Opening Atlantis (26 page)

“One way
and
another, I suspect,” William said. Yes, the backwoodsmen were sadly short on spit and polish. He thought they could fight anyway, and wished the rest of his recruits left him as confident. “From now till the fighting's over, you're a captain, with a captain's pay.”

“Good,” Marcus said matter-of-factly. “I don't chase silver as hard as you do, but I don't scare it off when it ambles into my sights, either.”

“Fine. I'll put you and your men into the
Pride of Atlantis.
” William pointed to the ship. “And do you recollect what we spoke of when last you visited Stuart?” He didn't go into detail, not when he hadn't yet tracked down the pigeon fanciers who kept Avalon informed of what went on here.

Marcus nodded. “I'm not likely to forget. Come the time, you won't find us behindhand. You may count on that.”

“Good. I didn't think I would find you so, and I intend to count on it.” William sketched a salute, then made his way down to the
Royal Sovereign.

“The admiral!” the boatswain cried, and piped him aboard. All the men on deck saluted as he came up the gangplank. The naval salute was knuckles-out, so the person honored couldn't see a sailor's pitch-dirtied palm.

Among the men saluting on deck was Elijah Walton. “We await your orders, Admiral,” he said with no irony William could hear.

Standing by him was the
Royal Sovereign
's captain, a red-faced veteran mariner named Adam Barber. He was the man with whom and through whom Radcliff would have to work. “Take us out of the harbor, Mr. Barber,” William said, wincing at his accidental rhyme. “Once we're on the open sea, we'll have the leisure to shake ourselves out into a proper line.”

“Aye aye, sir,” Barber replied. He shouted the necessary orders. Signal flags fluttered up the lines to let the other ships know what they were supposed to do. Were pigeons flying out of Stuart even now, letting the corsairs of Atlantis know their doom was on the way? Men with shotguns waited southwest of the city, but the odds of stopping the birds were slim, and William knew it.

Sweating, swearing sailors hauled up the anchor and the heavy rope that attached it to the ship. Slowly, slowly, they made the capstan turn. The noise it made was half rumble, half squeak. Their chanty, rising over that noise, was loudly and jauntily obscene.

Sails unshrouded. The masts and spars filled with canvas like a tree—an imported tree in Atlantis, where most of the natives were evergreens—coming into new leaf in springtime, but a thousand times faster. The
Royal Sovereign
slid away from the pier, slowly at first but then with more speed and more confidence.

“Nothing like getting under weigh, is there?” William said.

“Well, sir, I don't think so, and that's a fact,” Captain Barber replied. “I suppose other folks can have other notions.” He turned to the pilot, a Stuart native who knew the waters of the harbor as intimately as he knew the contours of his wife's body. “I place myself in your capable hands, Mr. McCormick.”

“And I'll try not to make you sorry for it, sir,” David McCormick answered. As the
Royal Sovereign
slid past a clump of barrel trees, he swung the wheel a couple of spokes' worth to port. “The deeper channel here lies this way. We'd likely not go aground anyhow, not unless the tide were lower, but all the same—why take the chance, eh?”

“If I have to take a chance in battle, that's one thing,” Barber said. “It comes with my station, you might say. Taking a chance on the way to battle…is something I don't care to do, thank you very much. Choose the deeper channel every time, sir.”

“That is well said,” William Radcliff put in. “Enough danger we can't steer clear of. What we can avoid, best we do.”

Captain Barber eyed him in some surprise. “Meaning no offense, sir, but you have better sense than I was led to believe.” Elijah Walton tried to hide in plain sight.

“Well, perhaps I do and perhaps I don't,” William said. “Either way, though, we'd do best to save our fighting for the pirates. Quarreling among ourselves won't get us anywhere but into trouble.”

Red Rodney Radcliffe waited for a pigeon from Stuart letting him know the enemy fleet had sailed. He waited and waited, but no bird came. Something was wrong. He didn't know what, but something was. William Radcliff wouldn't wait, not with all his ships assembled.

“They must have caught your bird fancier,” Jenny said when the pirate chief grumbled about it.

“Too bloody right they have,” Rodney said gloomily.

And if they had, what did that mean? It meant he was waiting and waiting for a message he wouldn't get. It also meant he was damn lucky he'd sent that pinnace north.
God bless Ethel,
he thought. Without the little ship and the birds aboard it, his unloving and unloved cousin's ships might have come up to Avalon unannounced and undiscovered.

A surprise would have meant disaster, nothing less. The whole point of fighting the enemy men-of-war was keeping them far away from the corsairs' base. If they took Avalon…If they did, individual pirates and pirate ships might go on here and there. But the present order of things, where the freebooters were almost a nation and where their vessels ruled the Hesperian Gulf, would die.

He took a fat gold ring out of a strongbox and pressed it onto one of Jenny's fingers. It was too big for anything but her thumb. Red Rodney didn't care. “Keep it, sweetheart,” he said.

She kissed him. He was generous enough, but not usually so generous as this. “What did I do? What did I say?” she asked.

“Never mind,” he said. “You're you. That's plenty.”

Jenny stared at the thick gold circlet. “But I want more!”

“You always do,” Red Rodney said, not without affection. “You make a good pirate, Jenny.”

“Huh!” That didn't suit her the way it would have suited Ethel. He might have known. She wanted to be a fine lady. What she was doing in Avalon with a dream like that…Well, people didn't always end up where they wanted to. You had to do what you could with what life gave you—either that or you had to give it a good swift kick and make it do what you wanted. Women had a harder time there than men did.

No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than someone knocked on the bedroom door. He and Jenny were decorously clad this time; she didn't have to duck under the covers. He opened the door. There stood Mick. “Ha!” Rodney said. “Is it word from Stuart at bloody last?” Maybe he'd worried over nothing.

“No, skipper—from the pinnace.” The Irishman held out an unfolded scrap of parchment.

“Give me that!” Radcliffe snatched it out of his hands.
We are not far from North Cape,
he read.
Enemy now coming into sight. Fleet is about the size you guessed it would be. Will get away if we can.
The message was dated the fourteenth. “What's today's date?” Red Rodney demanded.

“The fifteenth, isn't it?” Jenny said from behind him. Mick nodded.

Rodney Radcliffe calculated how fast the enemy fleet could sail. With reasonable winds, they would get to Atlantis in three or four more days. They would, that is, unless they were stopped. He had the chance to do just that.

“We move!” he shouted, so that both his mistress and the pigeon man jumped. He went on shouting, too, so that first his own crew and then the rest of the corsairs of Avalon would pay attention to him. And they did. The ragged, mismatched fleet sailed the next morning. Aboard the
Black Hand
, Red Rodney wore a smile that stretched from ear to ear. If William Radcliff wanted the pirates wrecked, he would have to do it the hard way.

William Radcliff looked discontentedly toward the Atlantean coast. Here in the west, with the warm current bathing the shore, the weather stayed mild much farther north than it did on the other side of the Green Ridge Mountains. “I wish we'd been able to sink that pinnace,” he grumbled.

“Don't worry, Admiral,” Elijah Walton said. William thought the Englishman used the title to pacify him, the way a mother might give a baby her breast. Walton went on, “We made the bastards aboard it beach themselves so they wouldn't be caught. They won't pass word on to the freebooters that we bear down on Avalon—we'll get there long before they can.”

“You are a clever man, sir—but, perhaps, not so clever as you might be,” William said. “How have the pirates been spying out our every move in Stuart?”

“By pigeon. But you seem to have put a stop to that.”

“Well, I can hope I did.” William Radcliff shrugged broad shoulders. “Whether I did or not, though, I couldn't very well stop the men aboard that little ship from loosing whatever birds they had. And I think it very likely they had some. Why was that ship there, if not to spy out our coming? No other reason makes sense. And they would pass word on to Avalon as quickly as ever they could. They would know we'd have swift ships aplenty, and that they might be overtaken themselves. Only pigeons make sense, then.”

Walton chewed on that with even less enthusiasm than he used for eating at sea. He was not a good sailor, not when the ocean turned rough, as it had in the voyage up from Stuart to North Cape. “Well, you are right,” he said at last. “You are right, and I wish to heaven you weren't.”

“Oh, so do I,” Radcliff replied, “but what difference does that make? If we fail against the freebooters, the ones who ran off the beach before we burnt their pinnace will come down to Avalon sooner or later and find their fellows carrying on just as they were before.”

A regiment might be unable to sustain itself traversing a long swath of Atlantean terrain. Marcus Radcliffe had made that all too plain to William. But a smaller group, as long as they kept their heads, would not have much trouble finding enough to eat.

“Maybe a band of copperskinned renegadoes or escaped blackamoors will fall on them before they reach their promised land,” Walton said.

“Maybe, but not likely, not in this quadrant of Atlantis,” William Radcliff said. “Far more Negro slaves in the French and Spanish holdings in the southeast, and the same holds true in lesser measure for the Terranovan natives. This is the least settled part of the land.”

“A pity, for it seems no less fruitful than any other, and rather more so than some farther east,” Elijah Walton said. “The only thing holding it back is its remoteness—well, that and the dampening effect a bloody nest of pirates is apt to have on the settlements of honest men.”

“Its time will come.” Radcliff spoke with sublime confidence. “One day—and sooner than many believe, especially back in England—this land will be as well settled as the home islands, and far more populous and prosperous.”

Walton looked shoreward himself. No axe had ever touched these redwoods. No farmhouses stood out in the meadow. No cattle or sheep or horses grazed upon them. No smoke betrayed human habitation anywhere close by. A honker, symbol of all that was old and wild about Atlantis, stared incuriously out to sea. The Englishman neither said anything nor needed to.

Stubbornly, William Radcliff said, “That time
will
come, sir. Not in my lifetime or yours, perhaps, but it will. You may rely upon it. We shall also continue with the deposition of the Terranovan savages from their longtime haunts until they cease to encumber the western continent.”

“There I can scarcely disagree with you, not when some of the savages have gold,” Walton said. “A great pity the Spaniards jumped on them first, but we have not got poor on Spain's leavings, indeed we haven't. If the corsairs plundered only Spain's ships, I should not mind them a bit.”

“Nor I,” William said. “But, since they plunder me and mine, I will end them if I can. And with a fleet like this under my command, I believe I can do nothing else.”

The fleet was a grand sight, spread out across the sea, the great ships of the line bunched together in the center, with faster, more nimble vessels on either wing. Nothing matched the splendor of a big sailing ship's stately passage over the sea. It put Radcliff in mind of a dowager gliding across the dance floor in skirts that swept out and concealed all the motion of her lower body. But for the thrum of the breeze in the rigging and the laundry-line sound of a sail filling with wind now and then, the journey was almost silent, which only added to its grandeur.

However grand and splendid it might be, it wasn't fast enough to suit the admiral. He didn't know what he could do about that. Well, actually, he did know: he could do nothing. Even with a breeze from the north, the fleet had to make headway against the warm current that came up from the other direction. Farther out in the Hesperian Gulf, the current did not flow, but the added distance and the unending uncertainty about longitude made evading the current anything but a sure time-saver.

“We may still come upon Avalon unawares,” Walton said.

“We may, yes, but I doubt we shall,” William replied.

“Oh, ye of little faith.” The Englishman's smile took most of the sting from the words.