Opening Atlantis Read online

  The master salter advanced on the honker. Fenner’s confidence grew with every step. Sure enough, the monster bird seemed curious at his approach, but not afraid. He had a stout bludgeon on his belt. One good wallop with that ought to shatter the stupid thing’s skull….

  A flash in the air, a harsh screech, a shriek from Fenner, and then he was down and thrashing with a great hawk or eagle clinging to his back and tearing at his kidneys with a huge, hooked, slicing beak. The honker might not fear men, but the sight of that eagle sent it running back for the shelter of the—redwoods, Kersauzon called them.

  Shouting and waving their arms, Englishmen and Bretons rushed to Hugh Fenner’s rescue. The eagle screamed harshly but flew away, blood dripping from bill and long, curved talons. Hugh lay where he’d fallen. He didn’t move. A sharp stink said his bowels had let go. Edward grabbed for his wrist, then let it fall. The master salter had no pulse.

  “He’s gone.” Radcliffe heard the dull wonder in his voice. Man could kill—but so could Atlantis.

  II

  François Kersauzon seemed as upset about Fenner’s death as Edward Radcliffe was. “As God is my witness, friend Saoz, I’ve seen those eagles take honkers before, but I never dreamt they would take men,” he said.

  “We probably look like honkers—a good name—to them,” Henry said.

  “Except smaller and maybe easier to kill,” Edward added, staring into the trees where the eagle had flown. That was a formidable bird, bigger and fiercer than any golden eagle or sea eagle he’d ever seen. And if its prey walked on two legs…

  As Kersauzon had said, the honkers seemed to have no fear of man. But that one had disappeared into the woods as soon as the eagle struck Hugh Fenner. Men might be an unknown quantity, but the birds that struck from the sky were enemies. Honkers had no doubt of that.

  “Poor Hugh. He died unshriven.” Richard crossed himself. So did the other fishermen, English and Bretons. Edward’s younger son went on, “We have to bury him here. We can’t very well salt him down and take him home.”

  “I’ll say the words over him,” Edward said. His sons and the other Englishmen nodded. He’d had to do that before, more than once, when someone on the St. George took sick and died or perished by some mischance. He was no priest, but he could hope his prayers helped a soul win through at least to purgatory. “A little piece of Atlantis will be English forevermore.”

  He’d spoken his own language, but Kersauzon, as he’d seen, could follow English. “Atlantis?” the other skipper echoed. “We’ve just been calling it the Western Land, but that’s better, by God—a name to stick in the mind. Atlantis!”

  Edward tried to remember if they had a shovel aboard the St. George. He didn’t think so. He scuffed at the dirt with the toe of his boot. It was soft. Whatever they had, they could manage. “Are there wolves here, or gluttons, or anything else that might dig up a grave?” he asked.

  “Haven’t seen anything of the kind,” Kersauzon answered. “Haven’t seen any four-footed creatures at all, or heard them howling in the night.”

  “Some uncommon big lizards,” one of his fishermen put in.

  When Edward Radcliffe thought of a lizard, he thought of a scurrying thing as long as his finger. An uncommon big one might be—what? As long as his forearm? Anything larger than that was beyond his ken.

  This whole land was beyond his ken—except that he was standing on it. Off to the west, beyond the trees, he saw the distant saw-toothed outline of mountains against the skyline. What lay beyond them? He snorted. He had no idea what lay on this side of the mountains, except for peculiar plants, even stranger birds, and eagles ferocious as demons from hell. But Richard was looking out toward those far-off peaks, too.

  No other men here, not settlers, not natives. No wolves, no bears. As he rowed out in the boat to see what digging tools the St. George had, he remarked, “If you fished in the sea and cleared some land for a crop, you could live here. You could live here pretty well, I think.”

  “If you’re going to live here, you’d need to bring some women over,” Henry said.

  Edward nodded, and that thought pulled him back to the present, or at least to the near future. “When we get home, I’ll have to tell poor Hugh’s Meg what chanced here,” he said, and grimaced. “I don’t look forward to that. Even paying her his full share, I don’t look forward to it. How many children have they got?”

  “Five, I think it is,” Richard answered, “and Meg’s likely to have another by the time we see England again.” Edward nodded once more; he thought he remembered the same thing, and wished his son had told him he was wrong.

  “Are you thinking of settling on these shores, Father?” Richard asked.

  “Aren’t you?” Edward said; Henry might be older, but Richard was the sharper of his boys, no doubt about that. “No moneylenders, no lord to bend the knee to, no king to pay taxes to. We’re free when we’re at sea now, but on land we might as well be slaves. Wouldn’t you like to be free all the time?”

  “No church,” Richard murmured. Did he want to be free of the priest, too, or was he complaining of the lack? Edward couldn’t tell.

  Henry was more resolutely practical: “No boatwrights. No net-makers. No blacksmiths. No horses, no sheep, no cattle…”

  “Not unless we bring ’em with us.” Edward glanced over to the Morzen. “If we don’t settle here, how long do you think these Bretons will wait? If they’re on the spot, they’ll have these fishing banks all to themselves, the bastards.”

  “They’re bad enough on the other side of the Channel,” Richard said. “Would you want them living a long spit down the coast from you?”

  “Well, if the other choice is spending the rest of my days jealous because they’re here and I’m not, maybe I do.” Edward Radcliffe weighed his words and nodded yet again. “Yes, son, maybe I do.”

  The crews of the St. George and the Morzen spent ten days on Atlantis. The longer Edward Radcliffe stayed, the more he wanted to come back, to settle and never to leave. He kept glancing at François Kersauzon out of the corner of his eye. Was the same thought in Kersauzon’s mind? How could it not be?

  Henry did knock a honker over the head. It was as easy as the Breton said it would be. The enormous bird stared at the man with a kind of dull curiosity as he walked up to it. It wasn’t afraid of him; it had never learned to be afraid of things that looked like him. It died without ever knowing it should have learned to fear.

  More than anything else, that made Edward sure Atlantis had no natives. If even savages lived here, the local beasts would have learned to run away from them.

  And Edward found himself eyeing François Kersauzon in a new way. The other skipper was properly alert, but if he got knocked over the head…. Half in regret and half in relief, Edward shelved the idea. He wasn’t afraid of wearing the mark of Cain. He was afraid he would have to kill all the Bretons to make killing Kersauzon worthwhile. And he was afraid he would lose too many of his own fishermen in the fighting. Sometimes—not always, but sometimes—peace was smarter than war.

  Perhaps three miles south of where he’d first come ashore, he found a river flowing strongly out into the sea. Henry was with him when they came to the mouth of the stream. The younger man pointed inland. “It’s bound to come down from the mountains,” he said.

  “No doubt. It would have to, with so swift a current,” Edward agreed. “It runs hard enough to power a great plenty of grinding mills.”

  “Aye, belike, if the mills have a great plenty to grind,” his son said. “No grain growing here, not yet.”

  “No, not yet.” Edward looked inland again. He was also looking into the future—through a glass, darkly, which is as much as it is given to a man to do. “But do you see any reason why grain shouldn’t grow here?”

  “I seen none,” Henry replied, “which is not the same as saying there is none. We don’t know.”

  “I want to find out!” Edward said. “I want to live here, where when I’m a
shore I can do as I please. I can hunt deer without poaching on the lord’s land—”

  “I haven’t seen any deer here, either,” his son broke in. “No one has, that I know of.”

  “Fine. I can hunt these honkers, then,” Edward said impatiently.

  “Oh, yes—they make fine sport.” Sarcasm dripped from Henry’s words. “The excitement of the stalk, the thrill of the chase…” He mimed bringing his club down on a big, stupid bird’s head.

  “They make mighty good eating, though,” Edward said, and his son couldn’t very well argue with that—the one Henry had killed was smoking on the beach where they’d landed. Edward went on, “And if there are no deer here now, what’s to keep us from bringing them across the sea like sheep or cattle or horses or—?”

  Henry interrupted again: “Everything else we’d need to live.”

  “Well, what of it?” Edward said. “Are you telling me we can’t do that? We can find this place again, or near enough—we know the latitude. And if we don’t settle right here, any other stretch of the coast would do about as well. Will you tell me I’m wrong?”

  “No, Father,” Henry said. “But it’s a big step, to uproot ourselves from England and cross the sea to try to make our homes on an unknown shore.”

  “It won’t stay unknown long. By Our Lady, it’s not unknown now—we’re standing on it,” Edward Radcliffe said. “And if we don’t make homes here, the Bretons or the French or the Basques or the Galicians will. Then we won’t even be able to fish here. They’ll be in their own back fields, you might say, and we’ll have to cross the Atlantic both ways. We’d never stay in business against them. Do you want that? We’d be second best forever. That’s no fate for Englishmen. That’s no fate for Radcliffes!”

  Henry sighed. “Father, it sounds good when it comes from your lips. But when we get home, what’s Lucy going to say to me?” He put his hands on his hips and raised his voice to sound like his wife, who’d always struck Edward as a bit of a shrew: “‘You want me to leave my kin and cross the sea? You want me to put our babies into a fishing boat? You want to sail away from my mother?’”

  “By God, yes to that!” Edward said—Lucy’s mother was more than a bit of a shrew.

  His son went right on imitating his daughter-in-law: “‘You want me to carve a farm holding out of nothing while you fish the way you always did? You expect me to live without neighbors, without friends?’”

  “We won’t be the only ones going—tell her that. We’d better not be, or the venture fails,” Edward said.

  “True enough. What can you promise the others, except a dangerous voyage over more sea than anyone in Hastings cares to think about?”

  “Besides the best place to fish they ever saw? Besides land that stretches to the horizon, there for the taking? Besides freedom from lords? How about freedom from peasant risings, too?” Edward said. Only a couple of years earlier, Jack Cade and his rebels had almost chased the King of England from his throne.

  Henry nodded thoughtfully. “There is that. What do you suppose Mother will think?”

  “She’ll go along,” Edward said, more confidently than he felt. Nell Radcliffe had a mind of her own and a tongue sharper than Lucy’s. She would go along if she thought going along was a good idea. If she didn’t, she wouldn’t be shy about saying so.

  “Well, we’ll see,” Henry said, which only proved he too knew his mother well.

  Crossing the Atlantic from west to east was easier than sailing the other way, for they had the winds with them through most of the journey. They put in at Le Croisic, where Edward paid François Kersauzon the price to which they’d agreed. Seeing a Breton take so much salt cod from the hold of an Englishman’s ship made the locals smirk.

  Edward looked suitably chagrined as he piled fish in front of the Morzen. He didn’t believe many Bretons knew of Atlantis yet. What did they think? That Kersauzon had won some enormous bet from him? He wouldn’t have been surprised. Let them think what they wanted, though. He knew, and Kersauzon knew.

  Two could hold a secret. Could Kersauzon keep the fishermen on the Morzen from blabbing? The odds were against it. The Bretons had brought back more smoked honker, and Radcliffe had a leg bone. They would have to explain where those came from. What would they say?

  Whatever they said, it would make the other fishermen—and even the local lubbers—curious. They would want to sail west. That meant Edward needed to move fast if he wanted his countrymen to take their fair share of Atlantis.

  He needed to move fast—and he couldn’t. Contrary winds held him in Le Croisic day after day. He fumed and swore, but he couldn’t do anything about it. His only consolation was that what held him in port held the Bretons, too. That wasn’t quite true: they could go down the coast to the south. But he didn’t think they would spill the secret to Frenchmen. They scorned the French even more than Englishmen did, which wasn’t easy.

  At last, the wind shifted. He took the St. George out of the harbor and sailed around Cap Finistère and into the Channel. The waves there, squeezed between Europe and England, grew taller and more menacing than they had been out in the open ocean. Even fishermen with strong stomachs stayed close to the leeward rail. The waves helped push the cog along, though. She made good time on the last leg of the voyage home.

  Hastings was the westernmost of the Cinque Ports: in reality seven towns, though the name had room for only five. They pooled their resources against pirates. There Edward felt safe enough—corsairs were after silk and silver, not salt cod. What he brought home wasn’t worth stealing, but a man could make a good living at it. What more could you want?

  The old, deserted Norman castle still stood on West Hill, looking down on the town. William the Conqueror had based himself in Hastings, of course—everybody knew that. With Plantagenets still ruling England, no one said—out loud—that he wished the Saxons had won the fight not far away. What would the country be like today had Harold prevailed? Different, Edward thought, and he was bound to be right about that.

  He brought the St. George into the Stade, the fishing boats’ harbor. “You’re back late,” a dockside lounger called. “We’d almost given up looking for you.”

  “You’re holy men, though,” another man said. “With so many Masses going up for your souls, how can you be anything else? I wish I were so sure I had all my sins washed away.”

  “Not much room to sin in a fishing boat,” Henry said with a grin. “We’ll have to make up for it now that we’re here.”

  A dealer hurried out onto the pier where the fishermen were tying up. “You’ll want to sell your fish to me, won’t you, Edward?” he said, his voice as greasy as cod-liver oil.

  “If you give me a proper price for them, Paul,” Radcliffe answered. “If you act like a Jew the way you do most of the time, I’d sooner sell them to an honest man instead.”

  “You wound me,” Paul Finley said, but this was as much a dance with formal steps as the dicker with the Breton salt dealer had been. And when Finley saw the size of the cod and the slabs of cod that came from the St. George’s hold, even his air of world-weary contempt for anything that had to do with salt fish cracked. “I don’t know the last time I set eyes on the like,” he admitted, which meant he’d never seen fish that came close to these. “Where did you catch ’em?”

  “I planted them in the dark of the moon, the way you do with crops that grow below the surface,” Edward Radcliffe answered gravely. His men sniggered. Sooner or later, one of them would get drunk and spill the word. With a little luck, it would be later.

  Paul Finley gave him a very strange look. “I almost believe you.”

  “Fair enough, for I almost told the truth,” Edward said.

  The dealer’s eye raked the fishing boat. “I don’t see Hugh. Tell me nothing happened to him, please—he’s a good man.”

  Edward’s mouth tightened. “We lost him, I’m afraid. You’ll keep that to yourself, by God, for I’ve not yet spoken to his wife and his father.” H
e remembered the master salter’s scream and the eagle tearing at his kidneys and flying off with his blood dripping from its beak and claws.

  Finley crossed himself. “Lord have mercy on him. This was at sea?” Before anyone had to lie, he answered his own question: “Well, of course it was. Where else would it be?” He forced himself back to what lay before him. “You have the hold full of fish this size and quality?”

  “Two-thirds full,” Edward said, his voice flat: if Paul Finley wanted to make something of that, he would have to do it himself.

  He raised an eyebrow. Before he spoke, though, he seemed to think better of it. “Mm, that’s your business—or your misfortune, depending. If you’d come home earlier in the season, you would have got a better price for them.”

  “You’ll take any way you can find to knock down what we did out there, won’t you?” Radcliffe spoke without heat. He knew Finley was still following the steps of the dance.

  “You do your job, I do mine,” the dealer said easily. “You want to make money when you sell, and so do I.” He named a price.

  Edward Radcliffe’s bellow of rage was a permitted step, but not a common one. You needed to feel some of that fury to show it, and he did. “Even you know that’s thievery, Paul. I’ve heard what worse cod than this is bringing.” He named a price close to three times as high as Finley’s.

  They went back and forth, back and forth. Edward knew his quality. He also knew his hold was one-third empty, which made him hold out for every farthing on the fish he did have. Finley came up ever so slowly, like a drowning man who didn’t want to break the surface.

  Both of them were sweating when they finally clasped hands. “If you’re going to be that tough with a full load of fish…” Finley shook his head. “Lord Jesu! Maybe I ought to let some other dealer see how he likes matching wits with you.” He counted out silver and gave it to Edward. “That’s what we said, yes?”

  Radcliffe counted the money. It wasn’t that he thought Finley was trying to cheat him. But checking never hurt anything. He nodded. “Yes, that’s what we said.” Their hands joined again.