The Folly of the World

by Jesse Bullington

  “Hobbe, Hobbe, Hobbe,” Sander whispered in the count’s ear. Up close the man smelled like garlic and aged Edam. “If you think I’m more concerned with keeping my station than getting my vengeance, you’re even thicker than I am. You come at me, and I’ll murder the world just to get at you. I’ll burn this house, I’ll burn Jo, I’ll burn the money and boats and warehouses and dear old Simon inside it, just to put my hands on you.”

  Sander paused long enough for Hobbe to start to speak: “All right, you have made—”

  “No, I haven’t, because you still think you can talk to me like I’m some cunting coachman, like I’m old Lansloet.” Sander ground his cock into Hobbe’s ass even as he tightened his elbow, and to his satisfaction that got the count squirming, if only a little. “So we’re of an understanding, I’ll say it to you the once more—if I have to put my hands on your slimy skin again, I will make it worth my while. We both know what I can do, something you made clear way back in your carriage when we was first sussing out the terms of our arrangement here. So I’ve got a wee promise for you: You so much as give me a shitty look from now until the end of our acquaintance, Hobbe, and I will make it my life’s work to take you apart, slow as possible, piece by piece. For days, man, days. Until the notion of dying and being cast into the pit for Satan’s eternal sport seems a comfort as warm as a kitten dozing in your lap. Now you get the fuck out of my house, and don’t you dare knock at my door again until you’ve been invited. Count.”

  Sander relaxed his elbow but didn’t drop it entirely, forcing Hobbe to duck out of the hold. The count did not look back as he hustled out through the parlor doors, and Sander smiled to see the man stumble on the stoop in his haste to be away. Yet as soon as the front door slammed shut behind the fleeing noble, the magnitude of his decision began to sink in—Hobbe was anything but stupid, and was like as not angry as a bee-stung hornet. Another reason to be out of Dordt, and as soon as possible—if Hobbe did try to expose them as phonies, he’d be wise to do it before Sander got a chance to leave town.

  Hobbe would be making straight for Laurent’s office, otherwise Sander would go and retrieve as much money as he could carry and simply quit the city for good, but in case Hobbe stopped by a gatehouse to fetch a militiaman or three before visiting Laurent for the inevitable pity party… well, Sander would just have to take what he had around the house, and hope that further down the road Laurent was greedy enough to try and work both sides instead of simply backing Hobbe’s play at ruining the Tieselen heirs.

  As it stood, war was looming, which was a welcome distraction, and who knew, if Sander made enough of an impression with the local Cod nobles during the campaign, they might back him up upon his return to Dordt, even if Hobbe followed through with his threat. Maybe. Or maybe they would hang him and Hobbe both. Well, worry about how to get that shit off the shoe after it was stepped in. For now he had to get through the rest of the day, which, at a minimum, involved sending the Gruyere brothers out to the warehouse and getting himself in a boat directed toward whatever Zeeland isle was hosting the party. Zierikzee was the port Hobbe had mentioned, wasn’t it?

  But what of Jo—could he leave her in Dordt, with Hobbe furious and ready to strike?

  Easy enough, he’d take her with him—after the coin he’d dropped on buying her gear and the smashed fingers he’d accumulated from her whaling on him with a practice sword, he was due a return on his investment.

  But what of Lansloet and Drimmelin? He wasn’t worried Hobbe would try to fuck with them, but he was definitely concerned that one or both of the servants he had inherited with the house would heed the count before they would answer to good old Graaf Jan. Leaving his home in the possession of people who might work with Hobbe to somehow betray Sander and Jo seemed exceedingly foolish.

  Easy enough, take all the servants with them—surely the other campaigning nobles brought their own people to cook and clean for them, yeah? They had to. Better to leave the house shuttered and empty than in control of traitors, which he had always suspected Drimmelin and especially Lansloet of being.

  So: book passage to the Rotterdam harbor, rally the entire household to immediately leave for war, send the Gruyere boys to the warehouse to discover and report the dead kids dumped in the mud, and, somewhere in there, grab a bite of dinner—in the madness of the morning he’d missed breakfast. Busy day for the graaf, but he’d had busier, and at least he had already taken care of the items “alienate your only noble friend who also knows your dirty secret” and “get your feelings hurt by your only other friend in town who doesn’t appreciate a nice gift when it’s in his own two hands.”

  Righting the upended lounger and wrapping his rat-fur cloak around his shoulders, Sander set off to find Simon Gruyere, his devious brother Braem, and, saints willing, a decent snack.

  IV.

  After a teary parting with Lijsbet at the Dordt harbor (the girls were cheerful and dry of eye, but Lansloet silently wept when he realized the young maid was being left to mind the house while he was forced to accompany his master), Jolanda, Sander, and the two older servants arrived in Rotterdam only to discover they’d missed the last fleet leaving for Zeeland by the better part of a week. Sander couldn’t believe it, and kept saying so over and over, to no resolution. While Sander gnashed his teeth and rent his hair, Jolanda went to the harbormaster and appealed to the man’s higher nature, as well as his thirst. Thinking it might help their heart-to-heart, Jolanda dredged up her old accent to pair with the Tieselen Red, and within an hour of arriving in the Rott she’d found them alternate passage to the islands.

  The voyage across the meer and then down the Volkerak to the Grevelingen estuary would have been a mite cramped in the narrow, stunted sailboat even if it had just been the one-eyed captain, his son, and the four members of the Tieselen contingent. Instead, they were tacked in shoulder-to-shoulder, as the vessel was delivering a monk, a nun, and a pair of potted apple trees to the village of Ouddorp on the lonely, windswept islet of Goeree. It sounded like the setup to a bad joke, and so the voyage proved: they spent the bulk of the journey getting on one another’s tits, literally as well as figuratively.

  The awkwardness of the situation was amplified rather than mitigated by the merriness of the two clerical members of the crew, who, to extrapolate from their boisterous songs and less-than-surreptitious fumblings under each other’s vestments after dusk, were in the process of eloping from their respective holy orders. The skeletal apple trees seemed dead, but the captain swore they would bloom again, and to Jolanda’s surprise one did seem to be budding in all defiance of the season by the time they reached Duiveland. They skirted that isle’s northern coast and carried over to the island of Schouwen, at which point the sea became so rough even the captain appeared olive around the gills. Arms linked to keep each other from falling overboard, Sander and Lansloet took to their knees at the edge of the boat, master and servant made equal as they prayed at the altar of Neptune. The ferocious wind carried their half-digested oblations up to paint the sail instead of letting them join the turbulent waters, leading the captain and son to curse like what they were.

  As they drew near Brouwershaven, a port north of Zierikzee where the Rotter harbormaster had claimed the Hooks and Cods were engaged, the captain took advantage of a break in the gale to steer them into a small sound. There he deposited them on an ancient pier, having no intention of sailing his ship anywhere near what Sander had been asserting since Rotterdam was sure to be an epic, show-no-quarter-and-take-no-hostages battle. The tide being in their favor, it was a wobbly step rather than a desperate leap onto the pier. While Sander, Drimmelin, and Lansloet picked their way slowly down the rickety structure, Jolanda thanked the captain and his son profusely and offered the clerical couple the best of luck with their future together.

  “It’s easy to sail before the wind!” the nun called as the ship circled the sound and back out to sea, the reflection of the setting sun adorning the taut canvas like a great burning
eye.

  They marched west. Dark as it soon became on the pebbly beach, there could be no doubt they were heading toward a raging combat—the tumult could be heard from afar, and the sky above the town blazed as though someone had set fire to the curtain of night. As they reached a tent city on the strand, Jolanda cringed to see this side of the encampment unguarded, all available men presumably engaged in the fight, and cringed again to hear the shrieks of pain emanating from the majority of the crowded canopies. Barbers emerged looking even more haggard than their wan charges, dumping out bowls of blood and hanging sodden, unrinsed rags out to dry before calling, “Next!”

  As excited as she’d been on the ship and even as they approached along the beach, Jolanda began to feel her eagerness wilt at seeing man after man caked in burgundy sand, at hearing the clash of metal and bloodthirsty cries grow ever louder as they wove their way through the hospital tents. Looking around, as awed and curious as she’d been the first time she’d set foot in Rotterdam, she realized Lansloet and Drimmelin had dipped out at some point, but there was little to be done about that now. Who could blame them? They weren’t warriors, like her and Sander, like all these half-murdered men screaming in the perpetual gloaming of tent-filtered lamplight…

  Sander had never given her his helm—he’d forgotten it in Dordt, the dunce—but her hood seemed to offer her anonymity enough, for none gave her a second glance. Seeing one footless soldier writhe in the sand while two men tried to hold him still and a third pressed a red-hot iron pan to the ruined stump of his ankle, black fumes that stunk of burning hair belching from around the cauterizing instrument as the living meat sizzled, she supposed they had greater concerns. And so should she, Jolanda decided, telling herself to buckle down, to get mean… it was time to fight as she never had before, it was time to get crazy, it was time to abandon mercy, to kill and kill and—

  —Feast?

  Aye, that’s what it was. They’d come to a break in the tents, but rather than a field of battle Jolanda saw the din was coming from dozens upon dozens of long tables arrayed along the strand. One of them was far enough out that the tide was lapping at the greaves of the men who refused to leave it, their bare white hands tearing into cakes and breads a sharp contrast to the steel carapaces covering the rest of them. Pages hurried between the makeshift kitchens erected beside bonfires and the tables, delivering great racks of pork or lamb or maybe both, whole salt-roasted fishes, carafes of wine, and jugs of ale. Metal struck on metal as knife met plate, tankard met tankard.

  Sander stood beside Jolanda, the two of them in the border of blackness separating the lamplight of the hospital tents from the bonfire glow illuminating the bizarre fete. Jolanda thought Sander looked as though he was going to be as sick as he’d been on the ship, but instead he belched out a, “What?”

  “Come on,” said Jolanda, taking his hand. This was somehow more intimidating than a battlefield would have been. She pulled him forward, toward a cluster of red-and-white Dordrecht banners planted beside a table. “Let’s find out what happened.”

  They didn’t get ten paces into the firelight before the cry went up: “Tieselen!”

  “Jan Tieselen!”

  “The Dordt Hook himself!”

  “Graaf Tieselen!”

  Jolanda and Sander froze as a good dozen of the yelling men rose from their nearby table and turned to stare at them. The biggest of them all, a burly, bearded giant, stumbled off his bench and advanced on them, his spattered armor glowing in the firelight, his eyes black as wounds. In one hand he held a jug and in the other an entire leg of lamb, its bloody end dripping in the sand. Jolanda recognized him at once, but before she could give Sander a whispered reminder of the giant’s identity, he’d stepped forward and called, “What’s all this, Von Wasser?” Jolanda nearly cheered the minor miracle of Sander’s remembering the hertog’s name—they saw him at church every Sunday, but to the best of her knowledge in nearly two years they’d never exchanged more than a dirty look. “What’s happened?”

  “I’d put the same to you, but I know a spy when I see one,” said Hertog Willem Von Wasser, raising his voice to a triumphant bellow as he went on. “You tell your Leyden master his vixen got hounded this day, and with vigooooor!” He gyrated and thrust his hips in a lewd manner while delivering this last.

  “I see that,” said Sander, and Jolanda could scarcely believe how calm he was. If anything, he seemed dour rather than irate.

  Jolanda heard feet kicking through the sand behind them and wondered if these drunk Cods were surrounding them, looking to be done once and for all with meddlesome Tieselens. When she spun around, however, she saw Lansloet and Drimmelin slinking over from the tents—apparently they, too, had realized no battle raged this night and were drawn to the smells of cooking food and warming campfires.

  “He sees it!” Von Wasser howled, earning cheers from the scarlet-and-white-mantled group he had quit, but most of the other tables had gone back to their merrymaking and were ignoring the besotted giant. “At last, the Hook sees his ambition crushed, his traitorous—oof!”

  Sander neatly seized the man by the beard and head-butted him in the face. Von Wasser stumbled back, dropping his jug and his lamb joint to put both hands to his face, and Jolanda felt the beach drop away beneath her, plunging her through a void of what-the-fuck: had Sander just killed them both? Great God in all his mercy, had Sander insisted they come to war as some sort of convoluted suicide plot? Had the madman panicked at realizing Wurfbain would come after him, and decided to end it all in one final glorious battle against whatever foe he could sufficiently antagonize into slaying him?

  Before Jolanda could decide between drawing her sword and accompanying him to hell or fleeing back through the tents, every man at the table Von Wasser had left now rose as one and scrambled off their benches, advancing on the Tieselens. Sander dropped to a crouch just as the stunned, wobbling Von Wasser fell back, landing on his arse, but before the mob could charge, Sander had straightened back up, having retrieved the hertog’s leg of lamb. He directed it at Von Wasser’s friends, most of whom Jolanda recognized from church as minor Dordt Cods, now that they were drawing closer between two bonfires. All of the other nearby tables had quieted at this display, and Sander issued what Jolanda was sure would be his final shit-talking:

  “Alla you listen! With both ears!” Sander’s voice boomed louder than the waves, crackled with the heat of the bonfires, and he waved the shank over the entire assembly as he pronounced his judgment. “My name’s Jan Tieselen, and I’m graaf of Oudeland! I’m also the man bringing wine up to Dordrecht! Yeah, you heard—I’m out of Dordt, same as Von Wasser, same as all these mussels coming down on me!”

  That got a few cheers from the observing tables, though Jolanda had no idea why. Sander waved the leg behind him, at her and the pair of cowering servants who hung back halfway between Jolanda and the tents, like spotted hares debating flight. He went on:

  “I brought my daughter, Jolanda! And two servants! What spy brings his cook, pray?! We came to fight, damn your eyes, we came to fight! For Philip! For Holland! For Dordt!”

  “He’s a Hook!” one of the lesser local Cods protested, and a grumbling arose from the mass of men as though they were a pack of half-dozing hounds Sander was tiptoeing through the midst of. The mouthy one who’d started the muttering must be a younger son, if noble at all, for Jolanda didn’t recognize him, but even the smallest adder could have killing spit. Before the complaints could rise to shouts or the Cods could resolve to charge, Sander began again, apparently shifting tactics:

  “I come up in the East! But got to Dordt fast as I could! All you sheepheads knew my uncle… the graaf, the old Graaf Tieselen! Some of you must’ve been his friends! Just like some of you must’ve had your quarrels with him! Point is, you wouldn’t have taken him for no cunt! You wouldn’t have done him the way you done me!”

  This earned Sander hisses, which was much more in line with what Jolanda had expected when Sander
began his foolhardy speech. He flicked her a grin and then strode forward, to where Von Wasser still sat sprawled in the sand. A half dozen of the Dordt Cods began matching Sander step for step, closing the distance. Sander stopped before Von Wasser, staring down at him, and the hertog looked up, his face dark with blood or shadow, Jolanda couldn’t tell which. Sander addressed him, but still his pronouncement carried back to her, and any who cared to heed it, she supposed:

  “I come to Dordt! Wanted to live up to my family name! But Wurfbain got his teeth into me! That fucking fox! And being from stranger lands than these, I took him at his word! And not one of you mussels set me straight! Not one! You knew he weren’t good for me! You knew he made me no good for Dordt! But you all just let me listen to him! Let me heed the council of a Leyden Hook! ’Cause no one had the grit to tell me I was a fool to listen to ’em! No one had the grit to tell me I was acting against my city! My people! My very family!”

  Despite the popping of a dozen bonfires, the choir of agony behind them, and the crashing surf, it went very quiet as Sander surveyed the interrupted banquet, the line of men before him, and the sand-sprawled Von Wasser. Jolanda saw that other than the fallen hertog, nobody in sight was still seated, hundreds upon hundreds of men fanning inland to get a better look, standing on benches, tables, each other. Glancing over her shoulder, she saw that every break in the barbers’ tents was clogged with faces—they were utterly surrounded, cut off from escape, save for the sea. There was a thought… she shuddered, and knew she would die on the sand before she’d brave those winter waters.