Opening Atlantis Read online

  Darkness deepened. The chorus of frogs grew louder and more various. A pair of big frogs hopped straight at each other, both of them croaking as loud as they could. They were only a couple of feet apart when one broke and ran, vanishing into the night beyond the campfire’s bright circle.

  An owl hooted. The note was different from the ones English owls used, but unmistakable all the same. Then Richard saw a moving light that wasn’t paired. “Glow-worm!” he said in delight. Some people called them fireflies. England had only a few. In summer, they made the air itself here seem to dance.

  Something else also scooted through the night air, from left to right. It was bigger than a mosquito, bigger than a glow-worm, and it didn’t dance in the air the way bugs did. The motion was straight and not too swift. Richard scratched his head. That straight track also meant it was no bat or nightjar come to feed on the insects drawn to his campfire.

  He scratched his head again. In that case, what was it? Had he seen only one such strange scoot, he would have shrugged and gone back to eating toasted honker liver. He even had coarse sea salt to scatter on his supper. After he finished, he intended to swaddle himself in his blanket so that, if the mosquitoes wanted him, they would have to find the tip of his nose.

  Then he spotted another of those curious fliers, and then another. They all came from the left and vanished to the right. “What the—?” he said, climbing to his feet. Atlantis was full of surprises. He seemed to have run into another one, one that made his curiosity itch.

  He walked out about as far from the fire as he thought the things were flying. As like as not, he thought, I’ll scare them away. He shrugged. If he did, he would go back to the honker liver, that was all.

  But he didn’t. One of them, whatever it was, scooted right past in front of his face. Startled, he grabbed for it, but he missed. Another one went by. He missed that one, too, and swore. The trouble was, he could see them only when they came close to the fire. That didn’t give him much time to catch them.

  It would have to be luck, then. If they kept coming, he was bound to snag one sooner or later…wasn’t he? After five or six fruitless lunges, he started to wonder. Then he did catch one. The cool, moist smack against the palm of his hand made him wonder whether he was glad to have it even as his fingers closed.

  “What have I got?” he said out loud. He turned so that firelight would help him, and opened his hand.

  A little frog, green with streaks of yellow, stared up at him out of big black eyes. It looked like any other tree frog he’d ever seen—except for its hands and feet. The fingers and toes were ridiculously long, with webbing stretched between them. The frog had to use those webs to glide through the air the way a ship used sails to push it along.

  Richard started to laugh. He set the frog down on the ground. It hopped off into the darkness the way any other little frog might have. He wiped his hand against his trousers. “Atlantis!” he said. “You won’t find another place where the birds don’t fly and the frogs damn well do.”

  Laughing still, he went back to his supper.

  These days, Edward Radcliffe’s bones creaked when he got out of bed in the morning. Sometimes sitting by the fire for a while or going out into the warm sun would get him moving again, almost as freely as he had when he was younger. Sometimes he creaked and ached from dawn to dusk, and woke up aching if he had to ease himself in the night.

  Hard to believe fifteen years had gone by since François Kersauzon talked him out of a third of his catch in exchange for a secret—hard to believe till he looked around, anyway. New Hastings was more than a village at the edge of unknown wilderness nowadays. It was well on the way to becoming a town. Farms and mills went up the river all the way to Bredestown, and beyond. Whenever Richard came back from a journey into the woods, he kept muttering that he would have to pull up stakes and move west again. Things were getting too crowded where he was.

  Edward didn’t think that would change, either. The War of the Roses went on and on in England. Once people had had their homes plundered and burnt, once men had been robbed and killed and women violated, the idea of getting on a ship and heading for a strange land across the sea no longer seemed so frightful. And so New Hastings swelled, as did Freetown; settlers founded other towns up and down the northern part of the east coast of Atlantis.

  François Kersauzon’s Cosquer also flourished. Two or three other Breton villages grew not far away from it. Edward had heard that there were Basque and Galician settlements in the southern regions of the new land, but he didn’t know for a fact whether that was so. The Bretons came up to New Hastings to trade; most of them still wanted nothing to do with Freetown. No folk from the Spanish kingdoms had turned up here yet. Still, it had to be only a matter of time.

  When Radcliffe looked west toward the mountains no man had yet visited—not so far as he knew, anyhow—what struck him was how much things had changed since he founded New Hastings. The dark forests of pine and redwood had been driven back for miles, replaced by farmlands and meadows and groves of apples and pears and plums that were still young but now starting to yield fruit.

  “It’s not so bad here now, is it, Nell?” he asked his wife.

  “Not so bad as it was when we first came here, that’s sure enough,” she said. “And you got to go back to England, too. Me, I was stuck here all that time.”

  He frowned. “If you think all that sea voyaging was easy or fun…Well, you should have tried it yourself, is all I have to say.”

  Nell didn’t back away from an argument—she never did. “We had to make do here when there wasn’t enough to make do with. Before we had a blacksmith, breaking a tool was as bad as it could be, because we couldn’t get another one, whatever it was. And the first houses were sorry affairs. Everyone who was here made a better shipwright than a proper carpenter.”

  “No danger of going hungry, though,” Edward said, and Nell couldn’t very well argue with that. Between the cod the fishermen pulled from the offshore banks and the big, foolish honkers, there was always plenty to keep a man’s—or a woman’s—belly full.

  His wife did say, “I missed bread till the crops started coming in the way they should.”

  Edward only shrugged. When a fishing boat ran out of biscuit, men lived on what they could catch. He didn’t much care what he ate, as long as he had plenty of it.

  “You hardly see honkers any more, not here by the seaside,” Nell remarked.

  “Still plenty of them inland. They still make good eating. And as long as they come down into the fields to steal what we plant, what else are we going to do but kill them?” Edward said.

  “Oh, I know. But the landscape seems so—so ordinary without them.”

  “I was thinking the same thing, or close enough.” Edward smiled at his wife. If they didn’t think the same way a lot of the time, they wouldn’t have stayed as happily married as they had. “One of these days, it will be hard to tell Atlantis from England.”

  “No, it won’t,” Nell said at once. “In England, the nobles and the king’s men can tell ordinary people what to do. They can take our money and use it to hire soldiers who steal from us. None of that foolishness here, by Our Lady.”

  “Not yet, anyhow,” Edward said. “I wonder how long it will be before some duke or earl fits out a ship with guns and comes across the ocean to try to tell us what to do.”

  “To try to squeeze money out of us, you mean,” Nell said. “That’s what it comes down to in the end.”

  “Well, so it is,” Edward agreed. “I just thank heaven we haven’t had a fight with Freetown and we haven’t got into a brawl with the Bretons yet, either. Tell me that’s not coming, too. Make me believe it.”

  “I wish I could,” his wife said. “We didn’t leave all our troubles behind when we came over here, did we?”

  Radcliffe shook his head. “I wish we would have, but it’s too much to ask for. We have more room here, so not all of them show up the way they did back home, but they ar
en’t gone.”

  As if to prove his point, a lookout on the beach winded a horn. That meant a strange ship was nearing New Hastings. Edward hurried into his house and came out with an axe. He wasn’t young and he wasn’t spry, but he didn’t need to be either to defend the home he’d built from nothing. He hurried down toward the muddy strand.

  But it wasn’t a strange ship approaching—it was Henry’s cog, the Rose. She wasn’t the White Rose or the Red Rose: simply the Rose. No one here saw any point to angering whichever side eventually won the civil war. She was made from Atlantean lumber; her sails were made from Atlantean wool. Danes and Norwegians used woolen sails. They were heavier and baggier than linen, but the flax crop here was just beginning to come in.

  Unlike Richard, Henry didn’t mind putting to sea in anything at all. Edward thought his older son had traveled farther up and down the coast of Atlantis than any other man alive.

  This run, the Rose was coming up from the south. Henry proved that. When he came ashore, he had a strange bird on his shoulder: it was bright green, with a yellow head, a red face, and a large, hooked beak. It squawked shrilly, then said something in a language Edward recognized.

  “That’s Basque, by God!” he said. “What does it mean?”

  “I don’t know, but it’ll start a fight in any tavern full of those one-eyebrowed buggers,” Henry answered.

  “Is the Devil teaching birds Basque now?” Edward asked. “Is he trying to make liars out of the people who say he can’t learn it himself? Or did you find the settlement people have been talking about?”

  “I found it. Gernika, they’re calling it, after a place in their country,” Henry said. “They picked a good spot for it, most ways. A river bigger than the Brede flows into the ocean there, and an island offshore makes the harbor as well shielded from bad weather as any I’ve ever known—it puts New Hastings and Cosquer to shame. But by Our Lady, Father, it’s hot down there! The worst of summer here seems like nothing beside it. And sticky! Your clothes melt to your skin. You stink all the time if you don’t bathe, or even if you do, and you come down with rashes and ringworms and I don’t know what all else.”

  “Well, then, they’re welcome to it,” Edward said. “How can they make a living in country like that? Why would they want to settle there?”

  “The land is rich—no way around that,” his son replied. “You stick a seed in the ground and you have to jump back in a hurry or the growing plant will poke you in the eye. And the hunting is good, they said.”

  Edward Radcliffe raised an eyebrow. “They said that? Where did you learn Basque? From your bird?”

  “Clarence here speaks more of it than I do, and that’s the Lord’s truth,” Henry said. “But some of the Basques down there know enough French to get by, and I do, too. You speak better, but I can get along.”

  “All right. Gernika, is it?” Edward clucked to himself. “We do need to start mapping this coast. Too many different folk settling along it to manage without knowing who lives where. Building a new village too close to somebody else’s holding is the easiest way I can think of to start a fight.”

  “I’m doing it as best I know how,” Henry said. “I’m not the best chartmaker in the world, but anything here is better than nothing. We can know latitudes, anyway, and curves of the coast.”

  “Better than nothing, as you say.” Edward paused, remembering what Henry had said a moment before. “What do you mean, the hunting is good there? What have they got that we don’t?”

  “Well, for one thing, they have snakes big enough to swallow a honker—plenty big enough to swallow a man,” Henry answered. “And they’ve got these river lizards…. I don’t know what else you’d call them. But they aren’t lizards the way we have lizards in England, or even like the ones here—big as your arm. These are lizards—fifteen or twenty feet long, with big mouths full of big teeth. They eat turtles and honkers—and people, too, if you aren’t careful down by the riverbank. Their hides make good leather. The Basques showed me some.”

  “They sound like…what’s the name for the creatures in the Good Book?” Edward Radcliffe snapped his fingers in annoyance. “Dammit, I can’t recall.”

  “Bishop John would know,” Henry suggested.

  “He would, yes.” Edward didn’t sound thrilled. “He knows almost everything. If you don’t believe me, just ask him.” Henry laughed, for all the world as if his father were joking.

  But finding a name for those big river lizards kept bothering Edward. He and Henry went to the church at the center of New Hastings. It was only whitewashed redwood, but it was, as far as he knew, the finest in Atlantis. And Bishop John, paunchier and grayer than he had been when he set out from England all those years before, looked the very model of a prelate. The Radcliffes spelled out their problem for him.

  “Those sound like crocodiles,” John said gravely.

  “Crocodiles!” Edward nodded. “That’s what you call the things. I couldn’t hook the name to save my life.”

  “You ever see one, Father, you’ll remember what they are from then on,” Henry said. “The Basques have their own word for them, too, but to me it sounds half like sneezing and half like spitting.”

  “Basques?” Bishop John asked. “I know you took the Rose south, Henry, but I don’t know what you found—besides crocodiles, I mean.” Henry told him, in less detail than he’d given his father: plenty of time for that later. The prelate heard him out, then said, “More and more folk flock to this shore. I thank God that we haven’t yet brought our wars across the sea with us.”

  “I think yet is the word,” Edward Radcliffe said. “I fear it’s only a matter of time, though.”

  John crossed himself. “I shall pray you are mistaken.”

  “Oh, I pray for the same thing, your Grace,” Radcliffe said. “But I want to be ready all the same, in case God doesn’t feel like listening.”

  Henry’s wife was a slim redhead named Bess. She clung to him outside the New Hastings church as if the Rose were another woman and not a ship at all. “Must you go away so soon?” she asked. “It seems you only just got home.”

  He kissed her, sensing that was some of what she wanted. It only made her cling tighter, though, and start to cry. “We have to learn what sort of land we have here,” he said. “We have to know how big it is, how wide—”

  “Do we have to find out right this minute?” Bess flared. “Do you have to do all the finding yourself?”

  “It’s not like that,” Henry said. “Richard goes off into the woods for weeks at a time, and—”

  “And it drives his wife wild.” Bess seemed bound and determined not to let him finish a sentence. “Do you think Bertha and I don’t talk about it? We have to talk to each other. Lord knows we don’t get much chance to talk to the two of you.”

  “We need to explore,” Henry said. “If we didn’t—”

  “If you didn’t”—his wife poke him in the chest with a blunt-nailed forefinger, to make sure he understood that you was a singular—“you could settle down and farm and spend more time with me and your children. Would that be so dreadful?”

  “You didn’t fuss this much when I left Hastings on fishing runs,” Henry said. “Sometimes I’d be gone longer then than I am on the trips I take these days.”

  His wife eyed him with a curious mix of exasperation and affection. “In those days, you had no choice. If you didn’t help your father bring in the cod, we wouldn’t eat. But now you don’t have to go wandering. Neither does Richard. You do it anyway. Both of you do it anyway. It’s not right. It’s not fair.” Her voice broke. More tears swam in her sea-green eyes.

  Henry had never talked things over with his brother. He didn’t know how they stood with Richard. He only knew for himself. “If I stayed on a farm all the time…It wouldn’t be you, love.” He wanted to make sure he said that, because it was the truth. “But if I stayed in the same place all the time, if I saw the same things around me all the time…” He shook his head. �
�Something inside of me would die. I’d be living in a cage.”

  “And the Rose isn’t?” Bess crossed herself. “Mary, pity women!”

  Richard thought a ship was a cage. But Richard also had to think a farm was a cage. He’d proved that, again and again. So instead of putting to sea, he’d thrust deeper into the Atlantean wilderness than any man alive. Didn’t it add up to, if not the same thing, then something not so very different?

  Deeper into the wilderness than any man alive? Henry suddenly realized he couldn’t be sure of that. Bound to be restless Bretons, restless Basques, even restless Dovermen…Deeper into the wilderness than anyone who’d started from New Hastings, anyhow. That would do.

  Bess shook her head. She said, “The Rose,” under her breath in a tone not far from hatred. But then she went on, “What’s the use? If I burnt that cursed scow to the waterline, you’d only go and build another one. And you’d enjoy doing it, too.” By the way she said it, that was the worst crime of all.

  And she wasn’t even wrong. Henry had enjoyed building the Rose. If he had to craft another cog, he thought he could do a better job the next time. He kissed Bess again, not sure whether that would make things better or worse. He wasn’t sure after he’d done it, either. He was sure of one thing, though: “I’ve got to go. I’ll be back before too long.”

  “It will only seem like forever,” Bess said bitterly.

  He kissed her one more time. Some men who went to sea for weeks and months at a stretch worried about their wives being unfaithful while they were away. Some men who went to sea for weeks and months at a stretch had children that looked like their neighbors who stayed home. People mostly didn’t talk about such things, which didn’t mean they didn’t happen.

  Henry didn’t worry about Bess. He knew he could count on her. And he didn’t reward her for her fidelity by going into strange women when he came into a strange port…not very often, anyhow. If he’d brought home the gleets and passed them on to her, she would have been even less happy with him than she was now.