The Folly of the World (8 page)

The warden stared incredulously at the naked man. He did not hand over the sword. People got hurt.

O
n the night the handsome stranger bought her, Jolanda had wondered just what kind of vile shit he intended to do to her. She’d gripped his dagger in her uninjured left hand, but he made no move to take it from her, and not knowing what else to do, she stowed it in the bundled shift and blanket under her arm and let him help her onto the horse. She had often daydreamed of finding a waterhorse and riding it into the waves, never to be seen again save by drowning sailors, but bouncing on an actual equine back through the dunes, Jolanda felt something deep and cold and black as the night sea soak her insides. They left the trail and rode up the beach, back to where she had first seen him, the stars glittering above like the witchfire that sometimes shimmered in the wet sand after a summer wave had broken and fled.

“That’s good for tonight,” the stranger had said, stopping the horse. They’d traveled farther than Jolanda had ever gone, but the dunes here looked the same as those of her home. He dismounted the horse first, and then helped her down. As he did, she remembered the knife tucked in the cloth in her arms, but it was very late and she was very tired, only the strangeness of the night and the discomfort of the ride and her throbbing hand keeping her awake. Her legs gave out underneath her as he set her down, and she stayed where she lay in the sand, the last thing she saw the silhouette of the Frieslander looming over her.

She was not a dreamer by custom, at least not when she was asleep, but that night Jolanda dreamt of the sea, dreamt she dwelt there the way she had dwelt in the dunes. She and her
eldest brother, Pieter, who wasn’t a shitbird like the rest and had run away when she was very young, were swimming over the black waves toward some distant, rocky isle. They talked as they swam, as if they were strolling on the beach and not sliding over breakers, and though the sea was dark as the sky, she could see almost as deep below as she could above, and yet was unafraid. She realized they had both changed, and wondered if the man who had bought her was her brother from the sea returned, and so he changed in the dream to the Friesland stranger, but still was Pieter. Only when the dream shifted and they were crouched in the smoky gloom of their father’s hut with the purple pots boiling did she realize she was asleep. Still she dreamt on, but when she started awake to a crab pinching a scrap from her bloodied palm she remembered nothing beyond the purple pots.

The crab scuttled into a hole, clutching what she hoped was a scrap of the torn tunic she had bound the wound with and not her skin. She blinked into the hazy dawn, the sand swirling over her like the thinnest silken sheet ruffled by the softest summer wind. She was cold, and she hurt all over, and sand was caked in her eyes and ears and nose and lips and worse places still. She sat up and saw that the stranger was staring out at the ocean, his horse beside him, and Jolanda had the brief but discomfiting notion that they had been conversing just before she awoke.

“I don’t know if you caught it, but my name’s Lubbert,” he said. “Of Sneek.”

She didn’t say anything, glaring at him.

“If anyone asks, you’re my daughter.”

She snorted. He gave her some of the horse’s oats for breakfast and then they mounted up, riding all day in silence. That night she kicked his balls and stole his horse, and in turn he broke her nose.

Lubbert was an arsehole after all, then, but that was all right—Jolanda had quite a bit of experience where arseholes were concerned, and he wasn’t the sandiest of the lot. After she
had come back to camp, her face aching, he had sewn up her palm with a needle and spool of white thread he kept in a little velvet-lined sewing box. The box reminded her of her mother’s needle case, which her arseling father had sold less than a year after the death of his wife despite Jolanda’s protests. It hadn’t been as fine a case as Lubbert’s, admittedly, but then her mother had been a decent, humble woman, not some show-off poot.

The hurt of his stitching up her hand took Jolanda’s mind off her nose, which continued to leak red, runny snot for a few days until that part of her also went silent, and then all that really bothered her was her arse and crotch and legs after spending the better part of each day on Mackerel’s back, Lubbert behind her on the saddle proper. His hands never strayed from the reins, and he never removed his codpiece to better rub against her, but even so, riding a horse was pure shit.

One thing about Lubbert was he didn’t run his mouth all day, and another was that after breaking her nose he didn’t hit her again, which was a pleasant change of pace. Still, she didn’t trust him, and if he was half as clever as he seemed, he wouldn’t trust her, either. She prodded the lily stitches crossing her mauve hand and smiled at the thought of going home one day, rich beyond dreaming, and flaunting her fortune in front of her brothers, who would still be living together in their father’s hut like the nest of shitbirds they were.

The first thing Jolanda realized when they left the coast and began moving inland was that the world is boringly flat, sort of like the sea but with half the character and none of the vitality. They rode inland, and no sooner did they pass the last dunes than Jolanda felt a sudden and unexpected sorrow well up inside her, the dikes of her eyes nearly breeched before she pushed it back down. Scowling at the green pasturelands only occasionally cut by shallow brown canals, Lubbert’s inability to swim made a great deal more sense. One of the few things he said to her that first day away from the sea was that nobody out here
was foolish enough to make their purple the old way, that he had never before heard of anyone extracting the color from windfall sea-fruit instead of some easier method. She picked harder at the pale thread in her dark palm, and gave a prayer that his balls still hurt.

In one of the larger towns they came to, which was walled and had locks on the river and two-story buildings with gaily painted doors and shutters and red-tiled roofs and all sorts of other things that made Jolanda gawp and smile despite her resolution not to, Lubbert insisted she be fitted for something to conceal her hair. They were already in the sheep-smelling hovel of an old widow when she figured out what he was up to, the silently nodding hag in the doorway giving Jolanda the willies.

“No thank you,
Papa
,” Jolanda said with a sneer. “I don’t want to cover it.”

“I won’t have it said my daughter’s a slut,” said Lubbert, smiling at the puckered biddy. “I’m in need of new hose myself, and while we’re here, fit my daughter with everything. A pelisse and bonnet if you can, or just a hood. She’ll also need a longer gown, obviously, and underwear.”

“I don’t need any of that,” Jolanda protested.

“You’re too old to be rubbing your slit on my horse like a bitch on her heat,” said Lubbert. “I shall return shortly.”

This horrified Jolanda more than being sold to a stranger by her own flesh and blood, and she had no reply ready as he shoved her past the old woman and closed the door. When she finally let a string of curses fly, the beldam smiled a rot-toothed grin and descended on Jolanda like a witch in the bedtime stories nobody ever told her after Pieter ran away.

Being in a real town—as opposed to the clutch of fish-shacks that passed for a village near her father’s house—Jolanda had expected the widow’s hut to be clean and bright. Instead it was squalid and dim, humid and cavelike, with a full half of the floor and one entire wall buried in a drift of rags—a witch house if ever
there was one. Boringly enough, though, the hag didn’t try anything interesting, instead teaching her how to knit leggings for Lubbert from a wheel of greasy, discolored wool. The girl already knew how, having made a dozen pairs for her brothers and father over the years, and the odd set for herself, on the rare occasion when there was enough material left over for her after theirs were done. When real winter came she had been glad for something to gird her legs with as she hunted the frosty dunes for vermin burrows worth digging out to supplement the family diet, but her father hadn’t let her bring them with her when he sold her sorry arse.

It soon became apparent that the old woman wasn’t going to let Jolanda take away any loose wool and instead planned to outfit the girl from the rag heap, the legging lesson being given solely for future applications. At this discovery Jolanda threw down her needles, declared herself the superior knitter and seamstress in no uncertain terms, and ruled the exercise a waste of everyone’s time. The biddy didn’t have anything smart to say to
that
, but in retaliation the bitch refused to let her try on any hose, claiming they were only for men.

When the Frieslander came back a short time later, the old woman had already dug through her mountain of oily hand-me-downs and extracted the articles in question. The worst of these was the gown, an enormous serge tunic that the crone hemmed up, though not nearly high enough—it barely came above Jolanda’s ankles, and would make the simple act of walking into a chore. Beneath this came the pelisse, which seemed to be a moth-worried cat-fur waistcoat with a ridiculously large bonnet to thread through the gown’s neck hole, and beneath
that
a thin linen shift. From the way the woman smiled at her afterward, Jolanda knew she must look like a sweat-wet idiot.

“Beautiful,” said Lubbert, inspecting her from the doorway.

“I look like a sweat-wet idiot,” said Jolanda, wiping a gown-entombed arm across her boggy brow.

“She says nasty things about you,” said the old woman. “Nasty, nasty words. She needs a hiding.”

“Thank you,” said Lubbert warmly.

“
Thank you
,” Jolanda imitated, pulling a complicated face at the old woman as she mimicked Lubbert’s stupid accent.

Outside, Lubbert cuffed her lightly on the bonnet, and she hit him back, which led to a brief but spirited slapping match in the street, wherein they each landed several blows. He was taller and so connected with her face more, but not so hard as he could have, and mostly avoided her aching nose and the head-wrap it had taken her forever to tie down. She was soon giggling despite herself. He offered a truce by way of a cheese he had acquired while she was being fitted, probably to make up for saying that thing about her mussel rubbing on his horse.

Nobody had ever bought her anything before, even if the clothes were horrible and the cheese so salty it made seawater seem sweet. And when she staunchly rejected his offer of a pair of shoes to go with the new attire, he didn’t press the issue. Not such an arsehole, then.

They rode on, usually sleeping on the side of the road. The silence of the nighttime fields, beyond the bugs and birds and other noises, put Jolanda very off—to not hear the sea anytime she should listen for it seemed a terribly unnatural and dismal circumstance. Still, the farther they rode and the more Lubbert opened up, telling her jokes and stories and stick-fighting with her when they broke for the day and he let her strip down to her shift, the more she came to appreciate the magnitude of her fortune. He knew more than she thought there was to know, from the name of the village outside her home—Monster, which she had always just called “the village”—to his intimacy with the names of various plants and birds that all looked the same to her.

“It’s Frisian, not Frieslander,” he said when she asked him if all Frieslanders were as fucking poncey as he was. They were riding, and though she said it expecting a hard pinch or slap upside the head, none came—a disappointment, as she was bored and had an elbow already tensed to fire into his slight potbelly. “Most of
them can’t afford such fine clothing, if that’s your question, and even if they could, it’s not practical for hard labor and fishing.”

“Frisians,” she repeated the word. “Heard you’re all child-rapers.”

“Rapists,” said Lubbert, “and nobody is all anything. As it happens, Frisians claim descent from Friso, a heroic champion of long ago. This Friso served under the god-king Alexander, who was one of the Nine Valiants—the nine greatest men who ever lived, if you believe the scholars. In payment for his homage, Alexander awarded Friso any land he should choose, any property in all the world. Friso decided on Friesland, and true Frisians are his heirs.”

“Oh,” said Jolanda, trying not to be impressed. “They are?”

“No. That’s just what they tell themselves. Friesland is a dank and stormy place, and floods often. Frisians are descended from whatever poor bastards didn’t have anywhere else to go. Perhaps it’s where criminals were banished from worthier lands. Don’t tell a Frisian that, though.”

“Aye, that sounds more like stiffheads than old kings and all.”

“For that, they’re stern people, to live in such a place. The Counts of Holland once tried to seize it from them, but the Frisians fought them to a man, and came out the conquerors. Better dead than a slave, is what the Frisians say. What does that tell you?”

“Better dead than a slave.” Jolanda nodded with approval, thinking on the sword Lubbert had promised to buy her once they retrieved his sunken treasure. “Means if someone tries to put you under ’em, you fight to the death, ’cause if you’re a slave, they might kill you anyway.”

“No,” said Lubbert, “it means Frisians are madmen who will lay down their lives to protect a mud puddle, so long as it’s
their
mud puddle. And it means if you already have a good thing—all of Holland, say—don’t go pissing away your resources trying to snatch up something else just to have it. It’s like fighting a dog for a bone when you’ve already got a joint of lamb on your board.”

“Oh,” said Jolanda, and they rode on. She could feel herself getting cleverer the longer she was around Lubbert.

They took their time getting to wherever it was they were going, cutting northwest for days only to double around to the south again, winding their way from Holland clear to Guelders and then back through Holland again. As the days turned into weeks, Jolanda grew used to riding a horse, the weight of a sword, and spending long stretches of time around another human being who wasn’t constantly trying to beat her, grope her, or both. When they camped near ponds and lakes, she would practice her diving, Lubbert throwing his small iron bar into the center and sending her swimming after it. She always found it, the little bit of muck and waterweeds nowhere near so distracting as saltwater stinging her eyes or waves shoving everything about. The only thing she missed, she thought as she dried out by their fires, were the dunes; the occasional grassy dike crossing the fields was hardly a substitute.