the island, waiting
for him. Poncey steel or not, the sword was in hand as Sander picked his way around the pools of shitwater and piles of rubbish, now stepping into the shadow of the rearing mound of stinking, wet corruption.
Then, as he stared, the whole fetid mass began to slowly pulse, like the side of a sleeping sheep.
What the wounds was going on out here?
Sander squinted until he was near-blind, willing the heap to stop breathing, to go still as filth ought, to leave him to his wine and his rats and his Simon. It obeyed, thank each and every saint in heaven, but he knew that couldn’t be the end of the weirdness out here. Taking a deep breath, a swimmer’s breath like Jo would’ve took, he committed himself to seeing whatever the world had to show him. Beyond, the sky was the same pale blue-gray as his eyes, wisps of white drifting overhead like angels on wing, but down here in the meer flats it was all green and brown and black, rats rustling through the mountain like demons in some hellish keep, like black—
—White. Bluish-white flesh, there, in the churned-up mud at the edge of the main junk pile.
Sander leaned in for a better look. Well. Shit. Then something too awful for words shot through him, hot as fire through dry hay, sharp as steel through warm fat, and his breath caught.
Jo.
“It’s a girl,” Simon’s voice was quavering. “A girl, Jan.”
“Yeah,” said Sander and made himself take a closer look. It was the hardest thing he’d ever done, and he did more hard things before breakfast than most cunts did in their lives. He looked, and he saw her clawlike hands were pale as fresh grubs. He let out his breath in a low whistle.
Obviously this girl was too young to be Jo, but Christ’s crown, for a moment there… How old could this poor chit be? She barely had any fat on her, tits included. Though it pained him, he glanced down between her splayed legs. Barely a hair. Christ. He closed his eyes, trying his damnedest not to pull a Simon impression.
“She’s naked,” Simon said, barely audible over the racket the rats were making in their castle. “Where are her clothes, Jan?”
“Her clothes?” Sander’s incredulity temporarily settled his guts. “Her clothes, you clot?”
“Yes,” Simon gulped, but Sander saw he wasn’t looking at the girl, he was staring back at the cluster of warehouses, at the city walls beyond them. “Her clothes. It’s too cold to swim, too—”
“Where’s her fucking head, is the question,” said Sander, turning back to the corpse. “Her clothes.”
“What?” Sander wouldn’t have thought it possible, but Simon sounded even more distraught. “Buried in trash, or, or under the mud, she—oh, Jesus!”
Simon had stumbled closer, and Sander saw by the unbroken mud between the girl and the fop that Simon really hadn’t gotten close enough to see before. He saw now, that was certain. The lad didn’t have any further alms to give to the rats, but that didn’t stop him from trying, gagging on his own breath and nothing more as he hunched over in the muck.
“Jesus? No, not him,” Sander said. He nodded to himself as he stared down at the girl. “Jesus didn’t do this. No. Nor no Belgians, nor no catfish, nor nothing else but what you’d expect. A man did this.”
Sander stared at the corpse for a long time, willing himself not to speculate how she might have gotten here but doing a shit job of it.
“You think she’s murdered?” Sander’s heart jumped at the sound of Simon’s voice; he’d almost forgotten he was there.
“No, Simon, I think she died of plague.” It was harder for Sander to take his eyes off the girl than he’d expected, so he didn’t even try. She was tangled in the mud, in herself, her limbs all wrong, that sallow skin seeming to turn bluer the longer he looked at it. At her.
“No, I…” Simon sounded like he was going to cry. “Why would someone… how could they…”
They. That was certainly a possibility. If… No, Sander bolted down that particular box of horrors, lest he never get a good night’s sleep again. No Belgians, no conspiracies, no plots of men or monsters. Not They, not Them, not nothing, save Not His Business.
“Come on, then,” said Sander, trying to reassure himself as much as Simon. “Nothing more to be done here. We’re going home to get dry and warm. And drunk.”
“Don’t we have to tell the militia?” Simon said, his voice cracking. “Or bring her with us, or—”
“Certainly not!” Sander couldn’t believe how thick Simon was. “There’s not a militia in the world lazier and shadier than the Dordt watch! We tell them we found a body, at best they’ll be on us like stink on shit for weeks and weeks, poking around our business, getting their touch on our warehouse, seeing if we’re involved. That’s best case, mind, worst case is they just blame us and hang us, end of story.”
“No,” protested Simon, “they wouldn’t, we didn’t, we—”
“We didn’t find nothing out here, Simon!” said Sander, trying not to shout. “Militia does not need to be sniffing around me, and that’s all they’d do. Think about it, Simon, think for once—what can they do that we haven’t? Poke it with a fucking stick? She’s dead, so it’s a little late to help her, and she don’t have a head, so it ain’t like they can tell who she is, so where’s that leave us?”
“I don’t know,” whispered Simon. “Where?”
“Doing the gallows jig, we tell anyone ’bout this!” Sander told himself Simon hadn’t lived a real life, that the lad couldn’t know how wicked the Dordt militiamen could be, given the chance. “They think I’m a Hook, Simon, everyone does, ’cause I’m in good with Hobbe but none of the Cod nobles, save you. Believe me, man, they’re just looking for an excuse to bring me down—best case, best case, I bribe them to let me walk, but what if they decide to just hang my ass and turn out my pockets when I’m dead, eh?”
Simon was wincing from each pronouncement, and Sander really was shouting now: “I’m hanging dead from a gibbet in Grote Markt Square, pants full of spunk and shit and piss, I’ve bit my own tongue off, so blood’s everywhere, Jo’s reputation’s ruined, if they ain’t hanged her, too, you’re out on the streets if you’re not swinging beside us, and why?! Why, you cunt?! Because Simon had to tell the militia ’bout something nasty he found by the wineshed?!”
“I’m sorry,” Simon whispered, tears rolling down his cheeks as he stared at the corpse. “I… we’ll just leave her, then.”
“Good,” said Sander, turning to his task before Simon’s spine lost its stiffness again. Sander wrinkled his nose as the piece of moldy canvas he was tugging out of the mound melted between his fingers. “Now, come over here and pull this crap down on her, cover it up like we couldn’t even know she was out here.”
Simon trudged over, defeated. “Why?”
“What’s wrong with you? This jacket’s fawn, Simon, fawn—I get corpse-grease on it, I’ll never get it clean.”
“No, why… why cover her?”
“Just ’cause we’re too smart to report this doesn’t mean some other cunt won’t be, they stumble on her,” said Sander, pleased with himself for being so sharp. “This heap’s a bow’s shot from our warehouse, and folk know we rat out here—we don’t want it looking like we must’ve seen her and not told somebody. That’ll look even worse than telling the militia in the first place.”
“So if it’s bad either way, let’s just tell—” But Sander was done with Simon’s bullshit, and cut him off by tugging at a board protruding from the mountain of refuse. He danced back as an entire layer of Trash Island sloughed off, burying the corpse in an avalanche of waterlogged wood and the reeking gray sludge that mortared the waste pile together. After frantically checking his jacket and seeing it was relatively spotless, Sander looked up to see that Simon was splashed with foul mud from his mustache on down. It would have been hilarious in different circumstances, but even now it was pretty funny. Sander waved toward the warehouse and began picking his way back across the flat.
Fucking tide had come in while they were messing around, and Sander’s boot
s were sloshing-full before he got ten steps. It was only when he settled into the dinghy that he realized Simon hadn’t brought the stuck rats and stray bolts with him, meaning the lot was taken by the meer by now. Goddamn Simon.
They returned to Dordrecht in silence, other than the occasional reiteration that Simon not tell a fucking soul about what they’d found. Shouldn’t have to say it even once, but, considering the greenness of Gruyere, Sander felt the need to repeat himself. Simon rowed and Sander looked behind them, to where Trash Island and the cluster of warehouses jutted out of the marsh like tombstones, the sunset turning the surface of the meer to blood. Or maybe just watered-down wine. Sander sighed. Some life.
III.
Jolanda never thought she would miss the smell of putrefying sea snails, but the purple pots of her youth were veritably fragrant compared to the stench that woad gave off. The herb itself was not so bad, but to get the color from it, she had to dry the leaves and pack them in piss and sheep shit, and then wait and wait and breathe through her mouth whenever she went up to the attic to check on the rot’s progression. How Lansloet could stand to keep his nest up there was beyond her—Drimmelin’s bed was more than wide enough for him, even with Lijsbet sharing it, but no, the bald ferret liked his attic, and kept to it even when the woad was eye-wateringly close to ripeness.
Jolanda also had to mix a bit of madder into the finished blue dye to get a comparable shade, but the reddish root was nowhere near as odiferous as the fermenting woad. The result was a far duller purple than what she and her family had manufactured, and every bit as time-consuming, but she had been unable to find the particular spiral-shelled snails in any of the markets she had visited during her tenure as a lady. On the one occasion she had found a merchant in Gouda who claimed to be able to procure for her a purple dye made from shells, the price he had quoted her was so outlandish she had laughed in his face. If the purple was worth that much, she sure as Mary’s mercy wouldn’t have starved most of the year in a shitty shack with a perpetually skint father.
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