Opening Atlantis (16 page)

At last, near the headwaters of a small stream running east, he came to a pine marked not with one of his usual blazes but with a
B.
He smiled. That blaze marked the Brede. All he had to do was follow the river, and it would take him home.

But when he neared Bredestown, he got another surprise, and one not nearly so welcome as the hog. More game out in the woods was always welcome. Strange men tramping the edges of the cleared ground wearing helmets and chainmail were anything but.

“Who the devil are you?” one of the strangers said when Richard stepped out from the shelter of the trees.

“
What
the devil are you?” the other one added.

He looked down at himself. His clothes were filthy and tattered, his beard long and unkempt. When he was alone in the forest, what difference did it make? It made one now.

“My name is Richard Radcliffe.” Talking to other people, especially to strangers, felt odd after so long in his own company. “I've been to the other side of Atlantis, and now I'm back. Who are
you
?”

“Why, the Earl of Warwick's men.” By the way the soldier said it, even someone just back from the other side of Atlantis—or the other side of the moon—should have known that. In case Richard didn't know that, the man added, “Warwick's in charge here now.”

“Is he?” Richard said tonelessly. Both soldiers nodded. Both of them kept hand on swordhilt. Richard got the idea they would make him sorry if he said that didn't suit him. That being so, he didn't. “When I set out, the earl was on the far side of the sea. So were you two, I expect,” seemed safer.

Both men at arms nodded. “But we're bloody well here now, so we have to make the best of it,” the bigger one said. He had a scar on his upper lip and two missing front teeth. He also had bushy eyebrows, which came down and together as he frowned. “Radcliffe, is it? You'll be the old grumbler's other son?”

No one had ever talked about Richard's father that way before. Richard had brawled—who hadn't?—but he was no warrior. He wouldn't have cared to take on one of these bruisers, let alone both of them, even if they weren't armored. Another soft answer seemed best, so he gave one: “Henry is my brother, yes.”

They put their heads together and muttered to each other. Richard wondered whether he ought to bolt back into the woods. But the soldier with the missing front teeth said, “Well, now that you're back, you'd damned well better keep your nose clean—that's all I've got to tell you.”

“You'd damned well better keep all of you clean.” The other soldier held his nose. “You stink like a dung heap,
friend.
”

Richard had no doubt the Earl of Warwick's man was right. “It's been cold,” he said with such dignity as he could muster. “Not much chance to wash.” It hadn't been all that cold on the other side of the mountains, but the soldiers didn't need to know that. When you were all by yourself, though, what point to washing? Most people didn't bother very often even when they weren't by themselves: Warwick's men stank of sour sweat, too. But Richard had no doubt he was riper. He looked forward to a bath.

After a last couple of growls, Warwick's men let him go on. A sigh of relief gusted from him as soon as they got far enough away not to hear it. Cows and sheep and a few horses grazed on the meadows and gleaned what they could from the fallow fields, manuring them with their dung. Dogs barked and growled. A brindled cat sneaked around the corner of a barn. It might almost have been England.

It might, that is, till Richard looked past the plowed and settled ground. Those somber woods had no counterpart in the lands across the sea. Here and there in the settlement, a pine or a barrel tree still stood. The redwoods were gone. Not only was their timber useful, but living under their shadow would have made the English feel like mice living under a church steeple.

Prince, the family dog, snarled at Richard as he came up. Then the beast took his scent and stared like a player doing a comedy turn in a mummers' show.
Is that really you?
his line would have been.

“Yes, you miserable hound, it is me,” Richard said.

Whining, the dog came up and licked his hand. He wondered what would happen if he stayed away long enough for Prince to forget him. He would get bitten, that was what.

Bertha was down on her knees in the garden plot by the farmhouse. You could keep things alive through these winters if you looked after them. Up to a certain point, carrots and parsnips got sweeter if you left them in the ground. And far fewer pests plagued them here than would have been so back in England.

Richard's wife glanced up from her work. Her mouth dropped open. The way he looked didn't faze her—she'd seen him come home from the woods before. She scrambled to her feet and ran to his arms.

“Hello, dear,” he said. She felt good pressed against him; her solid warmth reminded him how long he'd been away.

“So good to see you.” Bertha tilted her face up for a kiss. “I was beginning to worry—not a lot, but some.”

“Just a long trip, not a hard one,” Richard said. “But who are those damned brigands in chainmail? Where did they come from?”

He didn't hold his voice down. His wife looked alarmed. “You've met them, have you? Be careful how you talk about them. If anyone makes them angry, he pays.”

“Somebody ought to make them pay, by God,” Richard said. “Those byrnies won't hold out arrows.”

Bertha crossed herself. “Sweet suffering Jesus, you sound like your father. He's wild to do them in, but they don't give many chances.”

“What's this Warwick doing here, anyway?” Richard asked.

“He was sent here for our sins—and for his own,” his wife answered. “He made the king angry, so Henry sent him off to Freetown, to do his worst there. But his captain landed here instead, and now we're stuck with him.”

They went inside. She poured water from a bucket into a kettle and set it on the fire to heat. Richard smiled. He'd be able to bathe soon. But the smile didn't last. “We're going to have to do something about him,” he said.

“You
do
sound like your father,” Bertha said. “He goes on and on about how he didn't come to Atlantis to bend the knee to any nobleman. One day he'll say it too loud, or to the wrong man, and it will get back to Warwick. And then the trouble will start.”

“To the wrong man?” Richard frowned. He'd been away from human company too long; he needed a moment to realize what that had to mean. “Some of the settlers would betray him to this robber chief?”

“Watch what you say!” Bertha repeated. But she nodded, unhappily. “Some would. They want to get along any way they can. They don't want trouble. If I've heard that once, I've heard it a hundred times. ‘I don't want trouble,' they say, and pull their heads into their shells like turtles.”

“They'll have more trouble if they bend the knee to this dog of a Warwick than they will if they give him a good kick in the teeth,” Richard said. His wife started to speak again, then closed her mouth instead. He suspected he'd just sounded like his father one more time. Well, his father knew a hawk from a heron when the wind was southerly, all right.

Bertha took the kettle off the fire. She mixed the hot water with a little cold—not too much, because it would cool fast enough on its own. Richard stripped off his filthy clothes and scrubbed at himself with a rag and some of the harsh, homemade soap she gave him. By the time he was done, his skin had gone from assorted shades of brown to pink. She trimmed his hair and beard with a pair of shears she'd brought from England.

“You look like the man I married again,” she said when she finished, “and not the Old Man of the Woods any more.”

“I feel like the man you married, too.” He reached for her. They kissed. Laughing, he picked her up and carried her over to the bed.

Edward, these days, stayed close to home. He knew he had trouble keeping his mouth shut. If he hadn't known, Nell would have made a point of reminding him. He hadn't had to worry about saying what was on his mind, not for years. No one in Atlantis had. People needed to worry now. If you didn't watch your words, Richard Neville's bully boys would make you sorry.

The Earl of Warwick acted like a king, or at least like a prince. His bravos held New Hastings hostage. They lived off the fat of the land, taking what they wanted. One of the things Warwick took was Lucy Fenner, the late master salter's daughter. She was nineteen now, or maybe twenty. People said she was the fairest on this side of the Atlantic: a red-haired beauty with a figure to make a priest forget his vows. She could heat up a cold night—Edward had no doubt of that. He was getting old (no, Devil take it, he'd got old), but he wasn't dead.

He also wasn't a bandit chief, to take a woman whether she was willing or not. Warwick…was. Lucy, these days, went around with red-rimmed eyes and an expression beyond sorrowful. She'd never imagined beauty could be dangerous to her. Whether she'd imagined it or not, she was finding out the hard way.

“Mary, pity women,” Nell said when Edward remarked on that.

“It's not Mary's doing that Lucy got snatched from her family,” Edward said. “It's that dog of a Warwick.”

“He's a dog with teeth,” Nell warned.

“I know,” Edward said grimly. Fear of what Warwick's troopers would do was the only thing that had kept New Hastings from rising against its new and unwelcome overlord. “Someone needs to give him a boot in the ribs, to remind him he's not supposed to do that kind of thing here.”

His wife wagged a finger in his face. “Not you. You're not going to throw your life away over a chit of a girl.”

“I wouldn't do that,” Edward said with dignity. Nell only snorted. Still with dignity, he went on, “If I rise against Warwick, I won't throw my life away. I'll make him throw away his.”

“Can you?” Nell asked—the right question, sure enough.

“If I don't think I can, I won't move,” Edward said. “He has his bully boys, and he has the men he's scared into thinking he's a sure winner, and he has the handful of curs—I won't call them men, because they don't deserve the name—who lick the boots of anybody they think is strong. We have the rest of New Hastings.”

“Is that enough?” Nell asked anxiously. “Against trained men with armor…I don't think there was a mailshirt in Atlantis before Warwick came, let alone that suit of plate he wears.”

“You only need armor if you intend to kill your fellow man and you don't intend to let him kill you,” Edward said. “Why would we have wanted it till now? But we have shields, and we have our bows, and”—his voice dropped to a whisper—“in Bredestown, where Warwick's hounds don't go so much, the smith is making swords.”

“Warwick's hounds almost took Richard when he came out of the woods by the Brede,” his wife reminded him.

“I didn't say they never went to Bredestown. I said they didn't go there so often, and they don't,” Edward Radcliffe answered. “And Adam Higgins is no fool—there's always something else on the anvil, so no stinking bravo's likely to see him forging a blade.”

“I'm not worried about soldiers seeing him so much as I am about some Judas selling him to Warwick,” Nell said.

Edward put an arm around her. “Speaking of being no fool, my dear…”

“Oh, pooh!” Nell shook him off. “I'm an old gossip, is what I am. And one gossip knows how much trouble another one can cause. Is there anyone in Bredestown who doesn't like the smith? If there is, that's someone we have to watch.”

“By Our Lady!” Edward said, and laughed at his own choice of oath. “By Our Lady, indeed! I wonder how men ever get anything done, with women keeping an eye on their every move before they make it.” He paused, looking thoughtful. “I wonder
whether
men ever get anything done—anything their women don't want, I mean.”

“I have no idea what you're talking about—none.” Nell's voice was so demure and innocent, Edward started to nod. Then he caught himself and gave her a sharp look. Her face was demure and innocent, too—so very demure and innocent that he started laughing again. She poked him in the ribs. “You believed me. For a heartbeat or two, you believed me.”

“You'll never prove it,” he said.

“I don't need to prove it. I know you too well to doubt it.” Now Nell sounded supremely confident. And with reason: “I'd better after all these years, don't you think? Who else would have put up with you for so long?”

“No one in her right mind—that's sure enough,” Edward said. Nell made a face at him. He made one back. They both laughed this time. Edward wondered if he was slipping into his second childhood. If he was, he was having a good time doing it—or he would have been, if not for the Earl of Warwick.

Henry Radcliffe paced the
Rose
's deck. She lay not far offshore: far enough to keep a bad winter storm from flinging her up onto the beach and breaking her all to flinders. No storm now. The day was cold, but almost bitterly clear—a good match for the state of his mind at the moment.