A moment later, the captain bawled an order. A gangplank thudded down from the waist of the ship. Soldiers strutted out onto the pier. “Move aside, old man,” one of them told Edward. “This place is ours now.”
Richard Radcliffe smiled in the November sunshine. In England, it would have been cold and cloudy and likely rainy. In New Hastings, it probably would have been colder yet. Maybe it would have rained. It might even have snowed; it had done that more than once this time of year since he settled in Atlantis.
Now he was on the other side of the mountains. Now, as far as he was concerned, he was on the right side of the mountains. Henry had said Avalon Bay had weather like an unending April. Richard saw that his brother was right. He was somewhere not far from the famous bay—if a bay could be famous when only one shipload of men had ever seen it—and here it was: April, or as near as made no difference.
November in truth, but birds still sang in the trees. Leaves stayed green—a dark green, as most greens were in Atlantis, but green nonetheless. The grass under his feet as he stood out in the meadow was as lush as if it were the height of spring. It hadn’t died and gone all yellow, the way it would have in England or New Hastings.
He knew what that meant. This grass hadn’t seen a freeze. Maybe it would when winter advanced further…if winter did advance further here. Richard wouldn’t have bet on that. As far as he could tell, it really was springtime the whole year around.
Back behind him lay the mountains he’d crossed with such labor, a ridge of green now against the eastern horizon instead of the western, where he’d grown used to seeing it. He’d come into one new world when he first set foot on Atlantis. Now he was in another one—in his view, a better one.
The sea called him. He could smell it again, a smell he’d known all his life but one that had gone out of his nostrils as he crossed Atlantis’ fog-filled spine. He couldn’t see it yet—the ground rose ahead of him. But it was there.
And beyond that sea lay more land, with strange people living in it. He’d heard that from Henry, too, and from the fishermen on the Rose. He shrugged. Seeing that new land meant getting into a cog again. He supposed he could if he had to. If he didn’t have to, he didn’t want to. Atlantis was plenty big enough to satisfy him.
A crow cawed from the edge of the woods. It wasn’t just like an English carrion crow—the call was different, and it didn’t have such a heavy beak. It wasn’t just like a rook, either: it lacked the pale patch on its face. But it couldn’t be anything but some kind of crow.
Ravens in Atlantis, as far as he could tell, were just like the ravens back in England. Crows here were similar, but not identical. Jays were quite different: they were blue and white and crested, not pinkish brown. But they were plainly jays. Their feisty habits and raucous calls proclaimed that to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear.
Richard wondered why it should be so. Why did birds that acted like English blackbirds have robinlike red breasts here? Why were there so many Atlantean birds that couldn’t fly? Honkers, several kinds of duck, oil thrushes…He scratched his head. The question was easy to ask, but he had no idea what the answer was.
He trudged on. Before long, he was sweating—in November! That made him smile. He knew the kind of work he would have to do back in New Hastings to sweat there. Just walking along wouldn’t do it, not at this time of year.
Thinking of oil thrushes made him hungry. He would have to hunt before long. Well, at least hunting was easy here, when the quarry didn’t know enough to run away. Going after rabbits in England hadn’t been like that. Deer and boar knew enough to flee, too, not that the likes of a fisherman could go after them.
He didn’t miss working hard on a hunt. He did miss apples and pears and plums and all the juicy berries he’d known back in England. Nothing like those here. The settlers had planted orchards, but they weren’t bearing abundantly yet. The trees in those orchards were the only fruit trees in Atlantis.
One of the native barrel trees had a sweet sap that could be boiled down into a honeylike syrup or fermented into something halfway between beer and wine. It was pleasant, but it wasn’t the same as wandering through the woods and finding fruit. He couldn’t do that here.
No matter how much he craved the sun, he didn’t stay out in the meadow longer than he had to. Around New Hastings and Bredestown, red-crested eagles—and their attacks on settlers—had grown scarce. Here in the west, though, no one had hunted them. No one had gone after their nests. The birds were still common, and still deadly dangerous. A lone man had scant hope of fighting one off if it took him for a honker.
Under the trees, Richard breathed easier. The birds went right on singing as he walked along. The big katydids fell silent at his approaching footfalls. They feared men. They feared everything, because so many things ate them.
Richard had eaten them two or three times, when he couldn’t catch anything bigger. If you peeled off their legs and feelers before you roasted them, and if you ate them in a couple of bites, without much thinking about what you were doing…If you did all that, they tasted a little like shrimp. But they tasted more the way he thought bugs would taste—sort of greenish—and so he wasn’t anxious to repeat the experiment.
A salamander on a tree trunk eyed him. It didn’t scurry away or show any sign of alarm. Nor did it try to look like something else, the way so many crawling things did. Even in the gloom under the trees, it stood out: its background color was blood red, while the spots that measled it were a brilliant yellow.
He left it alone. There were brightly colored salamanders back near New Hastings, too. They weren’t identical to this one, but they had to be close cousins. He’d seen what happened when a dog ate one: it took a few steps, then fell over dead. A few years earlier, they’d found a two-year-old girl who’d gone missing also dead, with half a colorful salamander in her mouth.
“You can do as you please for all of me, deathworm,” Richard told the creature, and gave it a wide berth. For all he knew, just touching it could kill. He didn’t care to find out the hard way.
High overhead, a red-crested eagle screeched. Richard flattened himself against a tree—not the one where the salamander insolently rested. He didn’t think the eagle was hunting him—he didn’t know the eagle was hunting anything. Why take chances, though?
It screeched again, from the same place. He peered up, up, up. Peer as he would, he couldn’t see the bird. It was high up in a redwood, and anything high up in a redwood was higher than it could be anywhere else. Countless branches all shaggy with needles hid the eagle from the ground. No doubt it could see a long, long way from there. If a honker anywhere within its range of vision walked out onto a meadow to forage, the red-crested eagle could take wing and strike.
Even though he couldn’t see it, Richard didn’t feel altogether safe from the eagle, for he feared it might be able to see him. One thing the settlers had learned: the eagles had better eyes than they did. A bird would appear out of nowhere to strike at a honker or a man, or to carry off a lamb or a dog or, once or twice, a toddler. A fishing-boat skipper with eyes like that could name his own price, but the birds outdid mere men.
This one called again. Now it was in the air. As its screeches receded into the distance, Richard breathed easy again. Whatever it was after, it wasn’t after him. That meant he could press on.
Faint in the distance, he heard honker alarm cries. The bird must have struck. Whether it had killed…If it hadn’t, chances were it would soon find some other perch. He needed to be careful, but you always needed to be careful when you were the only man in strange country.
Something slithered away through the ferns. Atlantis had far more serpents than England did, and more of them were venomous. You had to watch where you put your feet. Well, you didn’t have to, but you were liable to be sorry if you didn’t. Some of the vipers twitched their tails, perhaps in anger, just before they struck. If they happened to lie coiled among dry leaves, that twitching might make enough nois
e to warn a wary man. Or, of course, it might not.
He hadn’t got a good look at this snake. He didn’t know if it was one of the poisonous kind. He wasn’t inclined to go after it and find out, either.
The ground sloped up under his feet. Then he topped the low rise and headed down instead. The afternoon sun flashed off water ahead.
At first, Richard could make out no more through the screening of trees and ferns ahead. A pond? A lake? He hadn’t gone much farther before he realized that, if it was a lake, it was a big one. He pushed harder. Now he wanted to get out into open country, at least long enough to take a good look at what he’d found.
Sunshine meant he’d come to the edge of the woods. “Oh,” he said softly as he got the look he wanted. After a moment’s wonder, he added, “If that’s not Avalon Bay, then this coast has two of them.”
He could see the quiet water of the bay, the lips of land that almost closed around it, and the opening that gave access to the wide ocean beyond. Henry hadn’t lied—this was a harbor in a million. It hardly mattered that there was nowhere to go from here. This was the sort of place where you wanted to build a town just because you could.
And there might be somewhere to go, after all. There were those copperskinned men the Basques had found, the ones with the name Henry and his crewmen pronounced differently every time they tried it. Did they have anything worth trading?
Another land across the sea, one you could reach from Atlantis…That was a surprise. But then, Atlantis itself was a surprise—one surprise after another, in fact. Richard wondered whether François Kersauzon rued the day when he sold the secret to his father. A third of a hold of salt cod? It didn’t seem enough, not when the Englishmen had done so much more with the new land than Kersauzon’s Bretons had.
Even the Basques had done more with Atlantis than the Bretons had, and the Basques had got off to a late start here. Richard paused, peering out into the bay. He thought the Basques had got a late start here. No matter what he thought, though, could he prove it? Like the Bretons, like the Englishmen, Basques and Galicians sailed deep into the Atlantic after cod. Just because his own father heard of Atlantis from the Bretons, that didn’t mean the Basques and Galicians must have. Maybe they’d stumbled over the new land on their own.
Have to ask them, next time I see one—whenever that is, Richard thought. He had no idea when it would be. He’d never traveled south. Basques came up to New Hastings every now and again, but he couldn’t remember the last time one went inland to Bredestown. Richard was curious about the copperskinned unpronounceables. How had they made out after they got to Gernika?
He looked out at the ocean again, or what he could see of it through the mouth of the bay. It wasn’t impossible, he supposed, that he would see a sail out there on the Atlantic. Henry hadn’t taken the Rose out around the northern cape this year, but maybe the Basques had gone around to the south and then sailed west toward their new land, their inhabited land.
Henry hadn’t wanted them to find Avalon Bay. That had made sense even before Richard saw this marvelous harbor with his own eyes. Now that he had, he was as sure as his brother that nobody but Englishmen had any business exploring or making a home here.
A river ran into the northern part of the bay. Henry had said so. Henry and his crew hadn’t taken a boat up the river, so nobody knew whether the stream ran west from the green ridge of mountains Richard had penetrated or came down from the north.
If it did rise in the mountains, it would make a wonderful highway across the western half of Atlantis. You could build a raft or a boat up in the mountain country and then ride the rest of the way. You could if there weren’t too many rocks or mudflats, anyway.
That would be worth knowing. Richard went on blazing his trail as he headed north toward the river. If it didn’t suit his purposes, he could always go back the way he’d come out. He didn’t want to: he’d already been over that ground once. But he could, which was comforting in its way.
Shorebirds flew up in shrieking clouds when they caught sight of him. They wouldn’t have done that on the eastern shore, or not to the same degree. A lot of the birds in the east were as naive about people as honkers were. What did that say? Was it close enough from here to the new land with the copperskinned people that more western shorebirds made the journey and grew familiar with hunters? Richard couldn’t see what else it was likely to mean.
He swore under his breath. He’d seen snipe in those clouds of birds, and snipe made uncommonly fine eating. The ones back near New Hastings were tame enough to catch by hand. Not these. If he wanted them, he’d have to get them the hard way.
Even without snipe roasted in clay, he went on. Over along the eastern edge of the bay, what was water, what marsh, and what land seemed as much a matter of opinion as anything else. Although it was bright daylight, mosquitoes buzzed. Henry had made it plain the water was deeper out by the insweeping arms of land. One of those would be the place to build, then.
Birds swooped here and there after the swarms of insects. Some of the swallows were achingly like the ones he’d left behind in England. Others were larger, with a purple cast to their feathers. Instead of flitting all the time, some birds perched on branches and stumps and made forays against the mosquitoes. “Pee-bee!” they called gaily. “Pee-bee!”
Richard found the river a little before sunset. It meandered through low country, so he had trouble being sure, but he thought it came down from the east. “I’ll find out tomorrow,” he said.
With a bone hook, some worms he dug out of the boggy soil, and a length of line, he had no trouble pulling a couple of trout from the stream. They wouldn’t make as good a supper as snipe would have, but they were a lot better than nothing.
He wondered how things were back in New Hastings. Cold and wet and boring, unless he missed his guess. Not much happened there, not these days. When he got back, he’d give people something to talk about for a while.
VIII
Three of the Earl of Warwick’s troopers tramped down the middle of New Hastings’ widest street, pulling their boots out of the mud at every step. Rain pattered down, which would make the mud even thicker and gluier before long. The troopers’ mailshirts jingled as they walked. To keep the rain off of their byrnies and helms, they wore hooded wool cloaks they’d taken from the settlers.
Edward Radcliffe wore a cloak himself, and a broad-brimmed hat in lieu of a hood. He made sure he steered well clear of Warwick’s men. The less reason they had to get angry at him, the smaller the chance they would do something he’d regret. He watched them trudge by. They paid him no attention at all.
The soldiers seldom went about in groups smaller than three, not any more. Two of them had suffered unfortunate accidents while walking around by themselves. Nobody could prove anything. Even Warwick admitted as much. But the exiled noble had called Edward in to the house he’d appropriated and laid down the law like Moses coming down from Mount Sinai.
“This will stop,” Warwick said bluntly. “It will, or I shall turn loose my wolves, and New Hastings will not be the happier for that.”
“Your Lordship, I had nothing to do with it,” Edward said.
“I believe you. If I didn’t believe you, you would be dead, and I would be talking to someone else.” Richard Neville didn’t waste sweet words on his social inferiors—which meant he wasted them on no one in Atlantis. “Still, these people listen to you. And they had better, if they don’t want to see what slaughter looks like. They will not play me for a fool. D’you understand me?”
“Oh, yes. You always make yourself very plain, sir,” Edward Radcliffe answered. “But may I ask you one question?”
“Go ahead.” By Warwick’s tone, he was granting a favor to a man who didn’t deserve it.
“Even if your soldiers hold New Hastings down, what good will it do you? What will you get from it?”
Richard Neville stared at him. They might both use English, but they didn’t speak the same language. “If
I cannot be a lord in England, Radcliffe, I shall be a lord—no, a king—here. This may be a miserable puddle of a realm, but it is my miserable puddle of a realm. Do you understand me now?”
“I certainly do, your Lordship,” Edward said.
“Good. Then get out.”
Get out Edward Radcliffe did, thanking heaven the noble let him leave. And he spread the word, as Warwick wanted him to do. But he spread it for his own reasons, not for the earl’s.
“We don’t want a king here, do we?” he said when he visited his son after getting away from Warwick, and answered his own question: “No, by God, of course we don’t, not if he uses his soldiers to steal from us and to hold us down.”
“Why shouldn’t we knock ’em over the head as we find the chance, then?” Henry said—and he was only the first of many. “If we get rid of a few now, the rest will be easier to dispose of later.”
Reluctantly, Edward shook his head. “If Warwick keeps them all together, think what they can do to us. Do you want England’s worthless war coming to the shores of Atlantis?”
“Sooner or later, we’ll have to kill them all.” Again, Henry was only the first who said that. The Earl of Warwick’s soldiers had not endeared themselves in New Hastings.
“How can we, without raising the whole settlement?” Edward asked. “They have training. They have discipline. They have armor. One of them is worth more in the field than one of us.”
His son smiled a most unpleasant smile. “We have longbows.”
He was right. A clothyard shaft from a longbow would pierce any mailshirt ever made. A shot at close range would pierce plate. But he seemed to think being right was enough. Edward Radcliffe feared he knew better.
“Unless we kill them all at once, the rest take their revenge,” he said. “The whole settlement is hostage to them. Trying and failing is worse than not trying at all.”
Opening Atlantis Page 13
