Opening Atlantis Read online

  “Your father would be gamy, even in salt,” Kersauzon said, also in English. Richard turned red.

  “Tell me your story,” Edward Radcliffe said. His son exclaimed in dismay. Edward held up a hand. “I will pay your price, friend François. Maybe I am a fool. It could be. Plenty of others have said so. And I will give you one small promise in return.”

  “Which is?” the Breton asked politely.

  “If you lie, or if you cheat, I will hunt you down and kill you.”

  Several of the Bretons growled. Jacques reached for his knife in a way that warned he wasn’t about to cut himself more of the strange smoked flesh that tasted so much like goose. François Kersauzon didn’t flinch, or even blink. “A bargain,” he said, and thrust out his right hand.

  Edward clasped it. Kersauzon began to talk.

  Maybe I am a fool…Plenty of others have said so. Radcliffe wondered whether his words would come back to haunt him. If they did, he would keep his promise. It was as simple as that.

  All around him brawled the immensity of the Atlantic. He’d never been a cautious sailor, clinging to the sight of land. You couldn’t be, not if you wanted to make a halfway decent living with your lines and nets. But he’d never sailed so far into the green-gray-blue of the ocean before, either.

  Ahead of him, like a will-o’-the-wisp, the Morzen bobbed on the swells. François Kersauzon’s cog—her name meant Mermaid—was a little smaller, a little faster, than the St. George. If she’d wanted to, she could have given Radcliffe the slip. But she reefed her big square sail a bit and stuck with the English vessel.

  Edward Radcliffe stood at the St. George’s stern, holding the tiller that connected to the rudder. A few cogs still used old-fashioned twin steering oars, but he liked the new arrangement better. It let the builders square up the stern, so the cog could hold more than it would have otherwise. The Morzen was made the same way. Up ahead, Kersauzon was doing the steering; by now, Edward was as familiar with his distant outline against the sky as he was with those of his own sailors.

  “I don’t like this,” Henry grumbled. “I don’t like it one bit. Those damned tricksy Bretons are laughing up their sleeves at us. You wait and see if they’re not, Father.”

  “Fine sleeves they have for laughing, too,” Edward said. His son gave him a dirty look. He was joking and not joking at the same time. A Breton kabig, with its hood, its wooden toggles, and its sturdy oiled cloth, was one of the best foul-weather jackets around. His own wool coat didn’t shed water so well, though it was probably warmer.

  One of the sailors pointed into the sea off the port bow. “Something funny floating there,” he called.

  “Thanks, Will,” Radcliffe answered, and steered towards it. “Grab a dip net and see if you can snag it.”

  “I’ll do that,” Will said, and he did. When the St. George came up alongside of whatever it was, he thrust the pole-handled net into the sea. Grunting with effort, he pulled it in again. Another fisherman hung on to him to keep him from going over the rail. He thrust a fist in the air in triumph. “Got it, skipper—damned if I don’t.”

  “Good for you!” Edward said, and then, to Henry, “Take the tiller for a bit, will you, lad? I want to see what he’s brought in.”

  “Whatever it is, it won’t be worth the third part of our catch—silver doesn’t float,” his son said. But he took his father’s place at the stern.

  Edward went forward, his gait automatically compensating for the cog’s roll and pitch. Had he thought about how he was doing that, he probably couldn’t have done it. “Well, Will, what have you got?”

  “It’s a leaf, like. Off a tree or a bush?” Will didn’t sound sure. When Edward Radcliffe got a good look at the thing, he decided he couldn’t blame the other fisherman. It was undoubtedly a leaf. But it was like none he’d ever seen before. It was bigger than a leaf had any business being. For a couple of heartbeats, he wondered if it was something on the order of a pine branch. That didn’t look like a pine branch, though—it looked like a stem. And it didn’t have needles growing from it. Those couldn’t be anything but leaves, even if they were frondlike, almost feathery.

  He scratched his head. “Pretty peculiar, all right. I wonder if the Bretons know what the devil it is.”

  Another fisherman came up beside them. “You know what it reminds me of?” he said.

  “I don’t, Ned, but I hope you’ll tell me,” Edward answered.

  “It reminds me of the leaves on a palm tree,” Ned said. “A real palm tree, I should say—we mostly use yew branches on Palm Sunday, on account of real palm trees won’t grow in England. But I saw ’em once in Cádiz, when I sailed down there on a trading run with a Dutchman.”

  “A palm tree,” Radcliffe echoed. Ned nodded. The skipper rubbed his chin. His beard was coming in thick now. Nobody shaved at sea; you were asking to cut your own throat if you tried. “We’re a mighty long way from Cádiz—farther off than we were at Le Croisic. How in blazes would a palm leaf drift all the way out here?”

  Ned spread his hands, which were as callused and battered as the skipper’s. “I don’t know. It’s not just like a palm leaf, either. More like one than anything else I know of, though.”

  “Maybe it says Kersauzon wasn’t—isn’t—lying after all,” Radcliffe said. “We can hope so, anyway.”

  “We’d better hope so,” Ned said, which also wasn’t wrong. He went on, “And Cádiz may be a long way off, but that there leaf says some kind of land isn’t. It’s pretty fresh—anybody can see that.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Radcliffe said. “I—”

  He broke off then. A bird flew up to the St. George out of nowhere—which is to say, he didn’t notice it till it landed on the rail not a long spit from him. Its shape and size put him in mind of a good English blackbird. So did its yellow beak. And, when it opened that beak, so did its song.

  But it was no blackbird, nor any other thrush he’d ever seen before. Yes, its back was dark brown, but it had a brick-red breast and belly, not quite so bright as a redbreast’s but close.

  It let out a few more bars of sweet music. Then, as Radcliffe took a step towards it, it sprang into the air and flew away—off to the west. It didn’t land on the Morzen; Edward didn’t think it did, anyhow. No, it kept on going. And where else would it be going but…?

  “Land,” Ned said. “Got to be land.”

  “Yes. I think so, too. And I begin to think François Kersauzon was telling us nothing but the truth,” Edward Radcliffe said. “I didn’t believe that when I took his bargain. If half of what he claimed was so, part of our catch would have been a small price to pay. But if all of it’s true…”

  “Well, what then?” the fisherman asked.

  Edward stared west, after the vanished songbird. “I don’t know,” he whispered, more than half to himself. “I just don’t know. And I don’t think anyone else does, either.”

  More birds—plainly land birds—perched on the St. George’s rail or in her rigging or atop her yard over the next few days. Edward Radcliffe would have bet that the cloudbank hanging off to the west hid the unknown land from which those birds came. He started thinking of it in his own mind as Atlantis, the fabled country set somewhere out in the ocean with which it shared a name.

  For some time, though, he had no chance to sail west. Along with everyone else on the boat—and, he was sure, everyone on the Morzen, too—he was too busy pulling cod from the sea. Kersauzon sure hadn’t been lying about what a fine fishing ground this was. Edward had never seen anything like it in waters closer to England.

  Some of the cod were almost as long as a man, and heavier than big men like Edward and his sons. The fishermen had to gaff them to bring them aboard, and even then the cod flapped and fought, desperate for life. Before long, the St. George’s deck was running in blood and slippery with fish guts. The crew flung offal over the side as fast as they could. That only brought sharks and other wolves of the sea alongside to feast on the unaccu
stomed bounty. Gulls and skuas and other sea birds fought for their share, too, and screeched in rage when they didn’t get everything they wanted.

  Listening to those furious, dissatisfied cries, Edward straightened for a moment and said to Henry, “They might as well be men, eh?”

  His son nodded. “They’re greedy enough, all right. But there’s plenty here for all of them. Plenty here for the Bretons and us, too—François wasn’t wrong about that. And you weren’t wrong to take him up on it.” Henry managed a wry grin. “There, Father. D’you see? You can say, ‘I told you so,’ and I just have to put up with it.”

  “So do I,” Richard said.

  Instead of coming out with the words every child—and every man and woman grown—so hated to hear, Edward Radcliffe only grunted and went back to gutting fish. The knife he used was a sturdy tool, not far removed from a falchion or shortsword, yet for some of the cod that were coming out of the sea it was barely big enough. He stropped it against leather again and again, and longed for a steel to do an even better job of keeping the edge sharp.

  The St. George’s master salter was a lean fellow named Hugh Fenner. “Good thing we have a full load from Abrgall,” he said, spreading flower of salt inside the body cavity of a fish Edward had just gutted. “We’ll use every speck we got in Le Croisic.”

  “Well, I hoped for a good catch then—I always do,” the skipper replied. “But I own I never dreamt of anything like…this.”

  “By Our Lady, who would? Who could?” Fenner said. “Some of these cod are so meaty, we need to carve ’em into thinner slabs to make sure the salt can cure ’em before they spoil.”

  “More work. As if we didn’t have enough already,” Edward said. “But do what you need to do, Hugh, and make sure the lads all jump when you tell ’em to. The catch comes first.” That might not have been the Apostles’ Creed, but it was the Fishermen’s.

  “Don’t you fret, skipper. Everybody’ll do what needs doing. That’s what we’re here for,” Fenner said.

  Radcliffe nodded without taking the master salter seriously. Telling him not to worry was like telling him not to breathe. Worrying was part of his job—a big part. If the captain didn’t worry, who would? Nobody. And if nobody worried, what would become of the fishing boat when something that people should have been worrying about happened? Nothing good—he was only too sure of that.

  “We’ll fill the hold full—Devil take me if we don’t,” Hugh Fenner said. “We could fill it full two or three times, all the fish we’re taking. Jesus and Mary, we hardly need the hooks and lines. The cod’re so thick, we could dip baskets in the water and take ’em out that way.”

  He was likely right. No wonder François Kersauzon had led them here. This bank had more fish than any one boat could handle. Radcliffe thought it had more fish than a hundred boats could handle, or a thousand. In exchange for the secret, the canny Breton got an extra third of the catch for no extra work. It struck Radcliffe as a good bargain for both sides.

  Whether it would strike Kersauzon the same way five or ten years from now, Edward wasn’t so sure. The St. George would keep coming back, and next time around would owe nothing to the other boat. I can sell the secret, too, if I want to or need to, Radcliffe thought. It wouldn’t last. A secret this big, this rich, couldn’t last long by the nature of things.

  The wind shifted. Radcliffe’s eye automatically went to the rigging, though of course he knew the sail was furled. The breeze had been coming out of the west. Now it swung about so that it blew toward the clouds fixed in the mysterious distance there. Maybe it would shift them at last. He hoped so—he wanted a look at what they hid. He’d heard Kersauzon’s stories about Atlantis, and he’d seen one enormous smoked leg of fowl. All that whetted his appetite, both literally and figuratively.

  As soon as he was sure the swing portended no danger to the cog, he plunged back into the unending labor of gaffing and gutting and salting fish. Some time went by before he looked up again, startled, and realized he’d forgotten to do anything of the kind for much too long.

  Dripping knife in his hand, he stared and stared. Green as England in springtime was his first thought after he finally got a glimpse of…Atlantis. Yes, the name seemed to suit more than well enough. A longer look said his first thought wasn’t quite true. This green was darker, more somber, than that of his native land. But that didn’t mean he didn’t want to see this new countryside up close. Oh, no. It didn’t mean anything of the kind.

  Oars creaked in the oarlocks as the St. George’s boat neared the shore. Edward waved to François Kersauzon—the Morzen’s boat was going ashore, too, only a short bowshot away. The Breton skipper waved back. “Is it not as I told you?” he called, his voice thin across the waves.

  “Seems that way.” Edward looked over his shoulder, toward the two fishing boats anchored in eight fathoms of water. He didn’t believe in taking chances; he wanted plenty of ocean under his keel. Plainly, Kersauzon felt the same way. That surprised the Englishman not at all—you didn’t get to be a captain if you were reckless. Or, if you did, you didn’t stay a captain long.

  He and his sons and Hugh Fenner and two other fishermen had a longer pull than they would have if he’d brought the St. George into shallower water. So did the Bretons from the Morzen. So what? Edward thought. Anyone who minded work had no business going to sea in the first place.

  He wondered whether Kersauzon and the Bretons would race to the shore. Sensibly, they didn’t. Anyone who gave himself extra work when so much wasn’t extra had to be a fool. François Kersauzon might be a lot of things, but Radcliffe would have sworn on Christ’s holy relics that he was no fool.

  The boat fought through the breakers and grated to a stop on a beach half sand, half mud. “You go out first, Father,” Richard said. “You brought us here. I never would have—I thought the Breton was cozening us.” The rest of the Englishmen in the boat nodded.

  “I thank you,” Edward said. His back creaked as he straightened. When he stepped ashore, his boot squelched in mud. He knew he ought to come out with something grand, something people—or at least he—would remember for a long time. But he was no traveling player or glib peddler, to find fancy words whenever he needed them. “Well, we’re here,” wasn’t what anyone would call splendid, but it was true.

  Kersauzon hopped out of the other boat and trotted toward him. The Breton took the new land for granted. It wasn’t new to him, not as a whole, even if this stretch might be.

  “What do you think?” he asked, as proud as if he rather than God had shaped the ground on which they stood.

  “It’s…different,” Edward answered. The murmur of waves going in and out, the wind’s sigh, the smell of sea in the air—all those things were familiar enough. So were the grasses and shrubs just beyond the beach. Past that, familiarity broke down. Radcliffe pointed to a strange plant. “What do you call that?”

  “I don’t know its right name. I don’t know if it has one,” Kersauzon said. “But I’ve been calling those barrel plants.”

  Radcliffe nodded. Right name or not, it fit well enough. The trunk—he supposed it was a trunk—looked like a stout, bark-covered barrel. From the top sprouted a sheaf of big, frond-filled leaves like the one Will had netted from the Atlantic.

  More barrel plants, some bigger, some smaller, dotted the landscape. Their leaves were of varying sizes and shapes and of different shades of green, but they all seemed built on the same plan—a plan Edward had never seen before. Farther inland, the woods were of conifers, but not of the sort of conifers he knew. “Have you a name for the trees, too?” he asked.

  “I do—I call ’em redwoods,” François Kersauzon replied. “Cut down a small one and you’ll see why—the lumber is the color of untarnished copper. And Mother Mary turn her back on me if I lie, Englishman, but some of them are bigger than any trees I ever set eyes on back home.”

  “Are there men here?” Richard Radcliffe asked. “Moors or Irishmen or other savages?”
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br />   “I’ve not seen any,” Kersauzon said. “I don’t swear I’m the only fisherman ever to find this shore. Basques or Galicians who don’t get their salt at Le Croisic—or maybe even those who do, for the Basques are close-mouthed bastards—may come here, too. But I’ve yet to run across a native. It’s a new land.”

  Edward spied a flash of motion—motion on two legs—behind a tall barrel plant. “Then what’s that?” he demanded, wondering if the Breton was tricking his son and him.

  Kersauzon only laughed. “Bide a moment, friend, and you’ll see—and hear.”

  “Honnnk!” The note was deeper than a man could have made it. Edward gaped at the curious creature that came out from behind the barrel plant. It walked on two legs like a man, but it was some sort of enormous bird. Its neck and head were black, except for a white patch under its formidable beak. The shaggy feathers on its back were dun brown, those on its belly paler. The legs were bare and scaly, like a fowl’s—but what a fowl it was!

  When the honker—the name flashed into Edward’s mind—spread its wings, the fishermen laughed. Those tiny appendages could never lift it off the ground. He wondered why the bird had them at all.

  It reached down with its beak and pulled up a mouthful of grass, then another and another. “So that’s where you got your great drumstick, is it?” Edward said.

  “It is indeed,” Kersauzon replied. “The poor, foolish things have no fear of man—another reason I think there are no natives here. You can walk up to one and knock it over the head, and it will let you. It will lie dead at your feet when it should be running or kicking.”

  “I’ll do that right now, then,” Hugh Fenner said. Half apologetically, the master salter turned to Radcliffe. “You get tired of even the best fish after a while. If we roast that overgrown goose, we’ve got a feast for the whole crew.”

  When we come to a new land, do we mark it by our first kill, the way Cain did? Edward wondered. But his stomach growled at the thought of meat, too. “Go on if you care to,” he told Fenner.