Opening Atlantis (14 page)

“We have no Lordships here,” Edward blurted.

“You do now, by Christ, and you'd bloody well better get used to it, for he's here to stay,” said the man in the red silk tunic.

“Warwick? Here? To stay? What happened?” Like everyone else in Atlantis, Edward got news of the civil war in England in bits and fragments, as new shiploads of settlers came in to New Hastings. The Earl of Warwick was King Edward IV's cousin. His help had let Richard of York briefly claim the throne a few years earlier. Without him, Edward wouldn't have sat on it. There had been talk he'd fallen out with the King over Edward's French policy, but this….
This is exile,
Edward realized.
He must have risen, risen and lost.

“He had…a disagreement with his Majesty.” Now the man in silk chose
his
words with care. “This being so, he was…encouraged to travel across the sea, to seek his fortune in these new lands the fisherfolk stumbled upon.”

Did he have the faintest idea he was talking to the leader of those fisherfolk, to the first Englishman who'd done the stumbling? Obviously not. Would he have cared had he known? That seemed just as unlikely.

“And so,” the fellow up on the forecastle went on, “he has sailed here to Freetown, that he may—”

Edward Radcliffe threw back his head and laughed like a loon. Loons swam in the ponds and rivers here, as they did in England. Their wild cries were almost as characteristic of this wilderness as those of the honkers.

The man in the silk tunic went almost as red as it was. “Silence, wretch!” he roared. “Give me one good reason I should not order these my men to shoot you down on the instant like the dog you are.”

“Why, you sorry blockhead, you don't even know where the devil you are,” Edward said, laughing still. He pointed south. “Freetown lies down the coast. Go there and be welcome.”
If you and Warwick are welcome anywhere in Atlantis, which I doubt.
“This is New Hastings.”

“New…Hastings?” The stranger spat the words out as if they were bad fish. “You lie! Surely you lie! That cur of a captain swore…”

“By the Cross, by Our Lady, by God, sir, this is New Hastings and no other place in all the world.” Edward knew a certain fleeting sympathy for the man who'd captained this cog. On a choppy sea, of the kind you were almost bound to have this time of year, gauging even your latitude was no easy feat. If he'd had clouds for several days, as he easily might have done, he wouldn't have been able to take a sun sight. He would be going by God and by guess, and they would have let him down.

“New…Hastings.” The stranger turned away and started screaming at the top of his lungs. Phenomenal lungs they were, too; he could have made himself heard from stern to bow on a bigger ship than this in the middle of a savage blow.

One of the men who came running was plainly the skipper. The other, just as plainly, was Richard Neville, the Earl of Warwick. He couldn't have been far past forty, but his hair and beard had gone very gray. He had a strong prow of a nose and clever dark eyes set too close together. His man bellowed abuse at the captain. The poor man did his best to defend himself. His best was none too good. How could it be, when he found himself in the wrong?

Warwick listened for a while, then walked over to the rail and peered down at Edward. With his man still berating the skipper in the background, he said, “So this is New Hastings, is it?” The noble's voice was surprisingly soft and gentle. Unlike the fellow in the red silk, he didn't need to bluster to get what he wanted.

“I'm afraid it is…your Lordship.” Edward hoped the nobleman didn't notice the pause he needed before he brought out the title of respect.

But Warwick did notice; Edward could tell. Warwick was one who would notice everything and forget nothing. The whole world and its mistakes would be grist for his mill. He'd gone wrong at last, though, or he wouldn't be here. For a great noble, for a man who aspired to the kingship, Atlantis would not be the earthly Paradise or anything like it. It would be the nearest thing to hell. How could you be a great man, a mighty man, when everyone was putting forth all his might merely to wrest a living from the vast wilderness the settlements bordered?

And where in the wilderness was Richard these days? Had he found Avalon Bay yet, or some other point on the western coast of Atlantis? When would he find his way home again? Edward had the sudden bad feeling he might need every pillar he could find.

“New Hastings,” the Earl of Warwick repeated, as his retainer had not long before. But he spoke in musing tones, as if he were hefting a new tool and wondering whether it would serve him well enough to use.

“Yes, your Lordship.” This time, Edward didn't hesitate.

Something glinted in the noble's eyes.
Oh, yes, you say the words, but you don't mean them, and you can't fool me into thinking you do.
Maybe Edward was reading too much into a single glance. Maybe, but he didn't think so.

“Well, I daresay I can do as well for myself here as I could at Freetown,” Richard Neville said, perhaps as much to himself as to Edward. He went back to speak to his lackey and to the captain.

A moment later, the captain bawled an order. A gangplank thudded down from the waist of the ship. Soldiers strutted out onto the pier. “Move aside, old man,” one of them told Edward. “This place is ours now.”

Richard Radcliffe smiled in the November sunshine. In England, it would have been cold and cloudy and likely rainy. In New Hastings, it probably would have been colder yet. Maybe it would have rained. It might even have snowed; it had done that more than once this time of year since he settled in Atlantis.

Now he was on the other side of the mountains. Now, as far as he was concerned, he was on the right side of the mountains. Henry had said Avalon Bay had weather like an unending April. Richard saw that his brother was right. He was somewhere not far from the famous bay—if a bay could be famous when only one shipload of men had ever seen it—and here it was: April, or as near as made no difference.

November in truth, but birds still sang in the trees. Leaves stayed green—a dark green, as most greens were in Atlantis, but green nonetheless. The grass under his feet as he stood out in the meadow was as lush as if it were the height of spring. It hadn't died and gone all yellow, the way it would have in England or New Hastings.

He knew what that meant. This grass hadn't seen a freeze. Maybe it would when winter advanced further…if winter did advance further here. Richard wouldn't have bet on that. As far as he could tell, it really was springtime the whole year around.

Back behind him lay the mountains he'd crossed with such labor, a ridge of green now against the eastern horizon instead of the western, where he'd grown used to seeing it. He'd come into one new world when he first set foot on Atlantis. Now he was in another one—in his view, a better one.

The sea called him. He could smell it again, a smell he'd known all his life but one that had gone out of his nostrils as he crossed Atlantis' fog-filled spine. He couldn't see it yet—the ground rose ahead of him. But it was there.

And beyond that sea lay more land, with strange people living in it. He'd heard that from Henry, too, and from the fishermen on the
Rose.
He shrugged. Seeing that new land meant getting into a cog again. He supposed he could if he had to. If he didn't have to, he didn't want to. Atlantis was plenty big enough to satisfy him.

A crow cawed from the edge of the woods. It wasn't just like an English carrion crow—the call was different, and it didn't have such a heavy beak. It wasn't just like a rook, either: it lacked the pale patch on its face. But it couldn't be anything but some kind of crow.

Ravens in Atlantis, as far as he could tell, were just like the ravens back in England. Crows here were similar, but not identical. Jays were quite different: they were blue and white and crested, not pinkish brown. But they were plainly jays. Their feisty habits and raucous calls proclaimed that to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear.

Richard wondered why it should be so. Why did birds that acted like English blackbirds have robinlike red breasts here? Why were there so many Atlantean birds that couldn't fly? Honkers, several kinds of duck, oil thrushes…He scratched his head. The question was easy to ask, but he had no idea what the answer was.

He trudged on. Before long, he was sweating—in November! That made him smile. He knew the kind of work he would have to do back in New Hastings to sweat there. Just walking along wouldn't do it, not at this time of year.

Thinking of oil thrushes made him hungry. He would have to hunt before long. Well, at least hunting was easy here, when the quarry didn't know enough to run away. Going after rabbits in England hadn't been like that. Deer and boar knew enough to flee, too, not that the likes of a fisherman could go after them.

He didn't miss working hard on a hunt. He did miss apples and pears and plums and all the juicy berries he'd known back in England. Nothing like those here. The settlers had planted orchards, but they weren't bearing abundantly yet. The trees in those orchards were the only fruit trees in Atlantis.

One of the native barrel trees had a sweet sap that could be boiled down into a honeylike syrup or fermented into something halfway between beer and wine. It was pleasant, but it wasn't the same as wandering through the woods and finding fruit. He couldn't do that here.

No matter how much he craved the sun, he didn't stay out in the meadow longer than he had to. Around New Hastings and Bredestown, red-crested eagles—and their attacks on settlers—had grown scarce. Here in the west, though, no one had hunted them. No one had gone after their nests. The birds were still common, and still deadly dangerous. A lone man had scant hope of fighting one off if it took him for a honker.

Under the trees, Richard breathed easier. The birds went right on singing as he walked along. The big katydids fell silent at his approaching footfalls. They feared men. They feared everything, because so many things ate them.

Richard had eaten them two or three times, when he couldn't catch anything bigger. If you peeled off their legs and feelers before you roasted them, and if you ate them in a couple of bites, without much thinking about what you were doing…If you did all that, they tasted a little like shrimp. But they tasted more the way he thought bugs would taste—sort of greenish—and so he wasn't anxious to repeat the experiment.

A salamander on a tree trunk eyed him. It didn't scurry away or show any sign of alarm. Nor did it try to look like something else, the way so many crawling things did. Even in the gloom under the trees, it stood out: its background color was blood red, while the spots that measled it were a brilliant yellow.

He left it alone. There were brightly colored salamanders back near New Hastings, too. They weren't identical to this one, but they had to be close cousins. He'd seen what happened when a dog ate one: it took a few steps, then fell over dead. A few years earlier, they'd found a two-year-old girl who'd gone missing also dead, with half a colorful salamander in her mouth.

“You can do as you please for all of me, deathworm,” Richard told the creature, and gave it a wide berth. For all he knew, just touching it could kill. He didn't care to find out the hard way.

High overhead, a red-crested eagle screeched. Richard flattened himself against a tree—
not
the one where the salamander insolently rested. He didn't think the eagle was hunting him—he didn't know the eagle was hunting anything. Why take chances, though?

It screeched again, from the same place. He peered up, up, up. Peer as he would, he couldn't see the bird. It was high up in a redwood, and anything high up in a redwood was higher than it could be anywhere else. Countless branches all shaggy with needles hid the eagle from the ground. No doubt it could see a long, long way from there. If a honker anywhere within its range of vision walked out onto a meadow to forage, the red-crested eagle could take wing and strike.

Even though he couldn't see it, Richard didn't feel altogether safe from the eagle, for he feared it might be able to see him. One thing the settlers had learned: the eagles had better eyes than they did. A bird would appear out of nowhere to strike at a honker or a man, or to carry off a lamb or a dog or, once or twice, a toddler. A fishing-boat skipper with eyes like that could name his own price, but the birds outdid mere men.

This one called again. Now it was in the air. As its screeches receded into the distance, Richard breathed easy again. Whatever it was after, it wasn't after him. That meant he could press on.

Faint in the distance, he heard honker alarm cries. The bird must have struck. Whether it had killed…If it hadn't, chances were it would soon find some other perch. He needed to be careful, but you always needed to be careful when you were the only man in strange country.

Something slithered away through the ferns. Atlantis had far more serpents than England did, and more of them were venomous. You had to watch where you put your feet. Well, you didn't have to, but you were liable to be sorry if you didn't. Some of the vipers twitched their tails, perhaps in anger, just before they struck. If they happened to lie coiled among dry leaves, that twitching might make enough noise to warn a wary man. Or, of course, it might not.