Opening Atlantis Read online

  “Is it…always like this?” Nell asked, gulping.

  “No, dear,” Radcliffe answered. His wife looked relieved in a wan way till he added, “Sometimes it’s worse.” She searched his face, hoping he was joking. When she saw he wasn’t, she groaned. He said, “You’ll get used to it after a while, though. Almost everyone does.”

  “Almost?” Nell got out through clenched teeth. She gulped again, and ran for the rail. Unlike the first victim of seasickness, she made it. She even knew which rail to run to. People who ran to the windward side only made that mistake once—trying to clean themselves afterwards ensured that.

  Fishermen screamed at passengers to get out of the way as they swung the yard to catch the breeze. They screamed at the livestock, too, but the animals didn’t want to listen (neither did some of the children). One irate soldier booted a hen into the English Channel.

  “Don’t ever do that again, Wat,” Edward told him. “We’ll need those birds when we get to the other side.”

  “If I trip over the damn thing and go into the drink myself, I won’t make it to the other side,” Wat retorted.

  “You won’t make it there if I toss you in the drink, either,” Edward said. Wat was twenty years younger. A long look at the jut of Radcliffe’s jaw and the size of his knobby fists, though, made the other man turn away, muttering to himself.

  Edward was glad to be back at sea. He felt he belonged here. His time ashore he endured; he came alive on the waves. That wasn’t anything he talked about with Nell, any more than he would have told her if he’d taken up with another woman. He didn’t want her jealous—it would only have made things worse.

  The St. George took much longer to shake down to routine than she usually did. The fishermen knew what routine meant. Their wives and children didn’t, and had to learn. The animals didn’t, either, and learned even more slowly, if at all.

  People who weren’t used to the rations grumbled about them—or they did when they finally got their sea legs under them and found they had appetites after all. Radcliffe thought the food was extravagant: to go with the ship’s biscuit, they had much more bacon and sausage aboard than usual, and less salt cod. The fish needed to be soaked before you could eat it. They had so many more mouths aboard than usual, they couldn’t afford much water for that.

  “This biscuit has weevils,” Nell said when they’d been at sea about a week.

  “Yes, that happens,” Edward agreed. “I’m sorry, but I can’t do anything about it.”

  “But it’s disgusting!” she said shrilly.

  “It can happen on land, too,” he pointed out. “It does.”

  “Not like this.” Nell held the biscuit under his nose. “It’s crawling with bugs!” He couldn’t see them when she did that—his sight had begun to lengthen. It didn’t mean he didn’t believe her, because he did. She went on, “All the ship’s biscuit is probably like this.”

  Edward nodded. “It probably is.”

  His wife glared at him. “Well, what are we supposed to do about it? We can’t pitch it into the ocean the way we ought to, not if it’s all bad. We’d starve.”

  “I’m afraid so.” Radcliffe was also afraid Nell would grab something and try to break it over his head. He regretfully spread his hands. “I don’t know what to tell you, dear. If you toast your biscuit over a candle flame, you’ll drive out most of the bugs. Or if you close your eyes and don’t think about it, you just…eat.”

  “I already tried that,” she said bleakly. “It doesn’t work—they crunch under your teeth. They taste bad, too. Maybe I’ll toast it and see how many weevils come out. Maybe I don’t want to know.”

  “I never did,” Edward said. She needed to remember this happened to fishermen all the time.

  She flounced off, as well as she could flounce on a pitching deck. Her long wool skirt swirled around her ankles. After a couple of strides, she turned around for a parting shot: “Do they have weevils in your precious Atlantis?” Before he could answer, she did it for him: “They would.” Then she stormed away.

  Later that day, Edward asked her, “Does the toasting help?”

  “A little,” she said grudgingly. More grudgingly still, she added, “You did try. I thank you for it.”

  “There’s my Nell,” he said. The scowl his Nell sent him told him all was not yet forgotten, even if it might be partway forgiven.

  The fishermen went to work sooner than they would have on a regular run. Everything they caught stretched the supplies on the St. George further. Edward wouldn’t have bothered salting most of what the lines brought in. But, as fishermen knew and few others ever had the chance to learn, fish just out of the ocean made far better, far sweeter eating than fish dried and salted or fish starting to go off at a fishmonger’s stall.

  The dogs didn’t turn up their noses at fresh fish guts, either. That eased Radcliffe’s mind; he hadn’t been sure how he would keep them fed all the way across the Atlantic. Dogs would eat almost anything if they had to, but they did best with something meaty.

  Fish suited the cats fine. There weren’t enough rats and mice on the cog to keep them full for such a long voyage. Edward knew from experience that there were bound to be some. He also knew from experience that, no matter how many cats he had aboard, they wouldn’t catch all the vermin.

  He wondered whether Atlantis had rats and mice of its own. Hard to imagine a place that didn’t. He laughed a little. If by some accident the new land lacked them, it wouldn’t much longer. They were bound to come ashore and bound to get loose in the wilderness. It was a shame, but he didn’t know what he could do about it.

  Swine were bound to get loose, too. They were much closer to wild beasts than sheep and cattle and horses. Swine, at least, made good hunting and good eating.

  Day followed day. Edward had a compass, to give him a notion of north. He had a cross-staff, to give him a notion of latitude—as long as he kept the date straight. As soon as he got out of sight of land, he had only a rough guess, based on how far he thought he’d sailed, about longitude. He wished someone would figure out how to keep track of it, but no one had.

  “Are we almost there?”

  He expected to hear that from his grandchildren, and he did. He was less happy to hear it from his sons’ wives, and from his own. The more he heard it, the more it grated on him, too. “Do you see land out there?” he would ask, and point west. There was, as yet, no land to see. When whoever was grumbling admitted as much, he would say, “Then we aren’t almost there, are we?”

  When the fishermen started pulling cod that weighed as much as they did out of the gray-blue water, Edward smiled to himself. The lubbers aboard went right on wondering where land was. Edward knew it wasn’t very far. They really were almost there—and he said not a word.

  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 trum
pets 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 François 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 while 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.”