The Folly of the World (14 page)

S
ander was trying to cool his stewing anger at Jan, but he might as well have been blowing on the summer sun. He should have expected something along these lines, considering the coldness of the bastard in question, but no matter how adamantly he told himself he should have seen this coming, he still boiled to think of it. That it bothered him as much as it did was not something he focused on for very long at a stretch—such thoughts were too knotty to properly sort out, and of course if he were in Jan’s position, things might be different and all, but still, it was a dark fucking play no matter what cards you were holding. Graafs and the like had to be careful, Sander got that, especially fake graafs like Jan, and yeah, you didn’t want people talking, spreading rumors, all that, but after all the time and hard work and, yeah, well, call it what it was, love, it felt ruthless as a raven’s mercy. It wasn’t like Jan was staving in Sander’s head, but for some queer reason it felt like his heart had suffered a blow—which was just stupid, since Sander had always been the harder of the two.

Except maybe he wasn’t, Sander admitted as he gave his oars an especially healthy jerk. Sander might be more eager to wade into a fight or, sure, yeah, a murder or two, but Jan had a whole different sort of edge to him, maybe the difference between a sword and a fish knife or something, a shaving blade. Whatever. Point was, part of the attraction had always been Jan’s willingness to overlook Sander’s more violent excesses; angel’s honesty, the man had shown no more disgust toward Sander’s crimes than he had to the occasional smear of shit on his cock mid-fuck—at
worst, a vaguely annoyed sigh, a wipe of a rag, and a resumption of business.

Why, then, the surprise? No, surprise was all right, why then the anger, the, well, the hurt? That didn’t make half a whore’s lick of sense. Would it have been different if the little mussel had been a lad, some fit little blondie or ginger grinding on Jan? Maybe—or maybe it would have made it worse, devil only knew. Point was, smart tactic or no, Sander would have another wee word with Jan when the girl wasn’t about, and on that wager a betting man might turn a healthy profit on even short odds.

Then there was this dogdick in front of him, this squinty little ball-washer who had been trying to fuck with Sander ever since they set out. As if reading his thoughts, the Muscovite brought his oars back too fast and spattered Sander’s face with meer water, further fermenting his sour mood. He
was
fucking with him, the prick.

“You fucking with me, you prick?” demanded Sander, setting his shoulders and dragging the oars through the meer as hard as he could, splashing them both as he ripped them up at the end of the stroke.

“I would not with you, my strashniy droog, not even for money.” The Muscovite smiled over his shoulder, his teeth yellow as old butter. This was accompanied by another spritz from his oars as they came back.

“Keep it up,” Sander snarled. He considered throwing the man overboard. With his back to Sander, he’d never see it coming. “Keep it up and see, ball-washer. Highest tree catches the most wind.”

“Velik telom, da mal delom,” the Muscovite sang, his voice rolling across the watery plain, his eyes closed as he rapturously belted out his stupid-sounding ballad. “Velik teloooooom, da mal deloooooom!”

Sander felt a brief but strong urge to stand and beat the man to death with his bare hands, but he knew from experience that
brawling in boats invariably led to his going in the water, and after the whole falling-into-a-canal-and-waking-up-in-hell business he was especially wary of going overboard. Let the prick sing—he’d be warbling another tune when Glory’s End was buried up his ass. Besides, it was bad luck to attack a man on his own ship, rublehead or no.

“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.”