Opening Atlantis (8 page)

That wasn't fair. Riffraff wouldn't be able to sail a cog so far, or to afford passage in one. But just then, anyone he hadn't handpicked to come to New Hastings seemed like riffraff to him.

And Henry, damn him, was grinning. “Not just our riffraff, either,” the younger Radcliffe said. “Somewhere between Atlantis and Le Croisic, François Kersauzon and his son are talking the same way—what do you want to bet? The land is there. More and more people know it's there. A land with no kings, a land with no soldiers…Why
wouldn't
half the folk in the world want to pack up and move to a place like that?”

When Edward looked at it that way, he could see no reason why lots of people wouldn't want to travel to Atlantis, either. But he said, “I'll tell you one thing, son. If Atlantis
does
start filling up, it will need soldiers soon enough, to keep some folk from taking what others have.”

“No doubt,” Henry said. “Then the soldiers will start taking on their own, because that's what soldiers do.”

“I know,” Edward said unhappily. He sighed. “And I suppose that's why we need kings—to keep soldiers from taking too much.”

“Well, sometimes kings can do that,” Henry said. “And sometimes…”

He didn't go on, or need to. The war in England they'd barely escaped did most of his talking for him. “God grant that civil war stay far from Atlantis' shores,” Edward said.

“I'm sure He will—for a while,” his son replied. “How many of the folk in New Hastings stand with the White Rose, how many with the Red?”

“I have no idea. I never tried to find out,” Edward Radcliffe said.

“As long as you can say that, and say it truly, we're safe from civil strife,” Henry said. “As soon as you know, as soon as you
need
to know…”

“Yes.” Edward could gauge the political winds along with those of the world. “May that day stay far away, too.” His son—both sons—had bumped heads with him a great many times growing up. But Henry, having at last attained manhood himself, only nodded now.

The War of the Roses did stay away from the western shores. Neither Yorkists nor Lancastrians cared who followed their emblem in the lands across the sea. Not enough people dwelt there to matter to either side.

Yes, the war stayed away. But flotsam and jetsam from it did mark Atlantis. As Henry had foretold, a good many Englishmen thought a land without soldiers and without kings sounded wonderful. They swarmed aboard anything that would float and sailed west.

Some of them, no doubt, starved before they got anywhere close to Atlantis. It was a long journey across rough seas. If the winds went against you, if you crammed too many people aboard for the food you carried, if you couldn't pull in enough fish to make up for your dwindling store of biscuit, if your water butts went dry or got too foul to drink before you sighted land—if any of those things happened, you were doomed.

The fishermen who sailed out of New Hastings didn't see the worst disasters. They saw the folk who planned better, but not quite well enough. Every so often, a shipload of living skeletons would come ashore. Caring for them strained what the settlers could do. The land was rich; hunting and fishing were good. But what would have been plenty for a small village proved a good deal less than that with more mouths to feed.

Edward Radcliffe was almost relieved when a well-equipped flotilla from Dover founded a new town eighty miles down the coast from New Hastings. They called the place Freetown, though some of the people who set it up seemed more interested in running things than he ever had.

But, as he said when he came back from a visit, “The more, the merrier. The land can hold them, and once they get in a couple of crops they'll be able to help us with the rest of the newcomers, the ones who have no notion of what they're doing.”

“Will they help, or will they just turn them away?” Henry asked.

“They'd better not.” Edward's hands folded into fists. “If they try to leave us with all those folk…Well, we won't have it, that's all. But if they're proper Christian men, they'll remember the parable of the Good Samaritan.”

“And if they aren't, we'll remind them of it, by God,” Henry said. Edward nodded.

Richard Radcliffe seemed discontented in a different way. He hadn't gone to Freetown. He hadn't gone back to England with his father and older brother, either. When he wasn't working his farm, he spent a lot of time staring west. “How far does Atlantis run?” he asked one winter's day. “What's on the other side of the mountains we can see?”

“Plenty close to the sea to keep us busy for a while,” answered the relentlessly pragmatic Edward. “One of these days, I expect we'll find out what's over yonder, but where's the hurry?”

Richard might not have heard him. “I'd like to head up the Brede,” he said: they'd named the closest stream for one that ran not far from the town where they were all born. “Who knows what lies in the forests? We could float trees down to New Hastings….”

“We?” Edward said.

“I'm not the only one,” Richard replied. “So much land for the taking. I feel—fenced in here.”

“How did you stand it aboard the
St. George
?” asked Edward, who knew his younger son hadn't always had an easy time on the fishing boat.

Richard shrugged. “What choice had I? I couldn't start a farm in England—the land was all taken. If I lived in town, I'd be cramped, too. So I tried to keep my mouth shut and do what needed doing. But here I have choices, and I aim to make the most of them.”

“Well, I don't know how I can hold you back if you're bound and determined to go,” Edward said. “Go on, then, and God bless you—and yes, we'll be able to use the timber, for houses and for boats.”

Eight or ten families went up the Brede with Richard and his wife and children. Edward watched them lead their livestock along the riverbank with a curious mixture of pride and fear. He didn't know what could go wrong with them in the woods, but he worried all the same. If anything did, they would be too far away for the folk remaining in New Hastings to help them in a hurry.

And they hadn't been gone more than a couple of weeks when a boat came up from Freetown. The Dovermen were in high dudgeon. “Do you know what?” one of them said in portentous tones.

“Not yet,” Edward answered, “but since I think you're about to tell me, I will pretty soon. What's your news?”

“There's a town full of God-cursed Frenchmen down the coast from us!” the Freetown man cried.

“Frenchmen, you say? Or is it Bretons?” Edward asked.

“By Our Lady, it only matters to them!” the man from Freetown said.

“Is that François Kersauzon's settlement?” Radcliffe persisted.

The fellow who'd been talking just shrugged. One of the other new settlers nodded. “That was their leader's name, yes,” he said. “They all speak French with a funny accent, the ones who speak it at all, but I could follow that much.”

“I have no quarrel with Kersauzon. No one here does,” Edward said. “He was the one who showed us the way to this land. We owe him a debt, if anything.” Several people standing close by him nodded.

That wasn't what the men from Freetown wanted to hear. “Atlantis should be English! Atlantis
must
be English!” howled the one who liked to hear himself talk. “We ought to chase those French scuts back across the sea with their tails between their legs!”

“Do you think they'd stay chased?” Edward inquired. “Would you?”

“I'd kill the French dog who tried to make me leave!” the Freetown man blustered. “And if I did go, I'd come back with a fighting tail and make the knaves sorry they ever troubled me to begin with.”

Radcliffe sighed. Some men were impressively blind. “Why d'you think Kersauzon's one pin different? If you tell him to go, he'll spit in your eye. If you somehow make him leave, he'll come back with soldiers himself. Do you want to farm and fish here, or do you want to fight?”

The question sounded sardonic, but he meant it. Some men did fight for the sport of it. He'd never understood that himself, but he knew it was so. To him, life was hard enough without making it harder still. Others, though, used brawls to spice up their days the way cooks used cinnamon and cloves and pepper to spice meats.

“I ought to let the king know he has such spineless subjects here,” the Freetown man grumbled.

“If you do, I will hunt you down and kill you,” Edward said matter-of-factly, as if he'd remarked,
The sun will come up tomorrow.
“And now you have quite worn out your welcome. Get out. If you fight Kersauzon, who is my friend, you may expect to fight me, too. I tell you that now, so you cannot say I will have taken you by surprise, and I aim to tell him the same as soon as may be.”

“You won't get away with this, Radcliffe,” the man from the new settlement said.

With a shrug, Edward answered, “I'm not trying to get away with anything. Only a blind idiot would think any different. Since you do, you have named yourself.”

Muttering, their fists clenched, the Dovermen got into their boat and went south toward Freetown. “What do we do now?” Henry asked. “They won't let it lie—they aren't the sort who could.”

“I know.” Edward sighed. “We always find a serpent in Paradise, even if we have to bring it with us. We'll need a watch, to see that the Freetown men don't seek to serve us and the Bretons the same way. We'll need to hold the
St. George
between here and Freetown for a while—I am glad I got those guns. And we really will need to warn François Kersauzon.”

“Which may provoke the Freetown men enough to make them complain of us back in England,” Henry said.

“Let them bellow and bawl like branded calves, for all I care,” Edward answered. “Will King Henry send knights here to make us behave when civil war's aflame back home? Give me leave to doubt, son—give me leave to doubt.”

“What would you do if he should send knights?” Henry asked.

“Well, it depends on how many,” Edward said. “A few? Our longbowmen can deal with a few knights, beshrew me if they can't. An army of 'em? An army of 'em would tell me he's gone quite mad. But if he does send so many—if he can send so many—why then going up the Brede with Richard looks better and better. We can live off the land. Can knights newly come here do the same? I would rejoice to see them try.”

“Something to that, I shouldn't wonder,” his son said. “I will thank the Lord, though, if we don't have to put it to the test.”

“So will I.” Edward nodded. “Yes, by God, so will I.”

Edward Radcliffe took an unarmed cog well out to sea before sailing south. He didn't want any of the Dovermen's fishing boats spotting him. His ploy worked: the first boat he saw was the Breton
Amzer Gaer
—the
Fairweather,
she would have been in English. When he hailed her, her skipper thought he was a Freetown man and made ready to fight.

“No, God butter you and the Devil futter you!” Edward shouted in Breton. “I'm Kersauzon's friend—can't you get that through your bloody thick head? Take me to him. I have news he must hear.”

“Why should we believe a lying Saoz?” the Breton yelled back.

“If you don't know who Edward Radcliffe is, you son of a dog, I'll board your scow myself and pound some sense through your hard skull.”

The Breton fisherman was bigger and younger than he was, but backed down before his fierce temper. “Why didn't you say you were Radcliffe? That's not your
St. George.
Yes, I'll listen to you—for a while, anyway.”

“Thank you so much,” Edward said with a mocking bow. “But I don't want to talk to you. I want to talk to Kersauzon—I know he doesn't keep his brains in his backside. Where have you hidden this new town of yours?”

“Cosquer lies south-southwest of here. You'll know it by the big rock offshore,” the Breton answered.

The name made Radcliffe smile: it meant Old Village. Only the Bretons would use that kind of name for a place on a barely explored shore. “Obliged to you. God give you a good catch.” He could be polite enough—after he got what he wanted.

“And you the same, Saoz
gast,
” the other man shouted. Edward laughed as he swung his cog on the new course. How many times had the Bretons called him an English whore? Not enough to make him believe he was one, anyhow.

The rock in front of Cosquer was almost big enough to make a small island. Several of the strange Atlantean almost-trees with barrel trunks and leaves sprouting from the tops of them clung to its side. As for the village itself…Edward laughed again when it came into sight. Here was a bit of Brittany transplanted to a far land, all right. The thatched roofs had a steeper pitch than they would have in Hastings. The windows were different, too, even if the houses were built from wood rather than stone.