The Folly of the World Read Online Free PDF Page A

Resisting the push of the jostling waves took what little strength she had, but she dived again, her leanness carrying her down. Even with eyes hardened against the brine she saw little, the sun too low, the bottom too deep, and as the tide shoved her backward, she ran her hands over the rippled sand, a blind woman seeking out a single loose thread in an endless quilt. She came up gasping, dry-heaved twice, gulped the air, then went down again.
    And again.
    And again.
    Lights were coming to her, bright sparks inside her skull, and still she dove, her fingers dredging through the sand. Her hands were too numb to even recognize that they had found the knife until the salt intruded into her sliced right palm. She came up bloody-handed and howling. And dove again, brushing the bottom slowly, carefully, and then, finally, wrapped the fingers of her good left hand around the hilt, a smile not even the dwellers of that deep could see hidden behind her thin lips.

III.
    T he girl was only a few paces out when Jan found her again, the sneaky bitch having escaped into the liquid shadows after diving for his knife. She was crawling more than swimming, the breakers barely cresting her back as she dragged herself from the sea like some beast of legend. He walked toward her, and she must have realized she was spotted, for she flung herself to her feet and dashed out of the water, charging him with his own dagger.
    Jan felt his stomach lurch at the sight, marveling that she could even stand, and then she couldn’t, her legs giving out and sending her sprawling in the shells. She gave a cry, and then commenced vomiting with such vigor that Jan half-expected her organs to appear in the frothy stew. She kicked her arms and legs, drowning on dry land as she retched uncontrollably.
    When she stopped heaving, Jan approached her, the girl rolling onto her back and revealing herself to be older than he would have imagined from the size of her tunic, perhaps fifteen or sixteen. Her stomach and small breasts were striped red from the shells, and as he appraised her, the deeper cuts began to weep. Oddly, from the elbows down, her arms were almost as dark as the rest of her was pallid, and he saw that the sand coating her right hand was sloughing off in small red clumps. In her left fist his dagger jutted out, black as burnt sugar in the gloaming.
    “Get!” the girl managed, brandishing the knife, her accent thick but certainly no poorer than those of the people of Aalsmeer, or worse yet, the Frisians. She would do.
    “Are you mad?” Jan asked pleasantly. “You could have drowned.”
    He tossed the sandy tunic onto her and turned around, his practiced nonchalance belying the ear he cocked for the sound of feet pounding beach behind him. Only the rumor of sand dancing in the breeze. She wasn’t moving.
    Mounting his horse, Jan looked back at the girl. She stayed where he had left her, the tunic draped over her like the victim of some worse crime, her plain face staring at him with a look of stupid confusion. Jan had hoped it would be a boy.
    The trail wound through the sandy hills and ridges, and though he saw the lights of a village ahead, he stopped at the first hut he came to, a rather large, sand-blasted hovel set back in the blackthorn that coated the dunes. The bouquet of rotten shellfish, charred bone, and old piss permeated the place, and there were several rusty cauldrons set in the sand between him and the hut. Jan nodded, remembering how stained the girl’s arms were. This would be easier than he had thought.
    It wasn’t, as it turned out. They slunk from the shadows of the sloe, half a dozen lads between the ages of ten and twenty, all wearing the dull, tongue-lolling expressions of sleepy wolfhounds, their arms dark with dye, their eyes dark with suspicion. He would have taken any one of them over the girl, but she was the swimmer and so there was nothing for it.
    “Is your father here?” Jan asked them, but none spoke, and the