Opening Atlantis (4 page)

He brought the
St. George
into the Stade, the fishing boats' harbor. “You're back late,” a dockside lounger called. “We'd almost given up looking for you.”

“You're holy men, though,” another man said. “With so many Masses going up for your souls, how can you be anything else? I wish I were so sure I had all my sins washed away.”

“Not much room to sin in a fishing boat,” Henry said with a grin. “We'll have to make up for it now that we're here.”

A dealer hurried out onto the pier where the fishermen were tying up. “You'll want to sell your fish to me, won't you, Edward?” he said, his voice as greasy as cod-liver oil.

“If you give me a proper price for them, Paul,” Radcliffe answered. “If you act like a Jew the way you do most of the time, I'd sooner sell them to an honest man instead.”

“You wound me,” Paul Finley said, but this was as much a dance with formal steps as the dicker with the Breton salt dealer had been. And when Finley saw the size of the cod and the slabs of cod that came from the
St. George
's hold, even his air of world-weary contempt for anything that had to do with salt fish cracked. “I don't know the last time I set eyes on the like,” he admitted, which meant he'd never seen fish that came close to these. “Where did you catch 'em?”

“I planted them in the dark of the moon, the way you do with crops that grow below the surface,” Edward Radcliffe answered gravely. His men sniggered. Sooner or later, one of them would get drunk and spill the word. With a little luck, it would be later.

Paul Finley gave him a very strange look. “I almost believe you.”

“Fair enough, for I almost told the truth,” Edward said.

The dealer's eye raked the fishing boat. “I don't see Hugh. Tell me nothing happened to him, please—he's a good man.”

Edward's mouth tightened. “We lost him, I'm afraid. You'll keep that to yourself, by God, for I've not yet spoken to his wife and his father.” He remembered the master salter's scream and the eagle tearing at his kidneys and flying off with his blood dripping from its beak and claws.

Finley crossed himself. “Lord have mercy on him. This was at sea?” Before anyone had to lie, he answered his own question: “Well, of course it was. Where else would it be?” He forced himself back to what lay before him. “You have the hold full of fish this size and quality?”

“Two-thirds full,” Edward said, his voice flat: if Paul Finley wanted to make something of that, he would have to do it himself.

He raised an eyebrow. Before he spoke, though, he seemed to think better of it. “Mm, that's your business—or your misfortune, depending. If you'd come home earlier in the season, you would have got a better price for them.”

“You'll take any way you can find to knock down what we did out there, won't you?” Radcliffe spoke without heat. He knew Finley was still following the steps of the dance.

“You do your job, I do mine,” the dealer said easily. “You want to make money when you sell, and so do I.” He named a price.

Edward Radcliffe's bellow of rage was a permitted step, but not a common one. You needed to feel some of that fury to show it, and he did. “Even you know that's thievery, Paul. I've heard what worse cod than this is bringing.” He named a price close to three times as high as Finley's.

They went back and forth, back and forth. Edward knew his quality. He also knew his hold was one-third empty, which made him hold out for every farthing on the fish he did have. Finley came up ever so slowly, like a drowning man who didn't want to break the surface.

Both of them were sweating when they finally clasped hands. “If you're going to be that tough with a full load of fish…” Finley shook his head. “Lord Jesu! Maybe I ought to let some other dealer see how he likes matching wits with you.” He counted out silver and gave it to Edward. “That's what we said, yes?”

Radcliffe counted the money. It wasn't that he thought Finley was trying to cheat him. But checking never hurt anything. He nodded. “Yes, that's what we said.” Their hands joined again.

“One of these days, you'll tell me where you really came by cod of that size,” Finley said.

“Yes, one of these days I will, and it may come sooner than you think,” Edward agreed. “But not yet, Paul. Not yet.”

Childbearing and hard work had coarsened Nell Radcliffe's figure. The years had lined her face and streaked her red-blond hair with gray. When Edward looked at her, he still saw the beauty he'd married more than half a lifetime earlier. He made love like a sailor newly home from the sea—in the daytime, which would have scandalized the neighbors had they known, and had so many of them not been fisherfolk themselves.

Then he told her why the
St. George
was so late coming home, and of the new land he'd trodden. “Atlantis?” she echoed, the fine lines at the corners of her eyes crinkling as they narrowed. “But Atlantis is a story, a fable, a make-believe, like the drowned city of Ys and the bells you hear under the water.”

“Funny you should talk of Ys, when a Breton guided me west to Atlantis,” Edward said. “But it's no dream. We still have the bone from a smoked honker leg—we ate the meat on the way home, when the fishing flagged. And Hugh Fenner died on the coast of Atlantis.”

“How?” Nell asked.

“Bad. Hard.” Edward left it there. He didn't intend to say more to Meg Fenner, either, or even that much. “But all the same, it's a true place, a good place, a place of great promise—you should have seen Paul's eyes when he got a look at the cod. Not Paradise, or Hugh would live yet, but a good place. A fine place.”

“You sound like you want to go back,” his wife said.

He nodded, there beside her in the bed so much wider and softer than his bunk aboard the
St. George
—and he was lucky to have a bunk on the cog, when his sailors slung hammocks instead. “I do,” he said. “It's a broader land than this one, and a man could live there free of a lord. A man could
be
a lord there, by heaven, for who would say he could not?”

Nell stirred, so the leather lashings under the mattress creaked—not the way they had a little while before, but enough to make him smile. “You don't just want to visit,” she said slowly. “You want to stay.”

“I do,” Edward repeated.

“What about me, then? What about your children? What about—everything?” Her wave took in not just the house, not just Hastings, but all of England.

“I'd want you to come along, that's what. We'd make a new life there, a new town—we could call it New Hastings, if you like.”

“I like this Hastings well enough,” Nell said.

“Talk to Richard and Henry. They're as wild for Atlantis as I am,” Edward said, though he wasn't quite sure that was so about Henry. “Talk to Mary and Kate and Philippa”—his daughters, all of them married to fishermen. “Do you think they'd be sorry to have gardens as wide as they could grow them, and no noble landlord and no rent to pay?”

“I think they'd be sorry to sail to the edge of the world and maybe off it,” Nell answered. “I think I would be, too. I thought I'd live my whole life in Hastings. I never wanted to do anything else.”

Edward Radcliffe had to remind himself not to get angry. Nell wouldn't be the only one who'd want to stay right here. Most people were like limpets, clinging to one spot. If you went farther than a day's walk from where you were born, it was the journey of a lifetime, and you'd bore your neighbors with it the rest of your days. Fishermen and traders were different; it was easy to forget how different. Edward had seen far more of the world than his wife had. He was eager to see more. She wasn't eager to see any.

“If life is better there, why not go?” he asked, doing his best to keep his voice gentle.

“Who says it would be better? We'd have to start from the beginning, with nothing at all,” Nell said.

“We'd have everything we could bring with us from England,” Edward said. “Livestock and seeds and saplings and cuttings and tools…”

“And someone would steal them from us as soon as we set foot in this place. If you men spend all your time fishing, who would drive off our enemies? We couldn't call on a lord or the king for soldiers, the way we can here if those nasty French dogs cross the Channel.”

Patiently, Edward answered, “There'd be no enemies. We would have the first settlement, the only settlement, on those shores.”

“Would we? What about that Breton pirate who sold you the secret—a third of the catch, Christ have mercy!” Nell said. “Is he lying with his wife right now, filling her head with wind and air about the marvelous land on the other side of the sea? Will there be a town full of those rogues around the cape from ours? They don't even talk a language a regular person can understand!”

He almost reminded her he spoke Breton, but feared it would do more harm than good. And he didn't know François Kersauzon wasn't planning to settle down in Atlantis. He feared Kersauzon was. The Breton was nobody's fool; if Radcliffe could see the advantages, so could he.

“And what about the wild men who'll live there?” Nell said. “They won't even know our Lord's name, and they'll murder us in our beds first chance they get.”

“No wild men.” There Edward spoke with assurance.

“How can you know that, on the tiny visit you had?” his wife demanded.

“Because the beasts in Atlantis had no fear of us,” he replied. “If they knew men at all, they would know to be afraid of them.” Even wolves and bears feared men. They killed men sometimes, but they feared them, and fled when they could.

“Well…maybe,” Nell said grudgingly. “Or maybe there just weren't any savages close by.”

“If there are men anywhere in Atlantis, they'd be there. That land was too fine to stay empty.” Edward squeezed his wife. “Don't say no right away. Think it through. You can't imagine what you're throwing away if you turn your back on this.”

“I know what I've got now,” she said. “I can imagine worse a lot easier than I can imagine better.”

“It will be better there,” Edward said. “For us, for our children, for their children, and for all who come after them, as long as there be Radcliffes.” The fervor in his voice amazed him.

“Well, maybe,” Nell said again.

Before long, Hastings bubbled with the name of Atlantis. If you wanted to go and settle someplace, you couldn't very well keep where you were going a secret. Word spread fastest among fishermen and merchants, who had the ships to get to the new land. But others heard, too: the smiths and potters and carpenters who sold them the things they would need on the distant shore, and after that those in authority.

Edward Radcliffe was dickering with a farmer named George Tree over several laying hens and a rooster when a black-robed priest strode up to him. “I would have speech with you, Master Radcliffe,” he said importantly.

“What do you need, Father John?” Radcliffe asked.

“Step aside, if you please.” The priest made it plain he wanted no one else to overhear.

“Whatever you like, holy Father.” Edward nodded to the farmer. “I'll be with you in a bit, George.”

“Them birds won't fly away while you're gone,” Tree said.

Father John had the smooth pink complexion and double chin of a man who'd seldom known hunger. He also had a blade of a nose and shrewd black eyes. “Do I hear rightly?” he asked after leading Edward down the muddy street till they could talk in reasonable privacy. “Do you purpose sailing off to the edge of the world and leaving the holy mother church behind?”

“I do want to sail off, yes, Father,” Radcliffe said, and the priest's mouth tightened. Quickly, the fisherman went on. “But I never dreamt of leaving the church behind. If a priest would come with us, we'd count it a blessing. There should be a chapel in Atlantis—why not?”

“I…see,” Father John said slowly. Edward hoped he hid his own tension; he didn't want every clergyman in town preaching against his venture. If anything could ruin his plans, that could. If people decided God was against them, they wouldn't go. Father John tapped a forefinger against the side of his leg. “If a priest did come with you, you would give him proper support?”

“We'd be glad to have him, as I said. We'd give him what we could. I can't say he wouldn't have to work some on his own, though,” Radcliffe answered. “It's a bare shore, you understand. We'll all be working hard, at first, hard as can be. How can we have a drone among us, meaning no offense?”

“Priests are not drones. Drones toil not, nor do they spin.” Father John's voice was as stiff as his spine. Radcliffe thought priests fit the definition more than well enough, but saying so wouldn't do. Sure enough, Father John went on, “Who would intercede with God, but for priests? Who would baptize, who hear confession, who give unction at the end of life?”