Opening Atlantis (3 page)

Dripping knife in his hand, he stared and stared.
Green as England in springtime
was his first thought after he finally got a glimpse of…Atlantis. Yes, the name seemed to suit more than well enough. A longer look said his first thought wasn't quite true. This green was darker, more somber, than that of his native land. But that didn't mean he didn't want to see this new countryside up close. Oh, no. It didn't mean anything of the kind.

Oars creaked in the oarlocks as the
St. George
's boat neared the shore. Edward waved to François Kersauzon—the
Morzen
's boat was going ashore, too, only a short bowshot away. The Breton skipper waved back. “Is it not as I told you?” he called, his voice thin across the waves.

“Seems that way.” Edward looked over his shoulder, toward the two fishing boats anchored in eight fathoms of water. He didn't believe in taking chances; he wanted plenty of ocean under his keel. Plainly, Kersauzon felt the same way. That surprised the Englishman not at all—you didn't get to be a captain if you were reckless. Or, if you did, you didn't stay a captain long.

He and his sons and Hugh Fenner and two other fishermen had a longer pull than they would have if he'd brought the
St. George
into shallower water. So did the Bretons from the
Morzen. So what?
Edward thought. Anyone who minded work had no business going to sea in the first place.

He wondered whether Kersauzon and the Bretons would race to the shore. Sensibly, they didn't. Anyone who gave himself extra work when so much wasn't extra had to be a fool. François Kersauzon might be a lot of things, but Radcliffe would have sworn on Christ's holy relics that he was no fool.

The boat fought through the breakers and grated to a stop on a beach half sand, half mud. “You go out first, Father,” Richard said. “You brought us here. I never would have—I thought the Breton was cozening us.” The rest of the Englishmen in the boat nodded.

“I thank you,” Edward said. His back creaked as he straightened. When he stepped ashore, his boot squelched in mud. He knew he ought to come out with something grand, something people—or at least he—would remember for a long time. But he was no traveling player or glib peddler, to find fancy words whenever he needed them. “Well, we're here,” wasn't what anyone would call splendid, but it was true.

Kersauzon hopped out of the other boat and trotted toward him. The Breton took the new land for granted. It wasn't new to him, not as a whole, even if this stretch might be.

“What do you think?” he asked, as proud as if he rather than God had shaped the ground on which they stood.

“It's…different,” Edward answered. The murmur of waves going in and out, the wind's sigh, the smell of sea in the air—all those things were familiar enough. So were the grasses and shrubs just beyond the beach. Past that, familiarity broke down. Radcliffe pointed to a strange plant. “What do you call that?”

“I don't know its right name. I don't know if it has one,” Kersauzon said. “But I've been calling those barrel plants.”

Radcliffe nodded. Right name or not, it fit well enough. The trunk—he supposed it was a trunk—looked like a stout, bark-covered barrel. From the top sprouted a sheaf of big, frond-filled leaves like the one Will had netted from the Atlantic.

More barrel plants, some bigger, some smaller, dotted the landscape. Their leaves were of varying sizes and shapes and of different shades of green, but they all seemed built on the same plan—a plan Edward had never seen before. Farther inland, the woods were of conifers, but not of the sort of conifers he knew. “Have you a name for the trees, too?” he asked.

“I do—I call 'em redwoods,” François Kersauzon replied. “Cut down a small one and you'll see why—the lumber is the color of untarnished copper. And Mother Mary turn her back on me if I lie, Englishman, but some of them are bigger than any trees I ever set eyes on back home.”

“Are there men here?” Richard Radcliffe asked. “Moors or Irishmen or other savages?”

“I've not seen any,” Kersauzon said. “I don't swear I'm the only fisherman ever to find this shore. Basques or Galicians who don't get their salt at Le Croisic—or maybe even those who do, for the Basques are close-mouthed bastards—may come here, too. But I've yet to run across a native. It's a new land.”

Edward spied a flash of motion—motion on two legs—behind a tall barrel plant. “Then what's that?” he demanded, wondering if the Breton was tricking his son and him.

Kersauzon only laughed. “Bide a moment, friend, and you'll see—and hear.”

“Honnnk!” The note was deeper than a man could have made it. Edward gaped at the curious creature that came out from behind the barrel plant. It walked on two legs like a man, but it was some sort of enormous bird. Its neck and head were black, except for a white patch under its formidable beak. The shaggy feathers on its back were dun brown, those on its belly paler. The legs were bare and scaly, like a fowl's—but what a fowl it was!

When the honker—the name flashed into Edward's mind—spread its wings, the fishermen laughed. Those tiny appendages could never lift it off the ground. He wondered why the bird had them at all.

It reached down with its beak and pulled up a mouthful of grass, then another and another. “So that's where you got your great drumstick, is it?” Edward said.

“It is indeed,” Kersauzon replied. “The poor, foolish things have no fear of man—another reason I think there are no natives here. You can walk up to one and knock it over the head, and it will let you. It will lie dead at your feet when it should be running or kicking.”

“I'll do that right now, then,” Hugh Fenner said. Half apologetically, the master salter turned to Radcliffe. “You get tired of even the best fish after a while. If we roast that overgrown goose, we've got a feast for the whole crew.”

When we come to a new land, do we mark it by our first kill, the way Cain did?
Edward wondered. But his stomach growled at the thought of meat, too. “Go on if you care to,” he told Fenner.

The master salter advanced on the honker. Fenner's confidence grew with every step. Sure enough, the monster bird seemed curious at his approach, but not afraid. He had a stout bludgeon on his belt. One good wallop with that ought to shatter the stupid thing's skull….

A flash in the air, a harsh screech, a shriek from Fenner, and then he was down and thrashing with a great hawk or eagle clinging to his back and tearing at his kidneys with a huge, hooked, slicing beak. The honker might not fear men, but the sight of that eagle sent it running back for the shelter of the—redwoods, Kersauzon called them.

Shouting and waving their arms, Englishmen and Bretons rushed to Hugh Fenner's rescue. The eagle screamed harshly but flew away, blood dripping from bill and long, curved talons. Hugh lay where he'd fallen. He didn't move. A sharp stink said his bowels had let go. Edward grabbed for his wrist, then let it fall. The master salter had no pulse.

“He's gone.” Radcliffe heard the dull wonder in his voice. Man could kill—but so could Atlantis.

F
rançois Kersauzon seemed as upset about Fenner's death as Edward Radcliffe was. “As God is my witness, friend Saoz, I've seen those eagles take honkers before, but I never dreamt they would take men,” he said.

“We probably look like honkers—a good name—to them,” Henry said.

“Except smaller and maybe easier to kill,” Edward added, staring into the trees where the eagle had flown. That was a formidable bird, bigger and fiercer than any golden eagle or sea eagle he'd ever seen. And if its prey walked on two legs…

As Kersauzon had said, the honkers seemed to have no fear of man. But that one had disappeared into the woods as soon as the eagle struck Hugh Fenner. Men might be an unknown quantity, but the birds that struck from the sky were enemies. Honkers had no doubt of that.

“Poor Hugh. He died unshriven.” Richard crossed himself. So did the other fishermen, English and Bretons. Edward's younger son went on, “We have to bury him here. We can't very well salt him down and take him home.”

“I'll say the words over him,” Edward said. His sons and the other Englishmen nodded. He'd had to do that before, more than once, when someone on the
St. George
took sick and died or perished by some mischance. He was no priest, but he could hope his prayers helped a soul win through at least to purgatory. “A little piece of Atlantis will be English forevermore.”

He'd spoken his own language, but Kersauzon, as he'd seen, could follow English. “Atlantis?” the other skipper echoed. “We've just been calling it the Western Land, but that's better, by God—a name to stick in the mind. Atlantis!”

Edward tried to remember if they had a shovel aboard the
St. George.
He didn't think so. He scuffed at the dirt with the toe of his boot. It was soft. Whatever they had, they could manage. “Are there wolves here, or gluttons, or anything else that might dig up a grave?” he asked.

“Haven't seen anything of the kind,” Kersauzon answered. “Haven't seen any four-footed creatures at all, or heard them howling in the night.”

“Some uncommon big lizards,” one of his fishermen put in.

When Edward Radcliffe thought of a lizard, he thought of a scurrying thing as long as his finger. An uncommon big one might be—what? As long as his forearm? Anything larger than that was beyond his ken.

This whole land was beyond his ken—except that he was standing on it. Off to the west, beyond the trees, he saw the distant saw-toothed outline of mountains against the skyline. What lay beyond them? He snorted. He had no idea what lay on
this
side of the mountains, except for peculiar plants, even stranger birds, and eagles ferocious as demons from hell. But Richard was looking out toward those far-off peaks, too.

No other men here, not settlers, not natives. No wolves, no bears. As he rowed out in the boat to see what digging tools the
St. George
had, he remarked, “If you fished in the sea and cleared some land for a crop, you could live here. You could live here pretty well, I think.”

“If you're going to live here, you'd need to bring some women over,” Henry said.

Edward nodded, and that thought pulled him back to the present, or at least to the near future. “When we get home, I'll have to tell poor Hugh's Meg what chanced here,” he said, and grimaced. “I don't look forward to that. Even paying her his full share, I don't look forward to it. How many children have they got?”

“Five, I think it is,” Richard answered, “and Meg's likely to have another by the time we see England again.” Edward nodded once more; he thought he remembered the same thing, and wished his son had told him he was wrong.

“Are you thinking of settling on these shores, Father?” Richard asked.

“Aren't you?” Edward said; Henry might be older, but Richard was the sharper of his boys, no doubt about that. “No moneylenders, no lord to bend the knee to, no king to pay taxes to. We're free when we're at sea now, but on land we might as well be slaves. Wouldn't you like to be free all the time?”

“No church,” Richard murmured. Did he want to be free of the priest, too, or was he complaining of the lack? Edward couldn't tell.

Henry was more resolutely practical: “No boatwrights. No net-makers. No blacksmiths. No horses, no sheep, no cattle…”

“Not unless we bring 'em with us.” Edward glanced over to the
Morzen.
“If we don't settle here, how long do you think these Bretons will wait? If they're on the spot, they'll have these fishing banks all to themselves, the bastards.”

“They're bad enough on the other side of the Channel,” Richard said. “Would you want them living a long spit down the coast from you?”

“Well, if the other choice is spending the rest of my days jealous because they're here and I'm not, maybe I do.” Edward Radcliffe weighed his words and nodded yet again. “Yes, son, maybe I do.”

The crews of the
St. George
and the
Morzen
spent ten days on Atlantis. The longer Edward Radcliffe stayed, the more he wanted to come back, to settle and never to leave. He kept glancing at François Kersauzon out of the corner of his eye. Was the same thought in Kersauzon's mind? How could it not be?

Henry did knock a honker over the head. It was as easy as the Breton said it would be. The enormous bird stared at the man with a kind of dull curiosity as he walked up to it. It wasn't afraid of him; it had never learned to be afraid of things that looked like him. It died without ever knowing it should have learned to fear.

More than anything else, that made Edward sure Atlantis had no natives. If even savages lived here, the local beasts would have learned to run away from them.

And Edward found himself eyeing François Kersauzon in a new way. The other skipper was properly alert, but if
he
got knocked over the head…. Half in regret and half in relief, Edward shelved the idea. He wasn't afraid of wearing the mark of Cain. He was afraid he would have to kill all the Bretons to make killing Kersauzon worthwhile. And he was afraid he would lose too many of his own fishermen in the fighting. Sometimes—not always, but sometimes—peace was smarter than war.

Perhaps three miles south of where he'd first come ashore, he found a river flowing strongly out into the sea. Henry was with him when they came to the mouth of the stream. The younger man pointed inland. “It's bound to come down from the mountains,” he said.

“No doubt. It would have to, with so swift a current,” Edward agreed. “It runs hard enough to power a great plenty of grinding mills.”

“Aye, belike, if the mills have a great plenty to grind,” his son said. “No grain growing here, not yet.”

“No, not yet.” Edward looked inland again. He was also looking into the future—through a glass, darkly, which is as much as it is given to a man to do. “But do you see any reason why grain shouldn't grow here?”

“I seen none,” Henry replied, “which is not the same as saying there is none. We don't know.”

“I want to find out!” Edward said. “I want to live here, where when I'm ashore I can do as I please. I can hunt deer without poaching on the lord's land—”

“I haven't seen any deer here, either,” his son broke in. “No one has, that I know of.”

“Fine. I can hunt these honkers, then,” Edward said impatiently.

“Oh, yes—they make fine sport.” Sarcasm dripped from Henry's words. “The excitement of the stalk, the thrill of the chase…” He mimed bringing his club down on a big, stupid bird's head.

“They make mighty good eating, though,” Edward said, and his son couldn't very well argue with that—the one Henry had killed was smoking on the beach where they'd landed. Edward went on, “And if there are no deer here now, what's to keep us from bringing them across the sea like sheep or cattle or horses or—?”

Henry interrupted again: “Everything else we'd need to live.”

“Well, what of it?” Edward said. “Are you telling me we can't do that? We can find this place again, or near enough—we know the latitude. And if we don't settle right here, any other stretch of the coast would do about as well. Will you tell me I'm wrong?”

“No, Father,” Henry said. “But it's a big step, to uproot ourselves from England and cross the sea to try to make our homes on an unknown shore.”

“It won't stay unknown long. By Our Lady, it's not unknown now—we're standing on it,” Edward Radcliffe said. “And if we don't make homes here, the Bretons or the French or the Basques or the Galicians will. Then we won't even be able to fish here. They'll be in their own back fields, you might say, and we'll have to cross the Atlantic both ways. We'd never stay in business against them. Do you want that? We'd be second best forever. That's no fate for Englishmen. That's no fate for
Radcliffes
!”

Henry sighed. “Father, it sounds good when it comes from your lips. But when we get home, what's Lucy going to say to me?” He put his hands on his hips and raised his voice to sound like his wife, who'd always struck Edward as a bit of a shrew: “‘You want me to leave my kin and cross the sea? You want me to put our babies into a fishing boat? You want to sail away from my mother?'”

“By God, yes to that!” Edward said—Lucy's mother was more than a bit of a shrew.

His son went right on imitating his daughter-in-law: “‘You want me to carve a farm holding out of nothing while you fish the way you always did? You expect me to live without neighbors, without friends?'”

“We won't be the only ones going—tell her that. We'd better not be, or the venture fails,” Edward said.

“True enough. What can you promise the others, except a dangerous voyage over more sea than anyone in Hastings cares to think about?”

“Besides the best place to fish they ever saw? Besides land that stretches to the horizon, there for the taking? Besides freedom from lords? How about freedom from peasant risings, too?” Edward said. Only a couple of years earlier, Jack Cade and his rebels had almost chased the King of England from his throne.

Henry nodded thoughtfully. “There is that. What do you suppose Mother will think?”

“She'll go along,” Edward said, more confidently than he felt. Nell Radcliffe had a mind of her own and a tongue sharper than Lucy's. She would go along if she thought going along was a good idea. If she didn't, she wouldn't be shy about saying so.

“Well, we'll see,” Henry said, which only proved he too knew his mother well.

Crossing the Atlantic from west to east was easier than sailing the other way, for they had the winds with them through most of the journey. They put in at Le Croisic, where Edward paid François Kersauzon the price to which they'd agreed. Seeing a Breton take so much salt cod from the hold of an Englishman's ship made the locals smirk.

Edward looked suitably chagrined as he piled fish in front of the
Morzen.
He didn't believe many Bretons knew of Atlantis yet. What did they think? That Kersauzon had won some enormous bet from him? He wouldn't have been surprised. Let them think what they wanted, though. He knew, and Kersauzon knew.

Two could hold a secret. Could Kersauzon keep the fishermen on the
Morzen
from blabbing? The odds were against it. The Bretons had brought back more smoked honker, and Radcliffe had a leg bone. They would have to explain where those came from. What would they say?

Whatever they said, it would make the other fishermen—and even the local lubbers—curious. They would want to sail west. That meant Edward needed to move fast if he wanted his countrymen to take their fair share of Atlantis.

He needed to move fast—and he couldn't. Contrary winds held him in Le Croisic day after day. He fumed and swore, but he couldn't do anything about it. His only consolation was that what held him in port held the Bretons, too. That wasn't quite true: they could go down the coast to the south. But he didn't think they would spill the secret to Frenchmen. They scorned the French even more than Englishmen did, which wasn't easy.

At last, the wind shifted. He took the
St. George
out of the harbor and sailed around Cap Finistère and into the Channel. The waves there, squeezed between Europe and England, grew taller and more menacing than they had been out in the open ocean. Even fishermen with strong stomachs stayed close to the leeward rail. The waves helped push the cog along, though. She made good time on the last leg of the voyage home.

Hastings was the westernmost of the Cinque Ports: in reality seven towns, though the name had room for only five. They pooled their resources against pirates. There Edward felt safe enough—corsairs were after silk and silver, not salt cod. What he brought home wasn't worth stealing, but a man could make a good living at it. What more could you want?

The old, deserted Norman castle still stood on West Hill, looking down on the town. William the Conqueror had based himself in Hastings, of course—everybody knew that. With Plantagenets still ruling England, no one said—out loud—that he wished the Saxons had won the fight not far away. What would the country be like today had Harold prevailed?
Different,
Edward thought, and he was bound to be right about that.