Opening Atlantis (7 page)

“See for yourself!” The boy pointed to the bright green growing grain. “
I
don't know what they are! Demons from hell is what they look like.”

“They aren't demons,” Edward said. Those two-legged shapes might be strange to the boy, but he'd seen them before.

“They have the look of something otherworldly.” Father John crossed himself, just in case.

But Edward Radcliffe shook his head. “No, no, Father. Those are the honkers I've been talking about. They think we've spread out a feast for them. They don't know they're a feast for us.” He raised his voice: “We can't let them eat our grain and trample what they don't swallow. Get clubs. Get bows. We'll kill some—they're good eating, mighty good—and drive the rest away.”

When he went out into the fields, he saw that these weren't quite the same kind of honkers as he'd seen the year before. They were bigger and grayer and shaggier of plumage. Their voices were deeper. But they showed no more fear of man than the other honkers had. You could walk right up to one of them and knock it over the head. Down it would fall, and another one ten feet away would go right on eating.

If you didn't kill clean, though…A man named Rob Drinkwater only hurt the honker he hit. It let out a loud, surprised
blatt!
of pain. Before he could strike again and finish it, one of its thick, scaly legs lashed forward. “Oof!” Drinkwater said. That was the last word—or sound—that ever passed his lips. He flew through the air, crashed down, and never moved again: he was all broken inside.

The honker lumbered off, still going
blatt!
The cry got the other enormous birds moving. Fast as a horse could trot, they headed off into the undergrowth. Every stride knocked down more young, hopeful wheat and barley.

Ann Drinkwater keened over her husband's body. The rest of the settlers stared from the dead honkers to the damaged crops and back again. “Will they come again tomorrow?” Richard Radcliffe asked. “Will they come again this afternoon? How many of them will we have to kill before the rest decide they shouldn't come?”

Those were all good questions. Edward had answers to none of them. “We'll butcher these dead ones,” he said. “We can smoke some of the meat, or salt it, or dry it. We can't let it go to waste. After that—”

“They're afraid of the damned eagles, if they aren't afraid of us,” Henry said. “If we screech like them, maybe we can scare off the honkers.”

“We'd have a better chance if we could fly like them,” his brother said, and Edward judged Richard likely right.

Numbly, the settlers got to work. Henry carried a pile of honker guts well away from the place where the creature had died. He made sure he included the kidneys, though they might have gone into a stew if he hadn't.

He waited in some nearby bushes, a hunting bow in his hand. Down from the sky to the offal spiraled…a vulture. Even the vultures here differed from the ones back in England. This one was almost all black, down to the skin on its head. Only the white patches near the base of the wings broke the monotony.

Henry came out and shooed it away before it landed and stole the leavings. It flew off with big, indignant wingbeats. Edward watched it go before he realized it had a healthy fear of men. He wondered what that meant, and whether it meant anything.

His son went back into cover. Henry had a hunter's patience—or, more likely, a fisherman's patience he was for once applying to life on land. And that patience got its reward when an eagle descended on the kidneys and fat much more swiftly and ferociously than the vulture had. Edward wasn't too far away when it did: he was close enough to notice the coppery crest of feathers on top of the great bird's head as it tore at the bait Henry had left for it.

With a shout of triumph, Henry sprang up, let fly…and missed. He couldn't have been more than eight or ten yards away, but he missed anyhow. The eagle might not have feared men, but a sharp stick whizzing past its head startled it. It launched itself into the air with a kidney in its beak.

Henry said some things that were bound to cost him time in purgatory. He made as if to break the bow over his knee. “Don't do that!” Edward called. “We haven't got many, and we haven't the time to make more without need, either. Besides, it's a poor workman who blames his tools.”

“I couldn't hit water if I fell out of a boat.” Henry was still furious at himself.

“There, there,” his father soothed, as if he were still a little boy. “You're a fine archer—for a fisherman.”

“Ha!” Henry made a noise that sounded like a laugh but wasn't.

“Keep at it,” Edward said. “It's a good idea. If we don't kill these cursed eagles, they'll go on killing us.”

“And the honkers, too,” Henry said. “They're as bad as deer or unfenced cattle in the crops. How much did we lose today?”

“I don't know. Some. Not more than we can afford, though, I don't think,” Edward answered. “And the eagles are more dangerous than honkers ever could be.”

“Tell it to poor Rob Drinkwater. Tell it to his widow and his orphaned brats.”

“A horse or a mule can kick a man to death, too,” Edward said. “That's all honkers are—grazers that go on two legs, not four. But when God made those eagles, He made them to kill.”

Henry thought it over, then nodded. “He made them to kill honkers, I'd say. And we look enough like honkers, they think we make proper prey, too.”

Edward Radcliffe started to say something, then stopped and sent his son a surprised glance. “I hadn't looked at it so. Damned if I don't think you're right.”

Henry walked over, retrieved his wasted arrow, and put it back into the quiver with the rest. “We'll have enough to get through the winter with or without crops, seems like,” he said. “Between the cod and the honkers, we'll do fine.”

“Aye, belike,” Edward said. “But I want my bread, too. And Lord knows I want my beer. If we have to fence off the fields to keep the honkers out, well, we can do that.”

“It will be extra work,” Henry said. “We're all working harder now than we would have on the other side of the ocean.”

“
Now
we are, yes,” Edward agreed. “But that's only because we have to make the things we take for granted back there. Once we have them, things will be easier here than they were in England. Why else would we have come?”

Henry laughed. “You don't need to talk me into it, Father. I'm already here.” He made as if to break the bow again, but this time not in earnest. “I'd be gladder I'm here if only I were a better archer.”

“Each cat his own rat,” Edward said. “Plenty of fine bowmen who'd puke their guts out on a fishing cog.”

“One of the girls was screeching about a rat the other day,” Henry said. “It must have got ashore in a boat—I don't think this country has any rats of its own.”

“I don't, either, but I was waiting for that to happen,” Edward said. “No rabbits here, either, or none I've seen, which is a pity, for I like rabbit pie and jugged hare. You can't keep rats and mice out of things. We brought cats, too, so there won't be
too
many vermin.”

“I saw a cat with a lizard's tail in its mouth yesterday,” Henry said.

“Yes, and they hunt the blackbirds that look like robins, too,” Edward said. “Never worry about cats. They don't starve.”

“I wasn't worrying,” Henry said. “Next time we go back to England, though, maybe we could bring some rabbits over. They're good eating and good hunting.”

“Well, maybe we could,” Edward said.

R
abbits. More chickens and ducks. Two more sows, with their piglets. And Tom Cawthorne, a bowyer and fletcher, and his family. They all came back to Atlantis on the
St. George.
With the good hunting in the woods back of New Hastings, Edward was glad to get a man like Cawthorne. The bow-and arrow-maker probably wouldn't have come if his oldest son hadn't just got a girl with child. Dan Cawthorne didn't want to marry her, and so….

“If you didn't want to marry her, why did you sleep with her?” Edward asked the youth—he was seventeen or so—once they got out to sea.

Dan looked at him as if he were not only crazy but ancient. “Why? Because she wanted me to,” he answered. By the way he said it, only a fool could imagine any other reason. “We didn't think anything would happen. Don't you remember what it's like to—?” He broke off, not quite soon enough.

To have a stiff yard all the time.
That was what he'd been about to say, that or something a lot like it. And Edward did remember. His yard still worked well enough, but it wasn't stiff all the time, the way it had been when he was seventeen. He sighed. One of these days, Dan would get older, too. Edward tried again: “Well, if you like lying with her so much, why wouldn't you wed her?”

The bowyer and fletcher's son sent him another
you idiot
look. “Don't you know Judy Martin at all, Master Radcliffe?” he said. “As soon as she puts her clothes back on, she starts talking, and you'd have to hit her to make her shut up. I'm not even sure that would work.”

Edward paid little attention to how much sixteen-year-old girls talked—these days, anyhow. There had been a time when he could have gone into great detail on the subject, but that was thirty years gone for him. He laughed and shook his head, wondering why he was worrying about this anyhow. If anything, Dan Cawthorne had done him a favor. If Dan hadn't got Judy Martin in trouble, Tom Cawthorne wouldn't have wanted to leave Hastings for an unknown shore.

Right now, the shore was unknown to Edward, too. Anything could have happened while he made the long round trip to England. Plague might have broken out. There might have been natives in the new country after all, despite the signs to the contrary. Or Bretons or Galicians or Basques might have happened upon New Hastings. Maybe, if they had, they would have stayed friendly and traded. Then again, maybe not.

His eye went to one of the two swivel guns the
St. George
now mounted. She wasn't a warship. She was nothing like a warship, which would have had high castles fore and aft packed with archers. But she could fight a little now if she had to. Against what she was likely to meet in Atlantean waters, that would do.

The ocean was rougher this time out than it had been on the first journey to settle the new land. The wind was more contrary, too, so the fishing boat stayed at sea more than a week longer before it came to Atlantis. The Cawthornes went greener and greener. Dan's bravado evaporated. At one point, clutching the rail, he moaned, “I wish I would've stayed and listened to Judy the rest of my days!”

“You'll change your mind once we get ashore,” Edward told him.

Dan Cawthorne managed a feeble glare. “Why aren't you puking your guts out, too?” he asked. Then, as if talking about it reminded him of it—which it could do for some people—he gulped and bent over and started to retch.

“This isn't a bad blow,” Edward said. “You should see a real storm, if you think this is something.”

Dan took his right hand off the rail just long enough to cross himself. His left kept its death grip. “God spare me that!” he choked out, and spat something disgusting into the green, boiling water.

When the fishing cog finally reached the banks off the coast of Atlantis, Edward and the rest of the crew started pulling big cod out of the sea. Dan and Tom watched in fascination. The Cawthorne women—and even Dan's little brother, who couldn't have been more than eight—seemed more horrified. “How can you do that to the poor fish?” Tom's wife cried as Radcliffe gutted a fat four-foot cod.

“Well, Mistress Louisa, we'd go hungry if I didn't.” Edward kicked the offal towards one of the sows, which fed greedily. “Don't you ever kill any of your own meat?”

Louisa Cawthorne gave a reluctant nod. “I do, and I cry every time I wring a pullet's neck.”

She was a tender-hearted creature, then. She was tender in other ways, too. Sailing with a woman aboard when your wife wasn't proved an unexpected strain. Edward kept his hands to himself, but his dreams were warmer than the ones he usually had at sea.

He breathed a sigh of relief when they sighted land at last. He didn't see New Hastings, or the smoke rising from its fires. That didn't surprise him; he hadn't seen any English fishing boats—or any others—bobbing in the ocean. Navigation was anything but exact; Edward wasn't even sure whether he was north or south of the new settlement.

He shot the sun with his cross-staff. Then he did it again, and then once more. If he weighed all three measurements together and gave a little something extra to the one he trusted most, he thought the
St. George
lay south of where she should have been. Most of the fishermen agreed with him. Nobody was positive, though. One of the men said, “Well, we'll go north and see what happens. If we don't like it in the end, we can bloody well turn around.”

Edward nodded. That sounded about right to him. And that very afternoon, a fisherman shouted, “Sail ho!”

If she was an English cog, everything would be fine. If she wasn't…Edward ordered the swivel guns loaded with scrap iron. If you got ready for a fight, sometimes you could stay away from one.

The lines of that cog did look familiar. Edward Radcliffe squinted north. Where had he seen her before? He cursed. “Bugger me blind if that's not the
Morzen
!”

Sure enough, the hail that came was in Breton: “Ahoy, the
St. George
! Is that you, Moses?” Yes, that was François Kersauzon's voice, all right.

“Moses?” Edward shouted back. “What are you talking about, you blasphemous toad?”

“You mistake me for your mother,” Kersauzon said sweetly. “And is it not that you have led your people to the Promised Land? I saw your new town, and all the cogs in the sea close by. You've done well, Edward, well enough to make me jealous.”

They were closing fast on each other. Radcliffe looked to his guns. If he opened fire now, maybe he could cripple the
Morzen
and finish her off at his leisure. He didn't want anyone jealous of New Hastings. If François Kersauzon didn't come home to Le Croisic, wouldn't that make other Bretons less likely to sail far into the west? The temptation!

But Kersauzon hadn't done anything to him, or, from what Edward gathered, to New Hastings. He'd done Edward a favor, in fact, by leading him to Atlantis. Yes, he'd profited from it, but he'd deserved to. If Edward returned evil for that great good, wouldn't he pay in the next world, pay for all eternity? He crossed himself. He was a believing man. He didn't want to imperil his soul.

And so he waved to the west, to the waiting Atlantean shore. “It's a broad land, François,” he said. “Room for Englishmen and Bretons—and Frenchmen and Basques, too, I shouldn't wonder.”

“It could be that we'll end up neighbors here one day, then,” Kersauzon replied. “I always thought Englishmen were better at a distance, but what can you do?” His comic shrug was very French. He would have got furious had Edward told him so.

Instead, Radcliffe made sure he really was south of the English settlement. Kersauzon didn't mock him for asking. Where dead reckoning left off at sea and prayer began was a question every sailor had to face now and then. The two cogs parted with fishermen on each calling, “Good luck!” to the other.

Henry came back to Edward as he steered the
St. George
toward New Hastings. Quietly, the young man said, “I wondered if you'd fight him.”

Edward Radcliffe sighed. “I wondered the same thing. But how could I? We wouldn't be here if not for him.”

His son sighed, too. “Well, Father, it's not that you're wrong. I only pray you won't spend the rest of your life sorry for being right.”

“God forbid it!” Edward said, and crossed himself again.

New Hastings thrived. How could it do anything else, set on fertile soil with the closest enemies an ocean away? Swarms of fish came out of the sea. Crops and livestock burgeoned. Hogs and rabbits got loose in the wild, but no one had imagined that they wouldn't.

Not many years went by before honkers grew scarce around the settlement. People complained that they had to walk a day or two to find the big flightless birds and kill them. The birds couldn't seem to figure out that these strange two-legged creatures were a menace to them.

Red-crested eagles grew scarcer, too, though not fast enough to suit Edward Radcliffe. The eagles killed a child and a woman, and seemed especially fond of the fat above the kidneys of sheep. Shooting them while they attacked was hopeless.

Shooting them while they perched, on the other hand…The great fierce birds often sat in trees on the edges of the woods so they could spot honkers grazing in the fields and meadows beyond. The eagles did see humans as prey, but didn't seem to see them as threats. Archers could get close to the trees and let fly.

After a while, the eagles around the settlement thinned out. Mothers still watched their small children more carefully than they would have back in England, for the danger from the sky was diminished, not gone.

When Edward Radcliffe sailed the
St. George
back to England again, six years after he first set eyes on Atlantis, he found the country fallen into the civil war everyone had dreaded so long. The port officials at Hastings roughly demanded whether he favored the White Rose or the Red. Finding they were loyal to the House of York, he declared for the White Rose himself, though in truth he couldn't have cared less whether the king was Yorkist or Lancastrian.

He didn't need long to find that most of the people in Hastings felt the same way he did. Who ruled hardly mattered to them. All they cared about was that someone should rule and bring the land peace. As usual, the lords who fought were profoundly indifferent to what the people wanted.

Edward wasn't. The trouble in England made people in Hastings who'd laughed at him on his last visit suddenly eager to find quiet across the ocean. “Marry, it'd be wonderful to go about my business without worrying about soldiers stealing my stock or burning down my shop,” a leatherworker said.

“They wouldn't do that in New Hastings,” Radcliffe said. “There are no soldiers in New Hastings.”

“No soldiers!” The other man might have had a vision of a miracle. “Isn't that a fine thing!” He paused, scratching his poorly shaved chin. “D'you need a man who makes leather?”

“Well, we might,” Edward replied.

“I'd pay,” the artisan said. “By God, I'd pay plenty to get away from these swaggering thieves in chainmail. I have a daughter who's fifteen, and I'd pay even more to get her away from them.”

“I understand that,” Radcliffe said. If his womenfolk were here now, he would have wanted to get them away, too. He rubbed
his
chin. Getting money for taking new settlers across the ocean hadn't occurred to him till now. He wondered why not. “We'll see what we can do for you, friend.”

“I am your friend—your friend for life—if you take me away from this,” the leather maker said.

Radcliffe knew not to count on that too much. Gratitude went bad almost as fast as fish did. But it might last to the other side of the sea. “Let's talk,” he said, and so they did.

The leather maker wasn't the only one who spent silver for his passage. That proved just as well, because Edward had to pay a fat bribe to take the
St. George
out of the harbor. Even then, he left under cover of darkness. But he did leave, and once he was at sea he didn't worry about anybody catching him.

Once they'd put Land's End behind them, Henry came over to him and said, “I wonder how long it will be before ships full of people we never heard of start dropping anchor right offshore.”

“How would they know where to go?” Edward asked, automatically setting himself against the rolling and pitching of the cog in the Atlantic's long, tall swells.

His son laughed at him—one of the less endearing things a son can do to his father. “Word has to be all over the Cinque Ports by now—likely all up and down the coast,” Henry answered. “Load what you hope is enough food into a cog, sail west and a bit south till you think you're going to fall off the edge of the world, and what do you know? You end up in Atlantis!”

“What do you know?” Edward Radcliffe echoed in distinctly hollow tones. It wasn't that Henry was wrong. No, it was that he was much too likely to be right. If you had the nerve to sail the open sea, you could come to Atlantis. And if you were sure Atlantis was there, if you were sure you wouldn't fall off the edge of the world, wouldn't that help you find the nerve to set sail? Edward clapped a hand to his forehead. “All the riffraff of the kingdom, landing in our laps!”