Opening Atlantis (22 page)

“Sorry, love. Not this lot,” Rodney answered.

Ethel pouted. “Why not?” Her voice took on a sugared whine that could coax almost anything out of her father.

Almost—but not quite. “Because they're worth good silver to me, that's why not,” Rodney Radcliffe said. “And they cost blood to take. That makes 'em too dear to kill for sport.” Whether killing them for sport was wrong didn't worry him. Silver did. Silver was one more measure of a man's rank among men.

“But I want to,” Ethel persisted. She didn't care to come up short at anything—which only proved she was her father's daughter.

“No,” Red Rodney said, and the flush that mounted to his cheeks came from choler as well as rum. “My men listen to me. You'd bloody well better, too. If they don't listen, I make 'em sorry. You think I can't make you sorry?”

He didn't put his foot down very often. When he did, he was likely to crush whatever lay beneath it. That could include Ethel, as she had painful reason to remember. The whine didn't go away, but it did change course: “Well, what can I shoot, then?”

“If you have to shoot something, go up on the stockade and shoot the first stray dog you see. Nobody'll miss that,” her father answered. “And after you do, get one of the slaveys to chuck the carcass into the bay. Don't leave it lying there to rot and stink. Does that suit you, you little rakehell?”

“I'd still rather shoot a copperskin,” Ethel said. Red Rodney's face must have sent up storm warnings, for she backtracked in a hurry: “A stray dog will do, I suppose. Better than nothing.” She hurried away.

A few minutes later, a pistol banged. Rodney was tearing into roasted honker then, and couldn't hear the dog howl. He guessed it did, though, because Ethel didn't come back unhappy. A smile spread over his face. He'd done what a father should do: he'd pleased his little girl—and he'd got her out of his hair for a while.

He didn't smile so much about the honker. “What have we got here?” he demanded. “This sorry bastard's no bigger than a rooster's drumstick.” He exaggerated, and by no small amount, but he'd seen plenty of bigger honker legs.

“Begging your pardon, sir, but it's the best the hunters brought back,” the cook replied.

“Likely tell, likely tell,” Rodney said. “When I was Ethel's age, by Christ, the honkers were three times the size of this miserable bird.”

“Hunters say, sir, that the big ones are all gone—at least from close enough to Avalon to bring them back before they spoil,” the cook told him. “They have to shoot the smaller, scrubbier kinds instead. Even those are harder to find than they were once upon a time.”

“Sweet suffering Jesus!” Rodney poured himself more rum. “Will we have to start raising sheep and goats and cows? Are we farmers or are we men?”

The cook maintained a prudent silence. He was no pirate himself. He'd cooked for the governor of Nieuw Haarlem in Terranova till Red Rodney captured him and carried him back to Avalon. After eating some of his food, Rodney refused a ransom for him. The cook hadn't done badly here—or rather, he might have done much worse, and he was smart enough to know it. If he said too much, his lot might change in a hurry.

“Running out of honkers!” Rodney said. “Bloody hell! What's Atlantis coming to if we're running out of honkers?”

Meinheer Piet Kieft had impressive waxed mustaches and an even more impressive pot belly. The governor of Nieuw Haarlem nodded to William Radcliff. “I do not love your cousin,” he said in gutturally accented English.

“Well, your Excellency, I must say that I'd wager I've not loved him for longer than you have,” William replied. “He has robbed me, plundered my ships, done all he could to hurt me.”

Piet Kieft snapped his fingers and poured more rum into his pewter cup. “Did he ever make you jump out a window naked when you were about to futter a serving girl with the best tits in the world?” He paused meditatively. “It was a second-story window.”

“Oh, dear,” Elijah Walton said before William could respond to that. “I'd heard you were somewhat discommoded in that raid, your Excellency, but I confess I did not realize the full extent of your, ah, difficulties. Please accept my sympathies.”

“And mine,” William added. He hoped, for the serving girl's sake, she'd been about to get on top.

“This is not even the worst of it,” Kieft continued. “That son of a sow of a Red Rodney Radcliffe, that black-handed bastard, he stole from me my prime cook, and would not sell him back to me. It is war to the knife between me and him.”

Yes, you look as if you've spent all the time since starving,
William thought. Piet Kieft hadn't come to Stuart to be mocked, though. “Well, your Excellency, now is the time to see whether we can pay him back.”

“Pay him back for sacking my town—
ja,
” Kieft said. “I sack his. Pay him back for stealing Cornelius and making Katrina giggle when she sees me instead of opening her legs?…Even if I cut his heart out, it is not enough.” His piggy little eyes flashed. He wasn't pretty, but William Radcliff wouldn't have wanted him for an enemy.

“You have ships,” Walton said. “Mr. Radcliff here, our kindly host, has ships. I also have ships at my beck and call. If we gather together our separate contingents and sail against Avalon with overwhelming force—”

“It will be the greatest miracle since the Resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” Radcliff finished for him.

“Your lack of spirit is distressing,” Walton said.

“I don't lack spirit—no such thing,” William replied. “But who will bell the cat, and when, and how? I admire you, sir, for persuading Meinheer Kieft to confer with us. Nevertheless, people have been mooting the fall of Avalon since the pirates first seized it. That is many years ago now, but they hold it still.”

“They go on holding it, too, if we don't work against them,” Piet Kieft said. “I aim to work against them—and most against Red Rodney—no matter what you do. But Master Walton is right. We have a better chance if we work together. I will do this. I do not even claim command.”

That made William Radcliff blink. That a Dutchman would take orders from an Englishman at sea…was no small miracle itself. The Dutch reckoned themselves the best sailors in the world, and the English would have been hard pressed to prove them wrong. England and Holland had fought two naval wars in the past generation, and the Dutch had got the better of it both times.

“Well, well.” William Radcliff turned to Elijah Walton. “If our comrade is so generous, can we fail to match him?”

Walton frowned. “My instructions are that an Englishman should lead the fleet against the corsairs.”

“And what am I if not an Englishman—and the man on the spot?” Radcliff asked angrily. “If you call me a damned honker, sir, as if I were a New Hastings man, I will wish you joy of our enterprise—and much luck in taking it anywhere without the aid of Radcliff of Stuart.”

“Be not overhasty, Mr. Radcliff, I pray you,” Walton said. “All these insults come from your own mouth, and none from mine.”

“You say this. Can you prove it? Will you prove it?” William pressed. “Or, by saying I am but an Atlantean, will you make me out to be a worthless settler, not deserving to associate with, let alone lead, his betters from the mother country?”

Coughing, Elijah Walton answered, “You cannot deny, sir, that your roots have been transplanted away from English soil these two centuries past.”

“Bugger my roots. My heart is English,” Radcliff said.

Piet Kieft stirred. “You started this, Walton. You set the pot on the fire. Will you now take it off and let it go cold because you cannot get all of your way? Or did you come here for just that purpose, so you could go back to London and say, ‘I tried, but we could reach no agreement against these corsairs'?”

“Before God, Meinheer Kieft, I did not!” Walton exclaimed.

Kieft looked around William Radcliff's baroque jewel box of a study: the bookshelves, with volumes in English and Latin and French; the polished brass astrolable on the wall, part decoration, part tool; the ready-cut quills and the jars of ink; the coffee simmering over a low fire; the calico cat curled up asleep on a cushion. “This place seems English enough to suit me. Does it not seem to you the same?”

Perhaps Walton flushed, or perhaps it was a trick of the light streaming in through the south-facing octagonal window. The veritable Englishman's gaze fixed on a honker skull, cleaned and polished, that held down one of the piles of paper on Radcliff's desk. The honker seemed to stare back from empty eye sockets.

“Oh, come now, sir!” William said. “Come now! You might see the same, the very same, in a merchant's residence in London, or a scholar's, as a curiosity of natural philosophy. Deny it if you can.”

Instead of denying it, Elijah Walton grunted. “Oh, very well,” he said—most grudgingly, but say it he did. “Shall we style you Grand High Admiral of the Hesperian Gulf, then?” He gave a mocking seated bow.

“I care little what you call me,” William Radcliff answered. “If I do what I set out to do, everyone who comes along will try his damnedest to filch the credit from me. And if I fail, I'll be that stupid honker from Atlantis, and all the blame will come down on my head. You win either way, Mr. Walton.”

Piet Kieft chuckled and nodded. He too knew what being a settler meant. As for Walton…he did not seem entirely displeased at the prospect.

A pigeon fluttered into the roost at Black Hand Fort. Pigeons had spread with men in Atlantis. Several native varieties of dove lived here, including a couple with wings too stunted to let them fly, but there had been no pigeons till people brought them hither.

This particular pigeon had a piece of parchment tied to its left leg. The handler who spied the parchment gently removed it, read the note on the inner surface, and hotfooted it to Red Rodney's chamber.

His knock didn't quite interrupt the pirate captain at play, which was lucky for him. Rodney's companion squeaked and yanked a silk coverlet—loot from one of the small, Spanish-held islands south of Atlantis—up to her chin. “Don't fret yourself, Jenny. He wouldn't dare bother me if it weren't important,” Radcliffe said. As he pulled up his breeches, he also raised his voice: “What's toward?”

“A pigeon from Stuart,” came the voice from the other side of the door.

“Ha!” Red Rodney threw on his shirt, too. He was still barefoot, but he didn't care. He went without shoes aboard ship more often than not, the better to feel the deck under his soles. “I knew it had to be something that mattered.”

“And I don't?” Jenny said sulkily, but he was already striding toward the door.

His mind moved perhaps even faster than his feet. Of course he had spies on the east coast. Who in his right mind wouldn't? He assumed his foes had spies in Avalon, too. They had reason not to love him and reason to try to find out what he was up to. With luck, he could feed them full of lies.

And maybe they were trying to do the same to him. Well, he'd find out. His thumb came down on the latch. He scowled at the man in the hallway. “What's going on, Mick?”
It had better be interesting,
his voice warned.

“Pigeon just in from Stuart, skipper,” Mick repeated, and held out the message the bird had carried.

Red Rodney needed to squint to read it; the handwriting was precise but tiny, to cram as much as possible into a small space. As he read, he started to swear. “You've seen this?” he demanded.

“I have indeed,” the Irishman answered.

“Well, keep your mouth shut about it till I decide what to do. Can you manage that?”

“Sure and I can.”

“You'd better, by Christ. Dutchmen and Englishmen and my own cold-hearted cousin. If that's not a mix cooked up in hell, I don't know what would be. They aim to gut us, Mick, gut us like a honker after you knock it over the head. Are we going to let them get away with it?”

The pigeonkeeper muttered something in Erse. Rodney Radcliffe didn't know what it meant, but it didn't sound as if the man favored giving their enemies an easy time. No one in Avalon would. What the English did to pirates they caught could make the hardest man shiver of nights. And what the English did was a mercy next to what happened when the Spaniards got hold of you. The Spaniards liked whips, and they liked fire….

He read the scrap of parchment again. The Spaniards didn't seem to be part of the gang William Radcliff was putting together. Rodney assumed his cousin crouched at the center of the plot. Where else would a spider go?

Returning to English, Mick asked, “How do you aim to stop the spalpeens, now?”

“We'll have to fight 'em. We can't very well run away, now can we?” Red Rodney said. The other pirate shook his head. Rodney muttered under his breath.
Could
freebooters fight as a fleet? They would have to, wouldn't they? He could see the need. Would his fellow great captains be able to? How many of them were in Avalon right now? How many would get back soon?