The Folly of the World

by Jesse Bullington

  Jolanda locked the oars and let them drift as she stretched her deadened arms, the sweaty woolen gown she’d put on after rebinding his wrist even damper from her exertions than it had been from the splashing canal water. As if the release of the oars was a river lock dropping to loose a torrent, soreness flowed through her, washing away the numbness and flooding her body with a hundred tiny agonies. She had started to pass out at the oars, which was no good, and had all sorts of pressing needs roiling through her innards, and so she took the gown back off, and, never having put anything on underneath it, jumped overboard into the frigid bog.

  The water proved warmer than the air, and just as her head went under, her feet sank into mud. Kicking free and up, she hung onto the side of the boat as she relieved herself, trying very hard not to think about giant catfish. It finally sank in that her plan had worked despite Sander’s madness, that they had a satchel of clothes and blankets and a smaller bag stuffed with the cheese-heavy contents of Poorter Primm’s larder, as well as a dozen of the fat man’s finest crossbows.

  Despite Poorter’s general priggishness, she hoped she hadn’t hurt him too badly when she’d smacked him with the practice sword—she’d been expecting him to give up without a fight, but he’d surprised her by pulling a bow and she’d had no choice but to swing on him. He’d gone down after the first blow and let himself be tied up, and only spoke to fruitlessly protest the gag that she shoved into his mouth. She supposed he recognized her despite the charcoal disguise and felt betrayed, but the double-dealer deserved a lot worse than she’d given him—just after scaling his roof she’d seen several hooded figures leave his house, no doubt Wurfbain’s people checking in on their chum.

  But Jolanda was done worrying about Poorter and who he might be plotting with. She was done with all of them, for better or worse, now that her plan had worked. She’d nearly abandoned it altogether, panicking at the last moment and going to Lady Meyl’s estate to throw herself at the woman’s mercy, to tell her everything, but the servant who answered the gate claimed that his mistress was out. That dogsbody had been just a little too insistent that Jolanda wait inside for Lady Meyl, and Jolanda rediscovered her resolve, running all the way through the crowds from Meyl’s house to Primm’s.

  There she went, worrying over Dordt business again, when she was done with it forever. At least she and Lijsbet had enjoyed one final afternoon of cards and wine in Solomon’s loft before Jolanda set upon the bloody path that took her from the house of the wealthiest noble in Dordrecht to the loft window of one of the city’s shadiest artisans, from there to a midnight harbor, and then, at long last, escape. Between mist and meer the odds of their being found by any pursuers were dwindling by the moment. Wonderful.

  Getting back into the rowboat proved a good deal more difficult than quitting it, and for a terrible moment Jolanda thought she was going to tip it completely as she hauled herself over the side, but then she was in and the rocking vessel settled. She sprawled amidst the crossbows, and with the same pulse of ice water you feel in your stomach at noticing a spider crawling across your face, she saw that one of the weapons was still nocked and loaded and pointed straight at her. If she’d bumped it hard enough to trigger the long tickler…

  Slowly sitting up, she took the bow and unloaded it, then set to unstringing all but two of the weapons. Useful as it might be to keep them primed and loaded as she had while taking the gatehouse, it seemed unlikely they would need them in a similar state of readiness anytime soon, and seeing Sander try to move amongst them would be like watching a blind kitten cross a field of rabbit snares.

  She yawned, wondering what time of day it was, and looked at Sander. He might yet live. The boat was much smaller than the one they’d taken out to Oudeland, and maneuvering around her unconscious shipmate to get at the wee anchor was near-impossible.

  To hell with it. She cleared a space for herself in the belly of the dinghy, her aching back actually warmed by the few centimeters of water pooled beneath her, and fell immediately into something resembling sleep. She woke every few moments or hours, it was hard to tell, and at one point fought a tightly knotted bag into giving up one of its blankets. The mist thickened, and she did not dream.

  It was well after dark when she started awake with the panic of one who knows she’s overslept, and after rubbing her raw arms and blinking away the sleep-crust she saw that Sander was sitting up in the boat, munching an orb of Edam as if it were a sourdough boule. He crumbled her off a chunk of the cheese, and she took it gratefully. They ate in silence, save for the friendly lapping of black water against their boat.

  “Do you think we died?” Sander said at last.

  “What?” Good to see he was his old self, but the question nevertheless gave her the creeps. “When?”

  “Whenever.” Sander might have shrugged, it was hard to tell from his night-vague profile.

  “I wish I had’ve,” Jolanda said. “Which makes me think no, we’re both still here.”

  “Where?”

  “The meer.”

  “I don’t want to die,” said Sander. He sounded tired. “I know nobody does, but just thinking about it makes me sick. Sick. I can still feel my hand.”

  “Why did you take it off?” she asked as she pawed through the food satchel. She found a bottle, and pulling the stopper out with her teeth, guzzled until she coughed. Her throat burned like it had after Jan had tried to kill her out here.

  “Hanged man’s hand,” said Sander. “Remember what Gilles said? You render the fat into a candle, and it helps you sneak past people.”

  “And you were going to make a candle in your cell?” The wine was so good it made her eyes fill, and she offered him the bottle.

  “It would’ve worked!” His defensiveness made her think, at last, that he would indeed recover from his self-inflicted wound, that everything would be all right. Sander was Sander. “I was just resting my eyes, you came in.”

  “Aye,” she said. “Sure.”

  “It’s true!” She heard the bottle gurgling, and then he handed it back, panting. “Would’ve gotten loose, fixed ’em all. Burn the whole eely city. You take care of Jan and Wurfbain, or we need to go back for them special?”

  “I ran, Sander,” she said, bristling that her rather daring jailbreak was now deemed less than sufficient. “I got gear together, I broke Jan’s nose, and I got the hell out. Gave Poorter a good working over before I left, too. He’s been keeping shady company; friends of Wurfbain, I expect.”

  “You know about them?” Sander asked, excited. “ ’Bout the Belgians, you know?”

  “What?” Same old Sander, all right. “Again with the Belgians?”

  “What I call ’em,” he said, and began blathering about plots and conspirators and monsters coming out of the water. She was done listening to the explanations of madmen and ghosts, and took the opportunity to get dressed. Making interested noises at appropriate-seeming lulls in his rant, she rose into a crouch and felt through the bags until she found a vair-lined pelisse, and then pulled on a cold, damp gown and, after wringing it out, a beaver mantle. She felt even chillier with the clothes on, but the fog finally seemed to be clearing, showing the side-lidded eye of the moon and the glittering freckles of night. She got back onto the rowing board and set to moving them along again as he prattled into the mist.

  “—not hell, but like, somewhere different, yeah? No eel so small it doesn’t dream of being a whale, right, so why not dream smaller, dream of being a man?” A final slosh from the bottle as he drained it, but that bit gave Jolanda pause.

  What if she hadn’t dreamed it all as she half-drowned in pursuit of the ring, what if there had been eels down there? What if those Tieselen corpses dressed in sharp-toothed ribbonfish had been real? It wasn’t as if she’d ever heard the explanation for Jan’s miraculous reappearance. In spite of her resolution to remain ignorant, to kill any curiosity that might crop up in her breast, she wished she’d paid more attention to Sander’s ramblings… bu
t he’d now gone as dry as the bottle.

  To the saints’ ears with her worries—there would be time enough for all that lunacy later. Unless there wasn’t, which was fine, too.

  “Sander, are you up?” she said after hours of silence, mostly to keep herself awake at the rowing board.

  “Uh,” he said from the black prow behind her.

  “Did I ever tell you about my brother?”

  “Nay,” he said, or something like it.

  “His name’s Pieter. He ran away when I was little. I always wished he’d taken me with him.” The mist had returned as she’d rowed, muting even the oars. She did not speak for a long time, but when she did, she whispered it, almost as afraid of Sander’s hearing as she was of his not.

  “Pieter run off, and when Jan bought me and took me away, I expected to see him everywhere. Pieter. The world was so small for me, I couldn’t imagine I’d go long without bumping into him. But I never did.” Something scratched at the bottom of the boat. A reed-bed, most likely.

  “I’m not stupid. He might’ve died a day out from the hut, or maybe he lives still, rich or poor, content or hungry, someplace far from here. Or near. Maybe he was one of those men of the militia I put down. I didn’t want to kill anyone, Sander, but I think I might’ve, getting you loose, even with a dull sword.” Jolanda flinched at the memory of that young man in the gatehouse wailing as she broke his hands and fingers. She’d let him live, but then the whole damn place had been aflame when Sander fell out of the door and off the pier. Even if the boy made it out, what if his hands never healed, what if he couldn’t so much as pick up a mug? She repulsed herself, and took her mind off it with the resumption of what she’d been saying.

  “Anyway, each and every time I heard I was to meet some new person, be it a stableman to take a horse or a count of Holland or whoever, every time, I half-thought it might be Pieter, and wouldn’t that be grand? Wouldn’t we recognize each other, like in a tale?” She thought of her other brothers then, but let them float away as she continued.

  “But we never saw each other. Or if we did, we never knew it—how would we? I was stupid, is what I’m getting at, because even though I knew I’d never see him again, I couldn’t stop hoping for it, dreaming about it. Sometimes I’d even tell myself you were him, or Jan was, and something had happened where none of us remembered.

  “Like with the cat. Margareta, remember her? The Muscovite’s cat we brought back with us, but Poorter let go ’stead of keeping for me. Well, when I was planning all this, I was sure she was going to hop in the boat just as I was leaving, aye? And I’d know her down all these days by a limp in her hind leg, from where you said Jan threw her? I was dead certain that she’d be in the boat when I got to the harbor, and even when she wasn’t, I thought she’d show up, by the gatehouse or something, and even as I was pulling your charred ass out of the drink, I checked the dock there to see if she was waiting. But she wasn’t. It was just us.”

  Sander snorted, snarled, but before she could whack him with the oar for being a bitch, she realized he was snoring. Well then. She rowed them deeper into the night, wondering what would become of them—they must gain a shore eventually, and what then? Would Sander recover from his injury, or, more likely, would he die sometime in the days to come, leaving her as alone as she’d ever been? Would she ever return to Dordrecht, to avenge the deaths of Simon and Lansloet and Drimmelin, to repay the crimes of Wurfbain and Jan and Poorter? Would she ever see Lijsbet and her Jew again?

  Or perhaps they would never come to shore, perhaps this meer stretched on and on forever, with only catfish and churchyards to break the monotonous gray waste. Perhaps militiamen were just behind them, and if she set down the oars for an instant, they would be overtaken—she imagined them hanging her from the boughs of the dead tree in Oudeland, where she should have died all those years ago, and rowed harder, her shoulders cramping. If they explained it all to her before slipping on the noose, if they could somehow make sense of all the murders and dead men coming back and what she’d seen haunting the Tieselen table in the flooded house, would that somehow make it all worthwhile?

  Would it be worth dying to find out the truth?

  Of course not. Which was why, assuming Sander ever woke again, and assuming they were not caught and turned over to the Dordrecht militia, she would concoct some story for him about Wurfbain and Jan and the rest being undone before they’d left the city, so they need not ever return, not for revenge, not for their stolen fortune (which had never been theirs to begin with), and not even for illumination—better to be blind than to see hell, or some such silly Sanderism. Perhaps they would live another fifty years or perhaps they would hang from a soggy gallows in the morning, but they would never hear a single answer to any of their myriad questions, so long as she could help it.

  The meer and the mist took their little boat, as night-waters will take any who seek such dubious sanctuaries, and Jolanda felt a weariness in her throbbing limbs that she hadn’t felt since the height of snail season as a girl. Gazing down to where her dark hands gripped the wooden shafts, she offered a prayer that she live long enough for the dye to fade once and for all, to see if she really had skin under all that purple.

  Locking the oars at last, she picked her way between the crossbows and dug out Sander’s gamy severed hand from beneath the bags. Then she returned to the back of the boat and felt around until she found the gap between rowing board and hull where she’d wedged Jan’s ring before setting out from the harbor. Pulling it free almost cost her a fingernail, but finally she extracted the small gold band. Holding it up and peering through it, she looked all around, taking in fog and bog and hollow boat—the whole of her topsy-turvy world.

  Then she shook her head, slid the ring onto the waiting finger of Sander’s clammy, dead hand, and cast it into the night. Jolanda wondered if hand and ring might spiral forever through the swamp-vapors, never descending into the water nor rising up into the sky, suspended for all time between heaven and earth, an eternal wheel spinning ever onward through the changeless twilight…

  She heard it splash into the meer, where it would no doubt make a hungry fish quite happy.

  Jolanda turned away from the gray, mist-kissed water and made ready to rest. Rolling up the small fur mantle Sander had commissioned but apparently never delivered to Simon, she gently lifted the madman’s heavy head and wedged the garment between brow and prow. Then she withdrew the stained cape Jan had given her when they had first come to Dordrecht and lay down beside Sander, resting her neck against the shared, bristly pillow. It was as cramped as her communal childhood bed, between his bulky body and the gunwale of the boat, and he stank even worse than rotting sea snails. Still, Jo smiled to herself as she stretched her blue cloak to blanket them both, two fools under one hood.

  Acknowledgments

  On New Year’s Eve, 1992, I traveled with my family to the Netherlands, where we lived for the better part of a year. We rented a small house in the outskirts of Poeldijk, a village bordering Den Haag, where I attended public school, ice-skated, played football, rode a bicycle everywhere, and fell into both love and canals with an alarming regularity—in other words, I went as native as my atrocious language-acquisition skills would allow. To this day, Holland holds a unique place in my increasingly evident bosom, and this work represents my clumsy, stuttering attempt to share my affection for the people, land, and culture I hold so dear. Also, my fondness for jenever cannot be overstated.

  It’s worth noting that in this text I’ve taken some liberties where specifics of the Dutch language are concerned—this may not be the usual place you’d expect to find such a confession, but it is called an acknowledgments page, and it certainly bears acknowledging! This was done in an effort to prevent confusion on the part of my English readers, hence variant spellings of groot/groote/grote, depending on whether I was talking about a coin, a region, or a market. Another example is my concurrent use of both “count” and “graaf,” which amount to t
he same title, and “hertog,” which is essentially Dutch for “duke”—this was likewise done so as to better differentiate characters, and I hope in attempting to spare puzzlement for some I have not inflicted it upon bilingual others.

  In the past I’ve made the mistake of trying to individually thank people in this space, which invariably leads to my inexcusably forgetting to include dear, dear people without whom the work would not be possible. The resulting emotion is, as the technopeasants say, the suck, and so I’ll simply say thank you to everyone who’s helped, and to everyone who’s read, which amounts to the same thing—it’s a strange, wonderful feeling to run across a random review from a stranger posted in some far-flung corner of the Internet, and exactly the sort of thing that rejuvenates me when I’ve been on a self-loathing bender and am in desperate need of random cheer. Thank you again, everyone.

  extras

  meet the author

  Raechel Dumas

  JESSE BULLINGTON spent the bulk of his formative years in rural Pennsylvania, the Netherlands, and Tallahassee, Florida. He is a folklore enthusiast who holds a bachelor’s degree in history and English literature from Florida State University. He currently resides in Colorado and can be found online at www.jessebullington.com.

  introducing

  If you enjoyed

  THE FOLLY OF THE WORLD,

  look out for

  THE ENTERPRISE OF DEATH

  by Jesse Bullington

  As the witch-pyres of the Spanish Inquisition blanket Renaissance Europe in a moral haze, a young African slave finds herself the unwilling apprentice of an ancient necromancer. Unfortunately, quitting his company proves even more hazardous than remaining his pupil when she is afflicted with a terrible curse. Yet salvation may lie in a mysterious tome her tutor has hidden somewhere on the war-torn continent.