The Folly of the World (31 page)

And yet, a highly profitable one—the old Graaf Tieselen had sold off most of his farmland around the family seat in Oudeland to get his wine importation business in the water, and while the neighboring graafs and hertogs who had snapped up the property had considered him mad to give up solid land for airy schemes, the landholder-turned-merchant had enjoyed the last laugh. Or rather, he would have, if he hadn’t drowned along with thousands of his countrymen when the Saint Lizzy Day Flood had taken the Groote Waard. Sander was laughing that figurative laugh, was the more accurate view of things, and laughing all the harder since this city-free warehouse had established delivery timetables with guild-run ships in Rotterdam and beyond—really drawing in the groots now.

Other Dordt entrepreneurs had followed the Tieselen model, so there were now several other stilt-raised warehouses poking out of the tidal flat like a pack of giant wooden waterbugs. On this side of the city walls, though, there was little else—brown
marsh when the moon took out the waters, and brown shallows when she brought them back in, far as the unsquinted eye could see. There wasn’t even the odd dead tree to pierce the flatness, just Trash Island and a lot of mud.

Simon kept house and guard of the stores, only rowing his dinghy into the city to pick up Sander for a rat hunt, or to retrieve supplies. And probably visit whores and his brother Braem, sure, but what he did in his own time was his own business, so long as no meer bandits made off with the wine and no rats made off with the packing hay.

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—”