Opening Atlantis Read online

  “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.”

  “We’d have a better chance if we could fly like them,” his brother said, and Edward judged Richard likely right.

  Numbly, the settlers got to work. Henry carried a pile of honker guts well away from the place where the creature had died. He made sure he included the kidneys, though they might have gone into a stew if he ha
dn’t.

  He waited in some nearby bushes, a hunting bow in his hand. Down from the sky to the offal spiraled…a vulture. Even the vultures here differed from the ones back in England. This one was almost all black, down to the skin on its head. Only the white patches near the base of the wings broke the monotony.

  Henry came out and shooed it away before it landed and stole the leavings. It flew off with big, indignant wingbeats. Edward watched it go before he realized it had a healthy fear of men. He wondered what that meant, and whether it meant anything.

  His son went back into cover. Henry had a hunter’s patience—or, more likely, a fisherman’s patience he was for once applying to life on land. And that patience got its reward when an eagle descended on the kidneys and fat much more swiftly and ferociously than the vulture had. Edward wasn’t too far away when it did: he was close enough to notice the coppery crest of feathers on top of the great bird’s head as it tore at the bait Henry had left for it.

  With a shout of triumph, Henry sprang up, let fly…and missed. He couldn’t have been more than eight or ten yards away, but he missed anyhow. The eagle might not have feared men, but a sharp stick whizzing past its head startled it. It launched itself into the air with a kidney in its beak.

  Henry said some things that were bound to cost him time in purgatory. He made as if to break the bow over his knee. “Don’t do that!” Edward called. “We haven’t got many, and we haven’t the time to make more without need, either. Besides, it’s a poor workman who blames his tools.”

  “I couldn’t hit water if I fell out of a boat.” Henry was still furious at himself.

  “There, there,” his father soothed, as if he were still a little boy. “You’re a fine archer—for a fisherman.”

  “Ha!” Henry made a noise that sounded like a laugh but wasn’t.

  “Keep at it,” Edward said. “It’s a good idea. If we don’t kill these cursed eagles, they’ll go on killing us.”

  “And the honkers, too,” Henry said. “They’re as bad as deer or unfenced cattle in the crops. How much did we lose today?”

  “I don’t know. Some. Not more than we can afford, though, I don’t think,” Edward answered. “And the eagles are more dangerous than honkers ever could be.”

  “Tell it to poor Rob Drinkwater. Tell it to his widow and his orphaned brats.”

  “A horse or a mule can kick a man to death, too,” Edward said. “That’s all honkers are—grazers that go on two legs, not four. But when God made those eagles, He made them to kill.”

  Henry thought it over, then nodded. “He made them to kill honkers, I’d say. And we look enough like honkers, they think we make proper prey, too.”

  Edward Radcliffe started to say something, then stopped and sent his son a surprised glance. “I hadn’t looked at it so. Damned if I don’t think you’re right.”

  Henry walked over, retrieved his wasted arrow, and put it back into the quiver with the rest. “We’ll have enough to get through the winter with or without crops, seems like,” he said. “Between the cod and the honkers, we’ll do fine.”

  “Aye, belike,” Edward said. “But I want my bread, too. And Lord knows I want my beer. If we have to fence off the fields to keep the honkers out, well, we can do that.”

  “It will be extra work,” Henry said. “We’re all working harder now than we would have on the other side of the ocean.”

  “Now we are, yes,” Edward agreed. “But that’s only because we have to make the things we take for granted back there. Once we have them, things will be easier here than they were in England. Why else would we have come?”

  Henry laughed. “You don’t need to talk me into it, Father. I’m already here.” He made as if to break the bow again, but this time not in earnest. “I’d be gladder I’m here if only I were a better archer.”

  “Each cat his own rat,” Edward said. “Plenty of fine bowmen who’d puke their guts out on a fishing cog.”

  “One of the girls was screeching about a rat the other day,” Henry said. “It must have got ashore in a boat—I don’t think this country has any rats of its own.”

  “I don’t, either, but I was waiting for that to happen,” Edward said. “No rabbits here, either, or none I’ve seen, which is a pity, for I like rabbit pie and jugged hare. You can’t keep rats and mice out of things. We brought cats, too, so there won’t be too many vermin.”

  “I saw a cat with a lizard’s tail in its mouth yesterday,” Henry said.

  “Yes, and they hunt the blackbirds that look like robins, too,” Edward said. “Never worry about cats. They don’t starve.”

  “I wasn’t worrying,” Henry said. “Next time we go back to England, though, maybe we could bring some rabbits over. They’re good eating and good hunting.”

  “Well, maybe we could,” Edward said.

  IV

  Rabbits. More chickens and ducks. Two more sows, with their piglets. And Tom Cawthorne, a bowyer and fletcher, and his family. They all came back to Atlantis on the St. George. With the good hunting in the woods back of New Hastings, Edward was glad to get a man like Cawthorne. The bow-and arrow-maker probably wouldn’t have come if his oldest son hadn’t just got a girl with child. Dan Cawthorne didn’t want to marry her, and so….

  “If you didn’t want to marry her, why did you sleep with her?” Edward asked the youth—he was seventeen or so—once they got out to sea.

  Dan looked at him as if he were not only crazy but ancient. “Why? Because she wanted me to,” he answered. By the way he said it, only a fool could imagine any other reason. “We didn’t think anything would happen. Don’t you remember what it’s like to—?” He broke off, not quite soon enough.

  To have a stiff yard all the time. That was what he’d been about to say, that or something a lot like it. And Edward did remember. His yard still worked well enough, but it wasn’t stiff all the time, the way it had been when he was seventeen. He sighed. One of these days, Dan would get older, too. Edward tried again: “Well, if you like lying with her so much, why wouldn’t you wed her?”

  The bowyer and fletcher’s son sent him another you idiot look. “Don’t you know Judy Martin at all, Master Radcliffe?” he said. “As soon as she puts her clothes back on, she starts talking, and you’d have to hit her to make her shut up. I’m not even sure that would work.”

  Edward paid little attention to how much sixteen-year-old girls talked—these days, anyhow. There had been a time when he could have gone into great detail on the subject, but that was thirty years gone for him. He laughed and shook his head, wondering why he was worrying about this anyhow. If anything, Dan Cawthorne had done him a favor. If Dan hadn’t got Judy Martin in trouble, Tom Cawthorne wouldn’t have wanted to leave Hastings for an unknown shore.

  Right now, the shore was unknown to Edward, too. Anything could have happened while he made the long round trip to England. Plague might have broken out. There might have been natives in the new country after all, despite the signs to the contrary. Or Bretons or Galicians or Basques might have happened upon New Hastings. Maybe, if they had, they would have stayed friendly and traded. Then again, maybe not.

  His eye went to one of the two swivel guns the St. George now mounted. She wasn’t a warship. She was nothing like a warship, which would have had high castles fore and aft packed with archers. But she could fight a little now if she had to. Against what she was likely to meet in Atlantean waters, that would do.

  The ocean was rougher this time out than it had been on the first journey to settle the new land. The wind was more contrary, too, so the fishing boat stayed at sea more than a week longer before it came to Atlantis. The Cawthornes went greener and greener. Dan’s bravado evaporated. At one point, clutching the rail, he moaned, “I wish I would’ve stayed and listened to Judy the rest of my days!”

  “You’ll change your mind once we get ashore,” Edward told him.

  Dan Cawthorne managed a feeble glare. “Why aren’t you puking your guts out, too?” he ask
ed. Then, as if talking about it reminded him of it—which it could do for some people—he gulped and bent over and started to retch.

  “This isn’t a bad blow,” Edward said. “You should see a real storm, if you think this is something.”

  Dan took his right hand off the rail just long enough to cross himself. His left kept its death grip. “God spare me that!” he choked out, and spat something disgusting into the green, boiling water.

  When the fishing cog finally reached the banks off the coast of Atlantis, Edward and the rest of the crew started pulling big cod out of the sea. Dan and Tom watched in fascination. The Cawthorne women—and even Dan’s little brother, who couldn’t have been more than eight—seemed more horrified. “How can you do that to the poor fish?” Tom’s wife cried as Radcliffe gutted a fat four-foot cod.

  “Well, Mistress Louisa, we’d go hungry if I didn’t.” Edward kicked the offal towards one of the sows, which fed greedily. “Don’t you ever kill any of your own meat?”

  Louisa Cawthorne gave a reluctant nod. “I do, and I cry every time I wring a pullet’s neck.”

  She was a tender-hearted creature, then. She was tender in other ways, too. Sailing with a woman aboard when your wife wasn’t proved an unexpected strain. Edward kept his hands to himself, but his dreams were warmer than the ones he usually had at sea.

  He breathed a sigh of relief when they sighted land at last. He didn’t see New Hastings, or the smoke rising from its fires. That didn’t surprise him; he hadn’t seen any English fishing boats—or any others—bobbing in the ocean. Navigation was anything but exact; Edward wasn’t even sure whether he was north or south of the new settlement.

  He shot the sun with his cross-staff. Then he did it again, and then once more. If he weighed all three measurements together and gave a little something extra to the one he trusted most, he thought the St. George lay south of where she should have been. Most of the fishermen agreed with him. Nobody was positive, though. One of the men said, “Well, we’ll go north and see what happens. If we don’t like it in the end, we can bloody well turn around.”