Opening Atlantis Read online

  “One of these days, you’ll tell me where you really came by cod of that size,” Finley said.

  “Yes, one of these days I will, and it may come sooner than you think,” Edward agreed. “But not yet, Paul. Not yet.”

  Childbearing and hard work had coarsened Nell Radcliffe’s figure. The years had lined her face and streaked her red-blond hair with gray. When Edward looked at her, he still saw the beauty he’d married more than half a lifetime earlier. He made love like a sailor newly home from the sea—in the daytime, which would have scandalized the neighbors had they known, and had so many of them not been fisherfolk themselves.

  Then he told her why the St. George was so late coming home, and of the new land he’d trodden. “Atlantis?” she echoed, the fine lines at the corners of her eyes crinkling as they narrowed. “But Atlantis is a story, a fable, a make-believe, like the drowned city of Ys and the bells you hear under the water.”

  “Funny you should talk of Ys, when a Breton guided me west to Atlantis,” Edward said. “But it’s no dream. We still have the bone from a smoked honker leg—we ate the meat on the way home, when the fishing flagged. And Hugh Fenner died on the coast of Atlantis.”

  “How?” Nell asked.

  “Bad. Hard.” Edward left it there. He didn’t intend to say more to Meg Fenner, either, or even that much. “But all the same, it’s a true place, a good place, a place of great promise—you should have seen Paul’s eyes when he got a look at the cod. Not Paradise, or Hugh would live yet, but a good place. A fine place.”

  “You sound like you want to go back,” his wife said.

  He nodded, there beside her in the bed so much wider and softer than his bunk aboard the St. George—and he was lucky to have a bunk on the cog, when his sailors slung hammocks instead. “I do,” he said. “It’s a broader land than this one, and a man could live there free of a lord. A man could be a lord there, by heaven, for who would say he could not?”

  Nell stirred, so the leather lashings under the mattress creaked—not the way they had a little while before, but enough to make him smile. “You don’t just want to visit,” she said slowly. “You want to stay.”

  “I do,” Edward repeated.

  “What about me, then? What about your children? What about—everything?” Her wave took in not just the house, not just Hastings, but all of England.

  “I’d want you to come along, that’s what. We’d make a new life there, a new town—we could call it New Hastings, if you like.”

  “I like this Hastings well enough,” Nell said.

  “Talk to Richard and Henry. They’re as wild for Atlantis as I am,” Edward said, though he wasn’t quite sure that was so about Henry. “Talk to Mary and Kate and Philippa”—his daughters, all of them married to fishermen. “Do you think they’d be sorry to have gardens as wide as they could grow them, and no noble landlord and no rent to pay?”

  “I think they’d be sorry to sail to the edge of the world and maybe off it,” Nell answered. “I think I would be, too. I thought I’d live my whole life in Hastings. I never wanted to do anything else.”

  Edward Radcliffe had to remind himself not to get angry. Nell wouldn’t be the only one who’d want to stay right here. Most people were like limpets, clinging to one spot. If you went farther than a day’s walk from where you were born, it was the journey of a lifetime, and you’d bore your neighbors with it the rest of your days. Fishermen and traders were different; it was easy to forget how different. Edward had seen far more of the world than his wife had. He was eager to see more. She wasn’t eager to see any.

  “If life is better there, why not go?” he asked, doing his best to keep his voice gentle.

  “Who says it would be better? We’d have to start from the beginning, with nothing at all,” Nell said.

  “We’d have everything we could bring with us from England,” Edward said. “Livestock and seeds and saplings and cuttings and tools…”

  “And someone would steal them from us as soon as we set foot in this place. If you men spend all your time fishing, who would drive off our enemies? We couldn’t call on a lord or the king for soldiers, the way we can here if those nasty French dogs cross the Channel.”

  Patiently, Edward answered, “There’d be no enemies. We would have the first settlement, the only settlement, on those shores.”

  “Would we? What about that Breton pirate who sold you the secret—a third of the catch, Christ have mercy!” Nell said. “Is he lying with his wife right now, filling her head with wind and air about the marvelous land on the other side of the sea? Will there be a town full of those rogues around the cape from ours? They don’t even talk a language a regular person can understand!”

  He almost reminded her he spoke Breton, but feared it would do more harm than good. And he didn’t know François Kersauzon wasn’t planning to settle down in Atlantis. He feared Kersauzon was. The Breton was nobody’s fool; if Radcliffe could see the advantages, so could he.

  “And what about the wild men who’ll live there?” Nell said. “They won’t even know our Lord’s name, and they’ll murder us in our beds first chance they get.”

  “No wild men.” There Edward spoke with assurance.

  “How can you know that, on the tiny visit you had?” his wife demanded.

  “Because the beasts in Atlantis had no fear of us,” he replied. “If they knew men at all, they would know to be afraid of them.” Even wolves and bears feared men. They killed men sometimes, but they feared them, and fled when they could.

  “Well…maybe,” Nell said grudgingly. “Or maybe there just weren’t any savages close by.”

  “If there are men anywhere in Atlantis, they’d be there. That land was too fine to stay empty.” Edward squeezed his wife. “Don’t say no right away. Think it through. You can’t imagine what you’re throwing away if you turn your back on this.”

  “I know what I’ve got now,” she said. “I can imagine worse a lot easier than I can imagine better.”

  “It will be better there,” Edward said. “For us, for our children, for their children, and for all who come after them, as long as there be Radcliffes.” The fervor in his voice amazed him.

  “Well, maybe,” Nell said again.

  Before long, Hastings bubbled with the name of Atlantis. If you wanted to go and settle someplace, you couldn’t very well keep where you were going a secret. Word spread fastest among fishermen and merchants, who had the ships to get to the new land. But others heard, too: the smiths and potters and carpenters who sold them the things they would need on the distant shore, and after that those in authority.

  Edward Radcliffe was dickering with a farmer named George Tree over several laying hens and a rooster when a black-robed priest strode up to him. “I would have speech with you, Master Radcliffe,” he said importantly.

  “What do you need, Father John?” Radcliffe asked.

  “Step aside, if you please.” The priest made it plain he wanted no one else to overhear.

  “Whatever you like, holy Father.” Edward nodded to the farmer. “I’ll be with you in a bit, George.”

  “Them birds won’t fly away while you’re gone,” Tree said.

  Father John had the smooth pink complexion and double chin of a man who’d seldom known hunger. He also had a blade of a nose and shrewd black eyes. “Do I hear rightly?” he asked after leading Edward down the muddy street till they could talk in reasonable privacy. “Do you purpose sailing off to the edge of the world and leaving the holy mother church behind?”

  “I do want to sail off, yes, Father,” Radcliffe said, and the priest’s mouth tightened. Quickly, the fisherman went on. “But I never dreamt of leaving the church behind. If a priest would come with us, we’d count it a blessing. There should be a chapel in Atlantis—why not?”

  “I…see,” Father John said slowly. Edward hoped he hid his own tension; he didn’t want every clergyman in town preaching against his venture. If anything could ruin his plans, that could.
If people decided God was against them, they wouldn’t go. Father John tapped a forefinger against the side of his leg. “If a priest did come with you, you would give him proper support?”

  “We’d be glad to have him, as I said. We’d give him what we could. I can’t say he wouldn’t have to work some on his own, though,” Radcliffe answered. “It’s a bare shore, you understand. We’ll all be working hard, at first, hard as can be. How can we have a drone among us, meaning no offense?”

  “Priests are not drones. Drones toil not, nor do they spin.” Father John’s voice was as stiff as his spine. Radcliffe thought priests fit the definition more than well enough, but saying so wouldn’t do. Sure enough, Father John went on, “Who would intercede with God, but for priests? Who would baptize, who hear confession, who give unction at the end of life?”

  “No one,” Edward said, as he had to. He didn’t want to go out of life without unction, the way luckless Hugh Fenner had. But he was a stubborn man in his own right. “A priest who is respected among men is better than one who is not,” he insisted. “Anyone who pulls his own weight in this world will be better liked than a man who expects to be waited on hand and foot. Holy Father, you know there are priests like that. We both wish there weren’t, but there are. We don’t need one like that where everyone else is bending his back like a beast of burden.”

  Maybe his earnestness got through to Father John. “What sort of priest do you need then, eh, Radcliffe?”

  Edward calculated for a heartbeat and part of another. As if he hadn’t, he answered, “Why, one much like yourself, holy Father.”

  Had he read his man aright? “Me?” Father John rapped out. “Why would I want to sail to the back of beyond—beyond the back of beyond?”

  “Where would you find a better chance to be your own man?” Edward asked. “You’d be…like a bishop, almost.” He didn’t wink at Father John. If the priest thought of himself the way Radcliffe hoped, he would rise to the bait on his own.

  “If I am to be sent alone to a strange shore, I should become one,” Father John said. “This is to enable me to ordain new priests so that the Church may continue in that far-off place.”

  “You will know such things better than I do, the same as I’m likely better at salting a cod,” Edward said. “Do you think you can make the necessary arrangements?”

  “Well, well,” the priest said, and then again: “Well, well.” He rubbed his smoothly shaven chin. “Do you know, sir, it is possible that I might.”

  “All right, then,” Edward said, as if that were a complete sentence. By the way Father John smiled, it was.

  Edward Radcliffe was a man of some consequence in Hastings. Any successful fishing captain was. All the same, he didn’t expect a summons to the castle, and he didn’t expect the summons to be delivered by four large, unsmiling men in chainmail. The largest and most somber of them growled, “You are to come with us at once, in the name of Sir Thomas and in the name of his Majesty, Henry VI, King of England!”

  Henry VI, King of as much of England as he can persuade to obey his writ at any given moment. The thought ran through Edward’s mind, but he kept it to himself. Sir Thomas Hoo, the local baron, was a loyal follower of the king’s. “I am at your service, gentlemen, and at Sir Thomas’, and of course at the king’s,” the fisherman said. If he tried telling them anything else, he had the bad feeling he would die as unpleasantly as Hugh Fenner.

  Sir Thomas’ men had horses waiting in the street. They even had one for Radcliffe. He took that as a good sign. If they were going to throw him in the dungeon, they would have made him walk, probably with a noose around his neck to advertise his disgrace to the town.

  He was more accustomed to riding a pitching deck than even a sedate gelding. Two of Sir Thomas’ retainers sniggered as he awkwardly swung up onto the horse’s back. “You’ve got more practice at this than I do, friends,” he said. “In the St. George, in a storm on the North Sea, you’d be the sorry ones, as I am here.”

  “Just ride,” said the one who seemed to do their talking for them. Ride Radcliffe did, not well but well enough.

  The wooden motte-and-bailey castle William the Conqueror built as soon as he landed in England and its stone successor had long since grown useless: the sea had chewed away most of the land that once stood between the old fort and the water’s edge. Its replacement, a solid mass of gray stone, safely stood farther inland.

  Their horses’ hooves drumming on the lowered drawbridge, Edward and his escorts rode into the castle. Sir Thomas Hoo stood in the courtyard, watching some young soldiers hack at pells with swords. Sir Thomas was no youngster. He was five or ten years older than Radcliffe, and his strength, once massive, was beginning to fail. His stooped shoulders and wrinkled, jowly face warned of the storms of life’s winter ahead.

  He rolled his eyes at Edward’s dismount, which was no more graceful than the way the fisherman had mounted. “What’s this I hear about you wanting to put all of Hastings on board ship and sail off with it to some unknown shore?” he growled without preamble.

  “By the holy Cross, Sir Thomas, if you heard any such thing, you heard lies!” Edward exclaimed.

  “Oh, I did, did I?” Sir Thomas Hoo’s eyes were red-tracked and rheumy, one of them clouded by the beginnings of a cataract. But they were very shrewd. “If it’s all moonshine and hogwash, why do I hear it from so many folk? Eh? Answer me that!”

  “If you believed everything you heard from a lot of people, sir, you’d be a sorry soul, sir, and that’s the truth,” Edward said. A couple of his escorts scowled; one of them dropped a hand to the hilt of his sword. Then Sir Thomas grunted laughter, and his retainers relaxed. Radcliffe went on, “Rumor always outruns fact. And any man who wishes me ill would work to make it outrun fact the more.”

  “It could be,” the castellan said. “I don’t say it is, but it could be. Well, then, what do you intend?”

  “A small settlement on the new shore,” Radcliffe answered. “The fishing grounds there are finer than any in the North Sea. That I saw for myself. Would we want to let the Bretons and Basques and other foreigners seize the advantage over Englishmen in using them?”

  “Fish. Cod.” Sir Thomas made them into words of scorn, if not into swear words. He glowered at Edward from under shaggy, gray-streaked eyebrows. “You want to get away from peasants in rebellion against their rightful lords and from French sea dogs.”

  I should say I do, Edward thought. The French had almost burnt Hastings to the ground not long before. But he couldn’t admit what he wanted. Without the least hesitation, he shook his head. “How could we leave our homeland behind for good?” he said. “Where would we sell the fish we caught if we did?” That was a legitimate question; he couldn’t imagine cutting all ties with England even if he and his kin spent most of their time in Atlantis and off its shores.

  “How many folk would fare with you on this madcap venture?” Sir Thomas asked.

  “A couple of dozen families, sir, and we’d need to bring the seed grain and livestock to let us make a go of it in the new land,” Edward answered. “Does not the Good Book speak of casting your bread upon the waters? This is England’s bread, and she shall find it again after many days.”

  “You’ve been talking with Father John.” Sir Thomas turned that to an accusation.

  “I have, sir. He will vouch for me.” Edward Radcliffe hoped he would.

  “He’s ambitious, too.” The castellan scowled once more. “Well, go, then, and I know not whether to wish you Godspeed or say be damned to you. Atlantis? Nonsense!” He hawked and spat and turned away.

  III

  Getting animals aboard the St. George vexed Edward, to put it mildly. “I never worried about Noah before,” he growled to Nell. “Now I feel sorry for the poor devil.”

  “I feel sorry for his wife,” Nell said. “Chances are he made her do all the work.”

  “If you think I’m going to sleep from here to Atlantis, you’re bloody well out of your mi
nd,” Edward said. “The cog won’t sail herself, and the fish won’t catch themselves, either.” The hold, which still stank of fish, was full of hay and grain instead. They had to get the sheep and hogs and chickens and ducks across the sea before they ran out of fodder and water for them. Could they do it? He thought so, but feared it might be close.

  He had no cattle or horses on the St. George. The boats that carried the bigger beasts had fewer of the smaller ones. He hoped things would work out. He didn’t know they would, but he hoped so. What else can I do? he thought.

  Richard said something hot as a smithy’s forge when he stepped in sheep shit. “Get used to it, son,” Edward advised. “It won’t be the last time.” Richard said something even hotter. Henry laughed at him, which only proved he hadn’t stuck his foot in it…yet.

  On another cog not far away, Father John’s tonsured head gleamed under the bright sun of early spring. Two other priests were also coming along on this leap into the unknown. Edward Radcliffe smiled to himself. The other two were pliable, tractable fellows, men without ambition for themselves. If any of them was made a bishop, when one of them was made a bishop, it would be John. So far from any other prelate, he might almost be a pope.

  Edward cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted to the other boats assembled in the Stade: “Are we all ready?” Two or three skippers echoed his cry to make sure everyone heard. Nobody said no. “Then let’s away!” he said.

  Sailors ran to the lines and let the big square sails fall from the yards. The wind came off the land, and pushed the cogs out of the harbor and into the waters of the Channel with the greatest of ease. Women and children squealed in excitement; not many of them had put to sea before.

  The water in the Channel was the way it usually was: rough. Those squeals didn’t last long. Ruddy English complexions went ghost-pale. “The rail!” a fisherman shouted. “Get to the damned rail!” He was just too late—and somebody would have a mess worse than sheep shit to clean up.