Opening Atlantis (11 page)

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.

“Come back to me, do you hear?” Bess said.

“I always have,” Henry answered. “I always will.”
I pray I always will.

He walked out onto the beach, right up to the edge of the Atlantic, and waved out to the
Rose.
The mate waved back; the cog's boat went into the water. A couple of fishermen rowed it toward shore.

One of these days, the settlers would have to build jetties out into the ocean so cogs could tie up more conveniently. Either that or they would have to find a proper sheltered harbor instead of this bare stretch of coast open to wind and sky. If they did, New Hastings might wither away. Henry shrugged. Bess wouldn't like that, but to him one place on land wasn't much different from another. Like his father, he only felt at home with a rolling, pitching deck under his feet.

The boat's keel scraped sand and mud. “Hop in, skipper,” one of the fishermen said.

“Bide a moment.” Henry turned back to wave to Bess and blow her a kiss. She waved back. Both rowers snickered. They were bachelors. They didn't understand how a woman could get under a man's skin and into his heart. He hoped they would find wives for themselves one of these days. More men than women came to Atlantis, so it wasn't a sure bet.

He wondered whether that was so for the Bretons and the Basques. If they had more girls than men…well, wouldn't that make a strange sort of commerce among the new settlements? But, from what he'd seen farther south, it seemed more likely to be the same with them as it was here.

“Ready to fare north this time?” the other fisherman asked as they started back to the
Rose.

“Damned if I'm not, Sam,” Henry answered. “We won't stew in our own juices sailing that way, anyhow. Only a couple of little settlements that anyone knows about north of New Hastings, too. Most of what we find will be new.”

“That anyone knows about, yes,” Sam said. “But who can guess whether there's a pirates' nest up there?”

“Not likely,” Henry said. “We'd know if there were pirates, because they'd prey on us. We've lost a couple of boats since we came here, but nobody thinks it was on account of anything but bad weather and uncharted rocks. Plenty of both to go around, Lord knows.”

“You're not wrong there,” Sam admitted. “Still and all, though, what do we know about those other settlers? Maybe they fish part of the time and farm part of the time—aye, and steal part of the time, too, whenever they see the chance.”

“Maybe they do,” Henry said. Sam had a notion of what he was talking about. Henry couldn't swear he'd never turn pirate himself. If the chance for a big haul appeared out of nowhere, if he was sure he could get away with it and not start a feud that would hurt him and his for generations yet to come…Well, who could say what he'd do if something like that came along? The
Rose
carried swivel guns to ward off raiders, which didn't mean she couldn't turn raider herself.

He clambered up the nets stretched along her port side. Sam and Geoff—the other rower—came right behind him. The fishermen in the cog grabbed hold of their hands as they scrambled up over the gunwale and pulled them aboard. Then they brought in the boat, stowing it abaft the mast.

The mate was a broad-shouldered fellow named Bartholomew Smith. “Are we ready?” Henry asked him.

“Ready as we'll ever be,” he answered. “Weighing anchor is all that wants doing—and then we find out what happens when we get colder instead of hotter.”

“You're not old enough to remember fishing runs in the North Sea,” Henry said. “Count your blessings that you're not. This could be something like that.”

“Then why are we doing it?” Smith asked.

“If we don't, someone else will.” For Henry, that was reason enough and more.

O
cean. When you looked west from the
Rose
's bow, there was nothing but ocean.
How far?
Henry Radcliffe wondered. All the way to Cathay? All the way to the edge of the world, where it spilled off in God's waterfall? All the way to some land as unimaginable as Atlantis had been when Henry was a young man?

He didn't know. How could he? He wanted to, hungered to, find out. But that was a voyage for another time, with another ship. The
Rose
was a fine coasting vessel, and the best job a gang of amateur shipwrights could have done when they hacked her out of timber. For striking out across the broad, stormy Atlantic to shores unknown? Well, no.

“Where now, skipper?” Bartholomew Smith asked.

Whenever Henry heard that, he started to look around to see where his father was. But Edward Radcliffe stayed behind in New Hastings. He still put to sea, to fish or to go down the coast to one of the other settlements. Heading off to nowhere for the fun of it, though, was beyond his old bones and creaking muscles.

Or maybe he just thought the
Rose
didn't have much of a chance of coming back from nowhere. And maybe he was right. But if he was, he judged with an old man's sour wisdom. Henry hoped that kind of judgment passed him by. Yet if enough years piled onto him, it probably wouldn't.

“Where now?” he echoed. “West along the coast for a while, and we'll see what it does. If it goes straight, we do the same. If it tends south, we follow. If it tends north…well, we still follow, but I won't like it so well.”

“Who would?” the mate replied. “Can't run all the way up to Iceland, though, or the squareheads would have found this country a long time ago.”

Henry grunted. He hadn't thought of that, and he should have. “We won't go hungry, anyhow,” he said. “Plenty of little fish to net out, and plenty of birds getting fat feeding on them.”

Even as he spoke, a bright-billed puffin plunged into the sea and came out holding three or four sardines. Murres and auks and guillemots also preyed on the abundant fish. So did bigger birds that looked like auks but seemed unable to fly. They swam like small porpoises instead.

Smith must have been thinking of them, for he said, “Shame we can't render some of these birds down to oil, like the thrushes ashore. They'd yield tun after tun, Devil take me if they wouldn't.”

“We ought to think about setting up a trying works here,” Henry said. “Not just for the birds, but for the whales, too.” He'd seen several of the big beasts blowing and breaching not far from the
Rose.
If one of them had risen right under her…There were all kinds of reasons why ships didn't come home.

“Far as the whales go, I'm surprised we didn't find the damned Basques up here ahead of us.” Bartholomew Smith made some gabbling noises that were supposed to be Basque.

Henry laughed, even if the mate's imitation didn't sound much like the real thing. “They're whaling men, all right,” he agreed. There were no more intrepid whalers than the Basques. They had their reasons, too. Like any other fish, whale meat was allowed during Lent and on Fridays. Henry himself was mighty fond of salted whale—
craspoix,
the French called it—and peas.

The big auklike birds were easy to catch. Like so many of Atlantis's creatures, they were ignorant of men. Some of the flying sea birds behaved the same way, but others were warier. Henry wondered what that meant. Did some of them stay in Atlantean waters all the time, while others flew to lands where men were liable to hunt them? Or were some simply stupider than others? A nice question, but one he had no idea how to answer.

Before the
Rose
got very far west at all, her progress slowed even though the wind remained favorable. The water through which she sailed changed color, too, turning lighter and bluer than it had been before. It was also noticeably warmer than the stretch of ocean from which they'd just come.

“Strong current,” Henry remarked.

“Right strong,” Smith agreed. “Seems to scoot along the shore here.”

“It does. Might almost have been put here to make sure we don't get anywhere in a hurry,” Henry said.

“You don't suppose—?” The mate sounded alarmed. Even by the standards of his age and trade, he was a superstitious man.

By the standards of his age and trade, Henry wasn't. “No, I don't think anything of the kind,” he answered. “Old Scratch has better things to do than worry about the likes of us. Or I hope he does, anyhow.” He crossed himself, on the off chance.

Bartholomew Smith did the same thing. “I hope so, too.” His voice quavered a little.

Satan did seem busy elsewhere. Just as Henry hoped, the coast soon started tending southward. Strong breezes blew down from the north to push the
Rose
on her way. She didn't travel as fast as she might have, for the current coming up from the south fought against her, but she did travel.

And the warm current seemed to bring balmy weather with it as it came. They still lay far to the north of New Hastings, but the climate here in the west was far milder than it had been on Atlantis' eastern shore.

“I wonder what it's like here come winter,” Henry said.

“Foggy, I warrant,” Smith replied. “All this warm water striking cold air…Might make London look to its laurels.”

“Have you ever seen London?” Henry asked.

The mate shook his head. “Why on earth would a Hastings fisherman want to go and see London? Have you, skipper?”

“No, never once,” Henry admitted.

“Well, there you are,” Bartholomew Smith said. “And I've been a
New
Hastings fisherman as long as you have, and I don't much want to go back across the sea any more, either. By God, I like it here.”

“So do I. Any land where no lord can tell you what to do and you don't owe taxes to anybody…I like that fine,” Henry said.

When they found a good-sized stream flowing into the ocean, they rowed the water butts ashore to refill them. A gaggle of honkers stared at them in mild curiosity, as if to say,
You're the strangest-looking birds we've ever seen.
They were the strangest-looking honkers Henry had ever seen. They were a pale gray, with orange feet and beaks. Their wings were bigger than those of any variety near New Hastings, though still utterly useless as far as getting them off the ground was concerned.

One of the honkers puffed up its chest and flapped its silly wings at another. “Honnnk!” it screeched. The other bird skittered away, as well as something as tall as a man and considerably heavier could skitter.

Getting the water butts back onto the boat once they were filled was slow, careful work. If you made a mistake, you could put one right through the bottom. Henry was calling out instructions when the rambunctious honker ambled up to him. Perhaps because he was making noise, it seemed to think him some kind of rival. It went through the same sort of display it had with the other honker, puffing itself up, flapping its wings, and making a noise like a badly played horn full of spit.

Henry straightened up. He was, he noted with satisfaction, a couple of inches taller than the orange-legged honker. He jumped up and down. He waved his arms. “Yaaah!” he yelled at the top of his lungs.

The honker started at him in bird-brained disbelief. Then, with a piglike grunt of dismay, it backpedaled, turned, and hastily retreated. The fishermen cheered Henry to the skies. “Well done, skipper!” Sam cried. “I didn't know you spoke its language!”

Laughing, Henry answered, “Hell, it's got to be easier to learn than Basque. And if it decided to give me more trouble, I could always clout it over the head.”

“That works pretty well with the damned Basques, too,” Sam said.

“It does,” Henry agreed. “But they've got harder heads than honkers, and they're liable to try and clout first.”

“You're right about that. Can't trust any of those foreign folk,” Bartholomew Smith said. It never occurred to him, or to Henry, or to Sam, or to any of the other Englishmen, that foreigners might feel the same way about them. In fact, the mate added, “Bugger me blind if we can trust those bloody Dover bastards, either. Freetown? Free, my arse!” He spat to show what he thought of the neighboring settlement.

Sam nodded. “The Bretons are a better bargain than the Dovermen, even if Kersauzon's getting old. Your father's right about that, skipper.”

“Yes.” Henry tried not to sound too glum. Thinking that François Kersauzon was getting old reminded him that his father was, too. The graveyard back of the church already had its share of headstones and more. He didn't want to think about its having one more in particular. And thinking about death and dying reminded him of something else. “Keep an eye out for eagles,” he called. “Wherever we find honkers, chances are we'll find them, too.”

They'd grown scarcer around New Hastings—and, from everything he could see, along the rest of the eastern coast as well. But men were new in these parts. The red-crested eagles would think they were nothing but strange honkers—nothing but food.

To his relief, the work party got the water butts loaded and back to the
Rose
without trouble. Honkers watched without understanding as the cog weighed anchor and sailed south.

Fishing in the warm current that ran up the west coast of Atlantis wasn't anywhere near so fine as it had been farther east. There were fewer sea birds to nab, too; their numbers depended on those of the fish they ate. Every so often, then, the
Rose
would come in close to shore. Honkers were never hard to find, and never hard to kill. Their smoked and salted meat fed the fishermen on the journey south.

“Don't know what we'd do without them,” Henry Radcliffe said, cutting a slab of meat from an enormous thigh.

“We'd go hungry, that's what,” Sam said. Grease ran down the fisherman's chin.

“I'm glad they're so stupid,” Henry said. “It makes hunting them so easy, you almost feel ashamed.”

Sam shook his head. “Not me. I'd be ashamed of starving when you can just knock them over the head.”

The men who went ashore to kill the honkers also came back with pine cones, which had tasty seeds. Other than that, though…“No berry bushes,” one sailor grumbled. “You'd think there'd be swarms of them, too, in weather like this. Nice and damp, but not too cold—feels like spring every day.”

Henry nodded; that was nothing but the truth. “I wonder why there aren't,” he said. “None by New Hastings, either—only the ones we brought from England.”

“Not many proper trees, either,” the sailor said. “No oaks, no elms, no chestnuts, no willows, no apples or pears or plums…Bloody pines and these redwood things. And ferns, like there should be fairies flitting through them.”

“Haven't seen any, God be praised,” Sam said. “No more wee folk in Atlantis when we got here than men.”

“Don't let Bishop John hear you talking of fairies and wee folk, or he'll give you a penance you won't fancy,” Henry warned them. They both nodded. You might believe in such things, but you didn't talk about them where churchmen could overhear. They'd make you sorry if you did.

Up in the crow's nest, the lookout sang out: “There's an inlet ahead!”

Before long, Henry could see it from the deck, too: an opening a couple of miles across, with the sea entering to some considerable distance. He nodded to Bartholomew Smith. “We'd better go in and see what we have there.”

“Aye, skipper.” The mate nodded. “Could be a prime harbor.” He laughed. “Could be, I mean, if there were any people here, and if there was anything to ship from here, and if there was any place you'd want to ship it to from here.”

“Damn it, Bart, if you're going to grumble about every little thing…” Henry said. The mate and the rest of the fishermen laughed.

A few minutes later, a breeze from out of the northwest wafted the
Rose
through the inlet and into the calm waters of the bay. Everyone looked around, trying to see every which way at once. “Oh, my,” Sam said softly, and that summed things up as well as anything.

The bay widened out to north and south beyond the inlet, leaving the best and biggest natural harbor Henry had ever seen. He nodded to Bartholomew Smith. “Well, you were right,” he said.

“I couldn't have been much righter,” the mate replied. “Almost makes me want to settle here, just to make sure nobody else does.”

“Right again,” Henry said. “By Our Lady, what an anchorage! You could put a navy here.”

“Or a flock of pirates,” Smith said.

“You named the trouble there,” Henry pointed out. “What would they have to steal? This is a bare shore.” He paused thoughtfully. “Well, it's a bare shore now. Maybe it won't be one of these days, but not yet.”