Henry shook his head. “Nothing is worse than not trying at all. If we don’t try at all, what are we but their dogs?”
“Patience,” Edward told him. “Patience. What we have to do is, we have to make sure we don’t fail when we try. And we have to make sure Warwick and his wolves—his name for them, not mine—think we are their dogs till we try. If they’re ready for us, if they’re waiting for us, our work gets that much harder. Am I right or am I wrong?”
“I am a man, not a dog,” Henry said, but then, shaking his head, “I’ll be a quiet man, I suppose—for a while.”
“That’s what we need.” Edward didn’t try to hide the relief in his voice.
He had to play the dog, too, no matter how it galled him. And acting subservient wounded him all the more because he knew he wouldn’t be worth much if it came to a fight. For a man his age, he was healthy enough. He could still see well—at a distance. He hadn’t gone deaf. He still had most of his teeth. All the same, he was nearer seventy than sixty. He wasn’t very strong, and he wasn’t very fast. His wind wasn’t what it had been, either.
When he grumbled about it, Henry set a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t fret, Father. You’ve still got more brains than any three men in Atlantis, and that includes Warwick. When we move against him, we’ll move because of you.”
“You flatter me,” Edward said. “I think you’re wrong, though. When New Hastings rises against Warwick, chances are it will be because a soldier does something so horrible, he’ll make everyone hate him—and his lord. These things work out that way.”
“If you say so.” Henry winked at him. “What I say is, you show you’ve got all those brains by knowing such things.”
“What I say is, you’re a miserable pup,” Edward said with rough affection.
Henry winked again. “And where do I get that? From you or from Mother?”
“Don’t let her hear you ask, or you’ll get it, all right,” Edward said. They both laughed, as if he were kidding.
Snow on the ground and sleet in the air told Richard Radcliffe he was back on the east side of the mountains again. His breath smoked, as if he were a dragon. He had a dragonish temper right now. Just a few miles back, the weather had been tolerable—not warm, but tolerable. No more.
“We’re living in the wrong place. We all ought to pack up and head for Avalon Bay,” he grumbled. Fog spurted from his mouth and nose with every word. And if that didn’t prove his point, he couldn’t imagine what would.
He also couldn’t imagine getting everyone in New Hastings and Bredestown to pack up and travel across Atlantis or sail around it to get to the land where it was always April. Most people were like plants; they found a spot, and they put down roots. He didn’t even intend to try to talk the whole English settlement into leaving. A few men, a few families, might. More likely, nobody would.
“Bloody fools,” Richard said, scuffing through the snow. He kept his head down, partly to ward against the nasty wind and partly to spot any tracks there might be. If he could follow a trail straight to a honker or an oil thrush…
When the weather got cold, you needed to eat more. The fire inside you needed more fuel to keep going. And, before long, he found some. This country was extravagantly rich in extravagantly stupid game. The oil thrush he came upon eyed him in mild confusion as he approached. Maybe, like the red-crested eagles, it thought he was some strange kind of honker. It probably wondered what he was doing right up to the moment when he knocked it over the head.
He found shelter behind a fallen pine. Dried-out needles made good tinder: he dug around under the trunk till he found some the snow hadn’t reached. Once he got the fire going, he fed it with twigs and branches. The warmth felt good—felt wonderful, in fact. He butchered the oil thrush and started cooking a leg. He hadn’t done the best job of plucking it; the stink of singeing feathers filled his nose. Grease dripped down onto the flames and made them sputter and pop.
He carved chunks of meat off the bones with his knife. He didn’t admire his own cookery. Part of the bird was nearly burnt, the rest nearly raw. He didn’t care. After tossing the gnawed leg bones aside, he cooked the liver and the heart and the gizzard, and then the other thigh. The breast and the wings had less meat on them.
A couple of soft, slow, almost sleepy chirps startled him. Then he started to laugh. He wasn’t the only one who thought the fire felt good. One of those mouse-sized katydids had taken shelter against the cold under the downed pine. With the fire close by to heat it up, it revived. Maybe it thought spring had come early.
“Sorry, bug,” Richard said. “Pretty soon, I’m going to push on, and then you’ll go back to sleep.” In England, dormice snoozed away the winter. No dormice here. No mice of any kind, except the ones that had sneaked aboard the cogs that brought the settlers from England. No native rats, either. Richard didn’t miss them. Who but a cat would?
After he built up the fire to burn for a while, he rolled himself in his blanket and went to sleep. It wasn’t a soft bed, but it would do. Now he hoped the weather wouldn’t warm up. If it started to rain, it would soak through even his thick, greasy woolen blanket. Then weariness claimed him, and he stopped worrying about the weather or anything else.
He was shivering when he woke up. That meant he woke sooner than he might have. It was still dark, with only the faintest hint of twilight in the east. New Hastings lay farther south than its namesake in England, so its wintertime days were longer and its nights shorter than the ones he’d grown up with. All the same, its winters seemed harsher than the ones in the land he’d left behind. He wondered why that should be so, but had no doubt it was.
“Father should have settled farther south yet,” he muttered as he poked the embers to red life, fed more tinder onto them, and got the fire going again. From everything he’d heard, the cold season was milder down in Cosquer and much milder down in Gernika. The Bretons and Basques had it easier than their English counterparts did.
Of course, that coin was two-sided. New Hastings’ summers were hotter and stickier than the ones back in England. The farther south you went down Atlantis’ east coast, the more pronounced that got. By the time you reached Gernika, wouldn’t you turn into a puddle of sweat?
There had to be a better way—and there was, on the far side of the mountains. From what he’d seen and from what Henry had reported, the weather near Avalon Bay came close to perfection the whole year round. Again, he wondered why there should be such a difference, and, again, he didn’t know. That the difference was there and that it was real, he couldn’t help believing. He’d seen it. He’d felt it.
His stomach growled. He roasted the oil thrush’s other drumstick and broke his fast with it. He left the rest of the carcass behind when he went east once more. In England, he wouldn’t have, for he wouldn’t have been confident of catching anything else. Even a halfway decent hunter, though, had a hard time going hungry in Atlantis. He’d left a lot of big birds behind him, dead, in his travels. He could always kill another one when he needed to.
Downhill again. Downhill all the way to New Hastings. All he needed to do was find the trail he’d blazed and follow it, and it would take him home again. What could be easier?
“Yes? And then what?” he asked himself aloud. When he got back, how many people would care where he’d gone? How many would care what he’d done? Oh, some would, but most of the settlers just wanted to get on with the lives they’d made here. They thought him strange for plunging into the wilderness every chance he got. He wondered why they’d bothered leaving England.
Even his wife thought him strange for plunging into the wilderness—and for leaving her alone. He hoped she hadn’t done anything to make a scandal while he was gone. Fishermen who went to sea for weeks and months at a time ran that risk. Richard had no reason to think Bertha was unfaithful, but he knew it was one of the things that could happen to a traveling man.
Of course, it was also one of the things that could happen to a man who lived
over his shop. If a woman was going to, she was going to. The same held true for men, but women had a harder time doing anything about it.
He was perhaps halfway down from the mountains to the sea when he got a surprise—he saw a hog drinking at a swift-running stream. A heartbeat later, the hog saw him or smelled him or heard him. It snorted and trotted away. Unlike honkers and oil thrushes, it knew what a man would want from it.
“By Our Lady, they’ve come a long way!” Richard exclaimed. If he’d seen this one here, some were bound to have traveled even farther west. He wondered if any swine had reached the mountains or gone over them. He laughed. They would give the local beasts a lively time.
Halfway up the towering spire of a redwood, a parrot screeched. Others started to call, too, till the woods echoed with their cries. That made Richard laugh again. Back in England, he’d heard of parrots, but never seen them. From everything he’d heard, they lived in hot countries. Not in Atlantis. Here they were, screaming their heads off in the middle of winter. You never could tell.
At last, near the headwaters of a small stream running east, he came to a pine marked not with one of his usual blazes but with a B. He smiled. That blaze marked the Brede. All he had to do was follow the river, and it would take him home.
But when he neared Bredestown, he got another surprise, and one not nearly so welcome as the hog. More game out in the woods was always welcome. Strange men tramping the edges of the cleared ground wearing helmets and chainmail were anything but.
“Who the devil are you?” one of the strangers said when Richard stepped out from the shelter of the trees.
“What the devil are you?” the other one added.
He looked down at himself. His clothes were filthy and tattered, his beard long and unkempt. When he was alone in the forest, what difference did it make? It made one now.
“My name is Richard Radcliffe.” Talking to other people, especially to strangers, felt odd after so long in his own company. “I’ve been to the other side of Atlantis, and now I’m back. Who are you?”
“Why, the Earl of Warwick’s men.” By the way the soldier said it, even someone just back from the other side of Atlantis—or the other side of the moon—should have known that. In case Richard didn’t know that, the man added, “Warwick’s in charge here now.”
“Is he?” Richard said tonelessly. Both soldiers nodded. Both of them kept hand on swordhilt. Richard got the idea they would make him sorry if he said that didn’t suit him. That being so, he didn’t. “When I set out, the earl was on the far side of the sea. So were you two, I expect,” seemed safer.
Both men at arms nodded. “But we’re bloody well here now, so we have to make the best of it,” the bigger one said. He had a scar on his upper lip and two missing front teeth. He also had bushy eyebrows, which came down and together as he frowned. “Radcliffe, is it? You’ll be the old grumbler’s other son?”
No one had ever talked about Richard’s father that way before. Richard had brawled—who hadn’t?—but he was no warrior. He wouldn’t have cared to take on one of these bruisers, let alone both of them, even if they weren’t armored. Another soft answer seemed best, so he gave one: “Henry is my brother, yes.”
They put their heads together and muttered to each other. Richard wondered whether he ought to bolt back into the woods. But the soldier with the missing front teeth said, “Well, now that you’re back, you’d damned well better keep your nose clean—that’s all I’ve got to tell you.”
“You’d damned well better keep all of you clean.” The other soldier held his nose. “You stink like a dung heap, friend.”
Richard had no doubt the Earl of Warwick’s man was right. “It’s been cold,” he said with such dignity as he could muster. “Not much chance to wash.” It hadn’t been all that cold on the other side of the mountains, but the soldiers didn’t need to know that. When you were all by yourself, though, what point to washing? Most people didn’t bother very often even when they weren’t by themselves: Warwick’s men stank of sour sweat, too. But Richard had no doubt he was riper. He looked forward to a bath.
After a last couple of growls, Warwick’s men let him go on. A sigh of relief gusted from him as soon as they got far enough away not to hear it. Cows and sheep and a few horses grazed on the meadows and gleaned what they could from the fallow fields, manuring them with their dung. Dogs barked and growled. A brindled cat sneaked around the corner of a barn. It might almost have been England.
It might, that is, till Richard looked past the plowed and settled ground. Those somber woods had no counterpart in the lands across the sea. Here and there in the settlement, a pine or a barrel tree still stood. The redwoods were gone. Not only was their timber useful, but living under their shadow would have made the English feel like mice living under a church steeple.
Prince, the family dog, snarled at Richard as he came up. Then the beast took his scent and stared like a player doing a comedy turn in a mummers’ show. Is that really you? his line would have been.
“Yes, you miserable hound, it is me,” Richard said.
Whining, the dog came up and licked his hand. He wondered what would happen if he stayed away long enough for Prince to forget him. He would get bitten, that was what.
Bertha was down on her knees in the garden plot by the farmhouse. You could keep things alive through these winters if you looked after them. Up to a certain point, carrots and parsnips got sweeter if you left them in the ground. And far fewer pests plagued them here than would have been so back in England.
Richard’s wife glanced up from her work. Her mouth dropped open. The way he looked didn’t faze her—she’d seen him come home from the woods before. She scrambled to her feet and ran to his arms.
“Hello, dear,” he said. She felt good pressed against him; her solid warmth reminded him how long he’d been away.
“So good to see you.” Bertha tilted her face up for a kiss. “I was beginning to worry—not a lot, but some.”
“Just a long trip, not a hard one,” Richard said. “But who are those damned brigands in chainmail? Where did they come from?”
He didn’t hold his voice down. His wife looked alarmed. “You’ve met them, have you? Be careful how you talk about them. If anyone makes them angry, he pays.”
“Somebody ought to make them pay, by God,” Richard said. “Those byrnies won’t hold out arrows.”
Bertha crossed herself. “Sweet suffering Jesus, you sound like your father. He’s wild to do them in, but they don’t give many chances.”
“What’s this Warwick doing here, anyway?” Richard asked.
“He was sent here for our sins—and for his own,” his wife answered. “He made the king angry, so Henry sent him off to Freetown, to do his worst there. But his captain landed here instead, and now we’re stuck with him.”
They went inside. She poured water from a bucket into a kettle and set it on the fire to heat. Richard smiled. He’d be able to bathe soon. But the smile didn’t last. “We’re going to have to do something about him,” he said.
“You do sound like your father,” Bertha said. “He goes on and on about how he didn’t come to Atlantis to bend the knee to any nobleman. One day he’ll say it too loud, or to the wrong man, and it will get back to Warwick. And then the trouble will start.”
“To the wrong man?” Richard frowned. He’d been away from human company too long; he needed a moment to realize what that had to mean. “Some of the settlers would betray him to this robber chief?”
“Watch what you say!” Bertha repeated. But she nodded, unhappily. “Some would. They want to get along any way they can. They don’t want trouble. If I’ve heard that once, I’ve heard it a hundred times. ‘I don’t want trouble,’ they say, and pull their heads into their shells like turtles.”
“They’ll have more trouble if they bend the knee to this dog of a Warwick than they will if they give him a good kick in the teeth,” Richard said. His wife started to speak again, then clos
ed her mouth instead. He suspected he’d just sounded like his father one more time. Well, his father knew a hawk from a heron when the wind was southerly, all right.
Bertha took the kettle off the fire. She mixed the hot water with a little cold—not too much, because it would cool fast enough on its own. Richard stripped off his filthy clothes and scrubbed at himself with a rag and some of the harsh, homemade soap she gave him. By the time he was done, his skin had gone from assorted shades of brown to pink. She trimmed his hair and beard with a pair of shears she’d brought from England.
“You look like the man I married again,” she said when she finished, “and not the Old Man of the Woods any more.”
“I feel like the man you married, too.” He reached for her. They kissed. Laughing, he picked her up and carried her over to the bed.
Edward, these days, stayed close to home. He knew he had trouble keeping his mouth shut. If he hadn’t known, Nell would have made a point of reminding him. He hadn’t had to worry about saying what was on his mind, not for years. No one in Atlantis had. People needed to worry now. If you didn’t watch your words, Richard Neville’s bully boys would make you sorry.
The Earl of Warwick acted like a king, or at least like a prince. His bravos held New Hastings hostage. They lived off the fat of the land, taking what they wanted. One of the things Warwick took was Lucy Fenner, the late master salter’s daughter. She was nineteen now, or maybe twenty. People said she was the fairest on this side of the Atlantic: a red-haired beauty with a figure to make a priest forget his vows. She could heat up a cold night—Edward had no doubt of that. He was getting old (no, Devil take it, he’d got old), but he wasn’t dead.
He also wasn’t a bandit chief, to take a woman whether she was willing or not. Warwick…was. Lucy, these days, went around with red-rimmed eyes and an expression beyond sorrowful. She’d never imagined beauty could be dangerous to her. Whether she’d imagined it or not, she was finding out the hard way.
Opening Atlantis Page 14
