Opening Atlantis a-1 Read online

  He thought they would spot land the very next day, but they didn't-fog closed in around the little fleet of cogs and held them wrapped in wet wool for the next two days. Sailors shouted to one another and blew horns to keep from drifting apart, because no one could see from stern to bow of one fishing boat, let alone farther.

  Edward hadn't been worried till then; everything on the journey west had gone as well as he could have hoped, or maybe even better. But those two days made him pace and mutter and crack his knuckles and do all the other things a badly rattled man might do. He wasn't fretting only about one cog colliding with another, either. Here he was, off a shore about which he knew next to nothing. How many rocks and shoals did it have, and where did they lurk? Was a rock he couldn't see only a few feet away, waiting to rip the bottom out of the St. George?

  To ease his mind, he cast a line into the water. It came back showing thirty fathoms and a sandy bottom. That made him feel a little better, but only a little. A rock could rise suddenly, and he knew it too well. He set one of the fishermen to casting the lead every time he turned the glass. "If we go under twenty fathoms, scream at me," he said.

  No screams came, only the shouts and braying trumpets from the other fishing boats. Radcliffe didn't mind those. He would have started and sworn had a horn bellowed from right alongside the St. George, but that didn't happen, either.

  "You're jumpy as one of the cats," Henry told him.

  "It's my boat," Edward said simply. "It's my notion to start a new town in the new land. And if anything goes wrong, it's my fault."

  "We're fine, Father," Henry said.

  "We are now. We are now, as long as God wants us to be." Edward crossed himself. A moment later, so did his son. "If God decides He doesn't want us to be-"

  "Then we can't do anything about it anyway," Henry broke in.

  "We have to do everything we can do, everything we know how to do," Edward insisted. "If we don't, we've got only ourselves to blame. God put the rocks wherever He put them. If we don't look for them, though, that's our fault."

  "Whose fault is it if we strike one just after we cast the lead and find naught amiss?" Henry asked.

  "Ours. No. His. No." Edward's glare should have been hot enough to burn off the fog by itself. "You're trying to tie me in more knots than the lines."

  His son laughed. "Well, if you're storming at me, you won't keep stalking the deck and scaring the poultry."

  "I'm not scaring the-" Hearing his own voice rise to a level he usually used only in a gale, Edward started to laugh. "All right-maybe I am."

  "As long as you know you might be, maybe you won't," Henry said, and then half spoiled it by adding, "so often, anyhow."

  Edward made as if to cuff him. He'd done that plenty with both boys when they were younger. If he tried it in earnest now, he feared he would be the one who ended up lying on the deck. Henry and Richard had their own boys to tame these days. Henry knew he was joking here, and made as if to duck. Then he clapped Edward on the back.

  "If I go down, which God prevent, I'll go down in good company," Edward said.

  "Which God prevent, is right," Henry said.

  A sunbeam in the face caught Edward by surprise. It caught him by surprise twice, in fact: he didn't remember falling asleep on the deck some time in the dark hours before dawn, and fog had still shrouded the St. George when he did. But now the sun shone, the sky was blue, and a warm breeze from the southwest carried the green smells of land with it.

  He sprang to his feet. "Land ho!" he bawled-the line on the western horizon was hard to make out, but he had no doubt it was there. "Land ho! Praise the Lord! He has brought us safe to this new shore!"

  Other cogs began shouting it, too, but he thought he was the first. If those shouts were what woke him and not the sunbeam after all, he didn't want to know about it.

  Nell came over to his side. She peered west, shading her eyes with the palm of her hand. "That's it?" she said. "It doesn't look like much."

  "Not yet." Edward bowed, as if he were a nobleman. "Kindly give us leave to draw closer, if you'd be so gracious."

  His wife dropped him a curtsy. "Oh, very well, since 'tis you as asks." Her impression of a high-born lady's airs and accent also left something to be desired. They grinned at each other.

  With the wind in that quarter, drawing closer wasn't easy. They had to slew the big square sail around on the yard again and again, tacking toward the land that almost seemed to retreat as they beat their way westward. But they did gain, even if not so fast as Radcliffe would have liked.

  And they did find their first rock on the new shore. The sea boiled white just above it. "That's a bad one," Henry said. "If the tide runs a little higher, it'll hide the bastard altogether-but it won't lift a boat high enough to get over it."

  "Note the landmarks," Edward said. "We'll chart these waters one day. By God, we will."

  "This isn't right where Kersauzon brought us," his son said.

  "I know." Edward sighed and nodded at the same time. "We did the best we could, and this is what we got. A few leagues north? A few leagues south? Who can say? Maybe we didn't have the latitude quite right when we were here last. Maybe we drifted in the fog. I don't know. But that's Atlantis ahead, the land where we're going to put down roots."

  Henry muttered something under his breath. Edward couldn't make out what it was, and supposed he might be lucky. He knew Richard had more enthusiasm for the new land than Henry did. Well, Henry was here, whether he was glad to be here or not.

  The fishing boats kept fighting toward the alluring coast ahead. The only way the wind could have been worse would have been for it to blow straight into their faces. No boat could make headway against a directly contrary wind; they would have had to drop anchor and wait for it to swing around. Edward might have been tempted to do that anyway, were the land not so near-the constant tacking wore out the crew. With women and children and beasts on deck, it was harder, more dangerous, more aggravating work than it usually would have been, too.

  But the hard work had its reward; to Edward Radcliffe's way of thinking, hard work commonly did. The St. George dropped anchor in eight fathoms of water as the sun sank toward the newly notched horizon ahead. "Can we get ashore before sunset?" Richard asked.

  "Only one way to find out," Edward answered. The boat went into the water. The fishermen began to row. Looking around, Edward spied other boats heading for the beach. He hadn't raced Francois Kersauzon, but he did now. "Pull hard, damn you!" he roared, and pulled hard enough himself to come close to jerking the thole pin out of the gunwale. "Pull hard! No one's going to beat me back to Atlantis!"

  In a twinkling, all the fishermen in all the boats were rowing as hard as they could. Edward was working harder than he had on the St. George, but exhaustion fell away. He laughed as he worked his oar and shouted out the stroke to the others in the boat. And he heard other laughs float across the green sea. The men racing to be first ashore weren't racing because they had to but because they wanted to, and it made all the difference in the world.

  Sand and mud grated under the boat's keel. Edward sprang out into ankle-deep water. "Mine!" he shouted, throwing his arms wide. "Mine!"

  He thought he was the first man on the beach. If he was, though, he wasn't by much. Other skippers and fishermen stepped out onto the shores of Atlantis. Little gray and brown shorebirds skittered along at the edge of the advancing and retreating waves, pausing now and again to peck at something or other. They left their tiny hentracks behind to be washed away by the next incoming surge.

  Richard set a hand on his father's shoulder. "We're here again," he said.

  "We are. By God, we are," Edward Radcliffe agreed. "We're here again, and this time we're not going to leave."

  "What's that?" said one of the fishermen who'd rowed the boat ashore. "We aren't going back to the St. George?"

  Edward laughed. "We'll go back, Alf. But we'll go back to get what we need to set up a new town here. It may be a whi
le before we go back to England." I wonder if I'll ever go back. I wonder if I'll want to, he thought, and then, I suppose I'll have to, one of these days. It's not the same as wanting to.

  Alf nodded; he might not be bright, but he was willing. "Well, that's all right, then," he said. "That's what I came for, that is."

  The biggest adventure was getting the horses and cattle off the cogs and onto the land ahead. Some skippers solved it with brutal simplicity by pushing the animals over the side and making them swim. Others ran their lightly laden cogs aground at low tide and lowered gangplanks so the beasts could descend. When the water rose, it lifted the fishing boats and let the skippers move them out to sea again.

  "Where are these honkers you kept telling me about?" Nell demanded as soon as she came ashore. She bent to wring out the dripping hem of her skirt, giving Edward a glimpse of a still-shapely ankle.

  "Well, I don't know just where they are," he admitted. "I expect we'll see them sooner or later, though-sooner, unless I miss my guess. We saw a good many when we were here before." Remembering what else they'd seen before, he raised his voice to a carrying shout: "Watch the sky! The eagles here are huge, and they have no fear of men-they think we're prey."

  Those little shorebirds had darted between-sometimes even over-men's feet, too. In England or France, they would have kept their distance. It seemed they'd never met men before, and didn't know such creatures were dangerous.

  And that was only a tiny strangeness among so many larger ones. The plants were the same curious mixture of conifers, ferns, and those barrel-trunked plants with the leaves that shot up from the top of the barrel. The honkers-even if absent at the moment-were like nothing Edward or anyone else had seen before. And the red-breasted thrushes acted like blackbirds but looked more like oversized robins. And all this within an hour's walk of the shore!-for no one, yet, had dared venture farther inland.

  Some of the first things the newcomers made were salt pans at the edge of the ocean, to trap the seawater and let it evaporate, leaving salt behind. What they got would not be anywhere near so fine as the pure white flower of salt bought in Le Croisic. Right this minute, though, Edward worried more about quantity than quality. He wanted to be sure he had the salt to preserve enough cod to get the settlers through their first winter on the new shore.

  He didn't worry about having enough cod. The banks off the east coast of Atlantis were abundant beyond anything he'd ever imagined, and he knew the great fisheries in the North Sea as well as any man alive. "Maybe the North Sea was like this when fishermen first started going out there," he said after the St. George's boat brought in load after load of huge, plump gutted fish. "No more, though. We've taken the very best out of it, and that best is still here."

  "It is," Henry agreed. "The fish we don't salt down, we'll be able to use to manure the fields." He held his nose. "The smell will be bad, but the crops will be good."

  "Yes." Edward Radcliffe nodded. "So much to do all at once, but this goes so well, it frightens me."

  His son frowned. "Frightens you?"

  Edward nodded again. "By Our Lady, it does. We work. We sweat and swink and toil. We build. And what if some sea wolves-Bretons or Basques, say-swoop down on us with swords and spears, and steal all we've made by our labor? I know what I want to buy when we see England again."

  "What's that?" Henry asked.

  "Some fine iron guns, by God, and powder and shot for 'em," Edward said. "A couple here ashore, and a couple on the St. George, too. I want to be able to fight if I have to, not to be raiders' meat."

  After pursing his lips in thought, Henry also nodded. "I do like that notion. And if we're not the only ones putting down roots in this new soil…"

  He let the words hang. "What then?" Edward prompted.

  His son's grin was wide as the ocean between them and Hastings. "Why, we could turn wolf ourselves! I could stay at sea!"

  "I didn't come here to go warring, asea or ashore. I came here to get away from all that," Edward said. "With the peasants up in arms, with the damned Frenchmen roaring across the Channel, with Lancaster and York glaring at each other and both ready to swoop, there's war and to spare back home if you're so hungry for it."

  Henry looked down at his feet. "You shame me, Father."

  By God, I hope so, Edward thought. But he didn't want to leave Henry with no pride, so he said, "I didn't mean to. But think on what you're talking about, that's all. War usually looks better to the fellow who brings it than it does to the poor buggers who have it brought to them."

  "Mm, something to that, I shouldn't wonder," his son said, to his deep relief. But then Henry pointed a half-accusing forefinger at him. "Who was just talking about buying fine iron guns?"

  "I was," Edward said. "But I didn't talk about raiding with them, only about standing off raiders. There's a difference."

  "No doubt," Henry said, and Edward beamed. Too soon-Henry hadn't finished. "The difference is, after a while you want to try out the guns, no matter why you got them in the first place."

  Edward Radcliffe winced; that held too much of the feel of truth. "It won't happen that way while I have anything to say about it," he insisted.

  "All right, Father," Henry said. "I hope it doesn't happen for many, many years, then." Edward noticed he didn't say he hoped it never happened at all.

  They did call the settlement New Hastings. The houses they made were of wood, not stone, because those went up faster. Cutting back saplings and clearing away the undergrowth were easier than they would have been back in England: no berry bushes or wild roses full of thorns and no stinging nettles. Plowing under the ferns that grew in the shade was even easier than dealing with grass on the meadows.

  And, when the crops came in, they flourished even before the settlers manured them with fish. "I don't see any bugs on the plants!" Nell exclaimed. "Is it a miracle?"

  "Ask Father John or one of the other priests," Edward answered. "Maybe the bugs here don't know how to eat our crops, or don't like the way they taste. Is that a miracle? Richard doesn't like the way squash tastes."

  "Richard is not a bug," Nell said. Since Edward couldn't very well argue with that, he walked off shaking his head.

  The weather got warm, and then warmer. It got muggier than it ever did in England, too. Edward had known the like down in the Basque country, but the people who'd spent their whole lives in Hastings wilted like lettuce three days after it was picked.

  An eagle swooped down and killed a child. It tore gobbets of flesh from the small of the girl's back before flying off. She died the same way Hugh Fenner had, in other words. Even though she was already dead, Father John gave her unction while her mother screamed and screamed. They buried her next to the log hut that did duty for a church. No stonecarvers were on this new shore yet, but at Father John's direction the carpenter made a grave marker out of the red-timbered evergreens that seemed so common here. Rose Simmons, vibas in Deo, the inscription read: may you live in God.

  How large would the churchyard grow? Edward dared hope his flesh would end up there, and not at sea for fish and crabs to feast on. Thy will be done, Lord, he thought, but not yet, please.

  Another eagle killed a sheep. That would have been a sore loss in England-not that eagles there attacked beasts so large. It was worse here, because the newcomers could spare so little. A smaller hawk carried off a half-grown chicken. A big lizard-bigger than any Edward had imagined-ate a duckling. But there were no foxes. That alone helped the poultry thrive.

  Edward chanced to be ashore one morning in early summer when a twelve-year-old told off to keep an eye on the livestock ran back into New Hastings screaming, "Things! There's things in the fields!"

  Like everyone else, Radcliffe tumbled out of bed. He pulled on his shoes and went outside. "What do you mean, things?" he demanded.

  "See for yourself!" The boy pointed to the bright green growing grain. "I don't know what they are! Demons from hell is what they look like."

  "They aren't
demons," Edward said. Those two-legged shapes might be strange to the boy, but he'd seen them before.

  "They have the look of something otherworldly." Father John crossed himself, just in case.

  But Edward Radcliffe shook his head. "No, no, Father. Those are the honkers I've been talking about. They think we've spread out a feast for them. They don't know they're a feast for us." He raised his voice: "We can't let them eat our grain and trample what they don't swallow. Get clubs. Get bows. We'll kill some-they're good eating, mighty good-and drive the rest away."

  When he went out into the fields, he saw that these weren't quite the same kind of honkers as he'd seen the year before. They were bigger and grayer and shaggier of plumage. Their voices were deeper. But they showed no more fear of man than the other honkers had. You could walk right up to one of them and knock it over the head. Down it would fall, and another one ten feet away would go right on eating.

  If you didn't kill clean, though…A man named Rob Drinkwater only hurt the honker he hit. It let out a loud, surprised blatt! of pain. Before he could strike again and finish it, one of its thick, scaly legs lashed forward. "Oof!" Drinkwater said. That was the last word-or sound-that ever passed his lips. He flew through the air, crashed down, and never moved again: he was all broken inside.

  The honker lumbered off, still going blatt! The cry got the other enormous birds moving. Fast as a horse could trot, they headed off into the undergrowth. Every stride knocked down more young, hopeful wheat and barley.

  Ann Drinkwater keened over her husband's body. The rest of the settlers stared from the dead honkers to the damaged crops and back again. "Will they come again tomorrow?" Richard Radcliffe asked. "Will they come again this afternoon? How many of them will we have to kill before the rest decide they shouldn't come?"

  Those were all good questions. Edward had answers to none of them. "We'll butcher these dead ones," he said. "We can smoke some of the meat, or salt it, or dry it. We can't let it go to waste. After that-"

  "They're afraid of the damned eagles, if they aren't afraid of us," Henry said. "If we screech like them, maybe we can scare off the honkers."