Opening Atlantis

IV

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 Francois 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 Francois 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, Francois," 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!"

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, Francois 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 Francois 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 Francois 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.

Henry was thinking along with him. "Only thing missing is a circle of standing stones in a meadow by the town," he said.

"By God, you're right," Edward said. "Damned if I'd be surprised if the stubborn buggers didn't put some up to remind 'em of home." He pointed. "Isn't that the Morzen lying right offshore?"

"Sure looks like her." Henry eyed Francois Kersauzon's cog. "She didn't carry those swivel guns last time we saw her."

"You're right-she didn't." Edward frowned. Those guns were longer and would probably shoot farther than the ones aboard the St. George. "If Kersauzon wasn't thinking along those lines before he saw us last, maybe we gave him the idea."

Half a dozen men pushed a boat into the Atlantic and rowed out toward the cog. "Ahoy, Englishmen!" Yes, that was Kersauzon's bellow, made louder by the hands he cupped in front of his mouth. "Is it you, Radcliffe?"

"No. It's your mother-in-law, come from Brittany to nag you," Edward answered.

"Anything but that!" Francois Kersauzon cried in mock terror. "Come ashore if you care to, and see what you have to nag about."

"I'll do that, and gladly, but first let me say my say-the Freetown men are not your friends."

Kersauzon clapped a hand over his heart. "I am shocked to hear it," he said, which made Edward and Henry both chuckle. More seriously, the Breton continued, "And you say you are?"

"Against them? Yes, by God!" Edward said. "I told them the same, too."

"You had better come ashore, then!" the Breton fishing captain said. Even across a broad gap of ocean, Edward could see how wide his eyes got. "Yes, you had better come ashore, because we have much to talk about."

"Let's get our boat in the water," Edward called to his crew. To his son, he said, "Would you rather come and dicker with me or stay here and do whatever you have to do in case there's trouble?"

"Do you need me to help put something over on the Bretons?" Henry answered his own question: "No, of course you don't. You can diddle them slick as grease all by yourself."

"I thank you for your trust in me," Edward Radcliffe said dryly.

He didn't faze Henry a bit. "Any time," the younger man replied. "We won't have trouble at sea from Kersauzon's people, either. Right now, after what you just said, they'd pick you for Pope if they had the chance. But if the Dovermen decide to raid Cosquer today…I'd better stay here."

"All right." The fishermen Edward chose to row him to Kersauzon's new village all spoke some Breton, or at least some French. They'd be able to make themselves understood once they made it to dry land-and maybe they would hear something the settlers didn't want them to.

Kersauzon waved when he saw the English boat heading toward his. A little to Edward's surprise, the Breton's rowers didn't make a race of it. They went back to shore sedately instead. A couple of the English fishermen sent Edward questioning looks, but he shook his head. Why push things? They'd get there soon enough any which way. And besides…

"Warmer here than it is in New Hastings," he called to Kersauzon. It was warm enough, in fact, to make the sweat stand out on his face, and unpleasantly sticky, too.

Unpleasantly for him, at least. Francois Kersauzon made a joke of it: "You are from the north, so you settle in the north, and you think chilblains are every man's God-given right-is it not so?"

"We like the weather we're used to," Edward said, and left it at that. The boat's keel grated on hard sand. He hopped out and helped haul it farther up the beach. Kersauzon and his men were doing the same with theirs. Edward pointed to the land they'd cleared in back of Cosquer. "Are those vines you've planted there?" he asked.

"What else would they be?" the Breton replied. "Beer is all very well-I have nothing against beer. Who could? But I want wine, too. And I'll have it…soon. Not yet, mind you, but soon. Maybe we can trade this for that, eh?"

"Maybe we can," Edward agreed. "My other son-not Henry, who's with me, but Richard-is starting a new settlement deep in the woods. Before long, we may have more lumber than we can use ourselves. And who knows what else we'll find once we look around a bit?"

"Who indeed? You're ahead of us. I think even Freetown"-Kersauzon pronounced the name as if it tasted bad in his mouth-"is a year ahead of us. But do you say the Dovermen want a war with us?"

"They're sure thinking about it. They're thinking hard, I'd say," Edward answered. "I told them to their faces I'd sooner stand with you if they start a fight. They didn't care to hear that, but I told them anyway."

"You are a gentleman." Francois Kersauzon bowed, as if to a nobleman in his own country. "It could be that Cosquer and New Hastings should band together and take this Freetown pesthole off the map before more trouble comes from it."

Radcliffe had wondered whether the Breton would say that. Not without some regret, he shook his head. "No, I don't want to. There's enough fighting across the sea-why bring more here? That's the other thing you need to know: if you strike first at Freetown, New Hastings will stand with her, too."

Kersauzon scowled at him. Some of the other Bretons swore. One or two of them ostentatiously turned their backs. Their leader asked, "Who appointed you the man to say who may war and who may not?"

"I say nothing of the kind," Edward answered. "I only say what will happen if a war does start."

"And if Cosquer and Freetown move against New Hastings together?"

"Good luck," Radcliffe said. "Watch your back-you'll need to."

Kersauzon stared at him, then started to laugh. "Well, when you're right, Saoz gast, you're right. But how long do you think you'll be able to keep the peace all by yourself?"

"I don't know. As long as I can." Edward sighed. "Sooner or later, something will go wrong. We aren't in Eden, so it has to. We're closer to Eden here than we were back home, though. I feel that in my bones. So maybe-I hope-it will be later, not sooner."

V

A n axe on his shoulder like a soldier's spear, Richard Radcliffe strode through the woods of Atlantis. No man had ever seen what he was seeing now; the only tracks in the soft, damp earth were the big, deep three-toed ones that belonged to honkers and other, smaller, bird prints.

The air smelled spicy. It smelled green, Richard thought. It made you wish you could fill a bottle with the scent and take it back with you. Wherever people lived for a while, things started to stink. Smoke and manure and slops and unwashed bodies…Getting away was a relief to the nose.

Moss and ferns grew between the curious barrel trees and the pines that rose above them and the enormous trees-redwoods, the Bretons'd named them-that towered over the pines. Some of those redwoods seemed a bowshot tall. No way to be sure just how immense they were till you felled one and measured it. Since the monsters were as thick through the base as three or four men were tall, that wouldn't happen right away.

Something stared out at Richard from behind a barrel tree. He stood still and waited. His father was right: the creatures here had no natural fear of man. After a moment, this one came out and walked along with a rolling motion that brought a smile to his face.

"Oil thrush," he murmured. Not since Adam and Eve had people needed names for so many new creatures. The birds and lizards and snakes of the new land were for the most part unlike any the settlers had seen back in England. Oh, ravens croaked from tree branches and sometimes harried hawks and eagles. Barn owls glided ghostly through the night. Fork-tailed swallows dipped and darted after flying insects. They were all familiar enough. And the red-breasted thrush that acted and sounded like a blackbird was easy to get used to. But the oil thrush…

It had the shape of one of those red-breasted thrushes. (Some people were calling them robins, though they were bigger and less vivid than the redbreasts back home.) It had the shape, yes, but it was the size of a chicken, or even larger. Its legs were long and strong, its wings too stunted to lift it into the air. And its beak…

Richard smiled. It was as if someone had made a thrush out of clay and pulled and stretched the beak till it could go no farther. It was more than half as long as the oil thrush's body. A beak like that might have made a formidable weapon, except that the bird didn't seem to realize it could use its beak so. The oil thrush stared at Richard with a beady black eye, its head cocked to one side.

When he just quietly stood there, the bird peered down at the ground instead. Suddenly, that long, strong beak stabbed into the dirt. When the oil thrush pulled its beak out, a plump earthworm wriggled between the mandibles. A twist of the bird's head, and the worm disappeared.

On waddled the oil thrush. Six or eight feet farther along the trail, it paused again. Was it listening? Sniffing? Richard had no idea. But its beak thrust down again, and came forth with another worm. This one tried to wrap itself around the bird's beak to keep from getting swallowed, but to no avail.

Richard followed the flightless thrush. It looked back at him, as if to say that was an unusual thing for anyone to do, but then kept walking. It didn't seem to take alarm when he bent down and picked up a fist-sized stone. The gray rock was cool against his palm; little bits of mud and moss clung to his fingers.

He was only a few feet from the oil thrush when he let fly. The stone knocked the bird over. A startled squawk burst from its throat as a puff of feathers floated up into the air. Richard finished it off with the axe.

As always when he hunted here, he felt a little guilty. It was like playing draughts against an idiot child-of course you were going to win. But he was hungry, and one thing the settlers had found was that the oil thrush made tasty eating.

He bled and butchered the bird, keeping the liver and heart and gizzard to toast over the fire when he buried the rest of the offal. A layer of golden fat under the skin led the settlers to give the oil thrush its name. Back at New Hastings and Bredestown, they rendered the fat over a slow fire and used it in lamps and in cooking and for grease. Richard didn't have time for that. As he cooked the bird, some of the fat melted and dripped down into the flames. The rest he ate with the dark, flavorsome flesh. The taste reminded him of woodcock, perhaps because both birds lived mostly on worms.

Several different kinds of mushrooms grew close by the fire. They looked good. He knew a couple of kinds were safe, so he ate of them. The ones he wasn't sure of, he left alone. He didn't need to take chances on them, not when the hunting was so good.

And he could roll himself in a blanket and sleep by the fire with very little fear. No wolves and no bears here to harry a lone man. He did get a surprise the next morning, when he found a snake curled up not far from him. It slithered in amongst the ferns and disappeared before he could grab a rock or a stick to smash it.

Some snakes here, the settlers had found, were more deadly than any vipers back in England. English poisonous snakes were the size of a man's arm. The ones here could be as long as a man was tall. They had bigger fangs and delivered more venom.

He ate the rest of the oil thrush and pressed on. Every so often, he paused to blaze one of the smaller trees. The marks would help him find his way home again. Meanwhile…Meanwhile, he had Atlantis all around him, and it was wonderful.

When he sailed on the St. George, he would sometimes stand at the bow and look out over the sea. The broad sky and the endless, ever-changing wavescape let him almost forget for a while that he was cooped up aboard a fishing boat. When he smelled stale cod, the illusion of aloneness in immensity wavered. When he had to clamber into his hammock of an evening, it vanished altogether.

Here in Atlantis, it was no illusion. Fern and shrub and moss, pine and redwood and barrel tree, honker and oil thrush and red-crested eagle: he was alone among them, and no thinking being save God Himself had ever set eyes on them before.

The same held true for the serpents and the peculiar frogs and the big snails and the even bigger bugs. Well, almost the same: Richard was willing to believe the Devil had looked at them along with God.

He picked his way around a marsh. Dragonflies and darning needles of astonishing size and variety buzzed above the reeds and the stagnant water. A bird snatched one out of the air and flew over to a stump with it. The bird bashed the dragonfly against the stump till it stopped struggling, then wiggled it around till it was in a good position to be swallowed. The dragonfly vanished. The bird's tail bobbed up and down. "Phee-bee!" it sang in a self-satisfied voice.

Turtles stared at Richard from the water. They didn't have domed shells like the pond turtles he was used to in England. They were flat as flapjacks, and as big around as the pan in which a woman might cook flapjacks. They had cold yellow eyes and jaws big enough and strong enough to bite off a finger. You could catch them with a hook like trout. They made good enough eating.

Near the edge of the marsh, a honker plucked up water plants with single-minded determination. It was of a variety different from the ones that raided the fields in New Hastings. It was a good deal smaller; Richard doubted its head would have come up much past his shoulder even if the bird raised it instead of leaning forward as it was doing. The ones near the coast could tower over a man if they did that. This one was a dull brown all over, darker on the back, lighter on the belly; it didn't have the black neck and white chin patch of the coastal honkers. And its feet had more web between the toes than the coastal birds' feet did.

When it honked, its voice was higher and lighter than those of the honkers by the coast. But it had one important similarity to them: it also didn't know it was supposed to be afraid of men. It kept right on feeding as Richard walked up to it.

He carried a stout bludgeon on his belt. The honker glanced at him, but it didn't even try to dodge when he clouted it. Down it went, kicking with the random thrashes any creature from fish to man might make when suddenly killed. Richard jumped back to make sure those flailing feet didn't catch him. They weren't aimed his way, which didn't mean they couldn't hurt him.

After the honker stopped twitching, he butchered it. Its heart was almost as big as his fist: big enough, with a chunk of liver, to make a meal. He cut off a big chunk of thigh meat to take with him when he traveled on. The rest of the carcass he left where it lay. Hawks and vultures and snakes and lizards were welcome to it. He could always find another honker or oil thrush to kill a little farther west.

As evening fell, frogs began to sing. They came in all sizes, from little peepers no longer than the last joint of his thumb up to baritone croakers large enough to make a cat think twice. Like so much in Atlantis, they were at the same time familiar and strange. Frogs in England sang with small inflated sacs on either side of their throat. Atlantean frogs, by contrast, had a single, larger throat sac under the chin.

The frogs' croaking couldn't mask another swamp sound: the buzz of mosquitoes. Atlantis had more of them than England did, and fiercer ones, too. Summer here got hotter and stickier than it did over there; maybe that had something to do with it. Richard put more wood on the fire, hoping the smoke would hold them at bay. No matter what he hoped, it didn't.

The bigger fire did let him see farther out into the night, though. Eyes glowed back at him. He wasn't frightened, as he would have been back in England. These eyes were all low to the ground and set close together. They belonged to frogs or lizards or snakes. No four-legged killers prowled Atlantis' wilds.

Darkness deepened. The chorus of frogs grew louder and more various. A pair of big frogs hopped straight at each other, both of them croaking as loud as they could. They were only a couple of feet apart when one broke and ran, vanishing into the night beyond the campfire's bright circle.

An owl hooted. The note was different from the ones English owls used, but unmistakable all the same. Then Richard saw a moving light that wasn't paired. "Glow-worm!" he said in delight. Some people called them fireflies. England had only a few. In summer, they made the air itself here seem to dance.

Something else also scooted through the night air, from left to right. It was bigger than a mosquito, bigger than a glow-worm, and it didn't dance in the air the way bugs did. The motion was straight and not too swift. Richard scratched his head. That straight track also meant it was no bat or nightjar come to feed on the insects drawn to his campfire.

He scratched his head again. In that case, what was it? Had he seen only one such strange scoot, he would have shrugged and gone back to eating toasted honker liver. He even had coarse sea salt to scatter on his supper. After he finished, he intended to swaddle himself in his blanket so that, if the mosquitoes wanted him, they would have to find the tip of his nose.

Then he spotted another of those curious fliers, and then another. They all came from the left and vanished to the right. "What the-?" he said, climbing to his feet. Atlantis was full of surprises. He seemed to have run into another one, one that made his curiosity itch.

He walked out about as far from the fire as he thought the things were flying. As like as not, he thought, I'll scare them away. He shrugged. If he did, he would go back to the honker liver, that was all.

But he didn't. One of them, whatever it was, scooted right past in front of his face. Startled, he grabbed for it, but he missed. Another one went by. He missed that one, too, and swore. The trouble was, he could see them only when they came close to the fire. That didn't give him much time to catch them.

It would have to be luck, then. If they kept coming, he was bound to snag one sooner or later…wasn't he? After five or six fruitless lunges, he started to wonder. Then he did catch one. The cool, moist smack against the palm of his hand made him wonder whether he was glad to have it even as his fingers closed.

"What have I got?" he said out loud. He turned so that firelight would help him, and opened his hand.

A little frog, green with streaks of yellow, stared up at him out of big black eyes. It looked like any other tree frog he'd ever seen-except for its hands and feet. The fingers and toes were ridiculously long, with webbing stretched between them. The frog had to use those webs to glide through the air the way a ship used sails to push it along.

Richard started to laugh. He set the frog down on the ground. It hopped off into the darkness the way any other little frog might have. He wiped his hand against his trousers. "Atlantis!" he said. "You won't find another place where the birds don't fly and the frogs damn well do."

Laughing still, he went back to his supper.

These days, Edward Radcliffe's bones creaked when he got out of bed in the morning. Sometimes sitting by the fire for a while or going out into the warm sun would get him moving again, almost as freely as he had when he was younger. Sometimes he creaked and ached from dawn to dusk, and woke up aching if he had to ease himself in the night.

Hard to believe fifteen years had gone by since Francois Kersauzon talked him out of a third of his catch in exchange for a secret-hard to believe till he looked around, anyway. New Hastings was more than a village at the edge of unknown wilderness nowadays. It was well on the way to becoming a town. Farms and mills went up the river all the way to Bredestown, and beyond. Whenever Richard came back from a journey into the woods, he kept muttering that he would have to pull up stakes and move west again. Things were getting too crowded where he was.

Edward didn't think that would change, either. The War of the Roses went on and on in England. Once people had had their homes plundered and burnt, once men had been robbed and killed and women violated, the idea of getting on a ship and heading for a strange land across the sea no longer seemed so frightful. And so New Hastings swelled, as did Freetown; settlers founded other towns up and down the northern part of the east coast of Atlantis.

Francois Kersauzon's Cosquer also flourished. Two or three other Breton villages grew not far away from it. Edward had heard that there were Basque and Galician settlements in the southern regions of the new land, but he didn't know for a fact whether that was so. The Bretons came up to New Hastings to trade; most of them still wanted nothing to do with Freetown. No folk from the Spanish kingdoms had turned up here yet. Still, it had to be only a matter of time.

When Radcliffe looked west toward the mountains no man had yet visited-not so far as he knew, anyhow-what struck him was how much things had changed since he founded New Hastings. The dark forests of pine and redwood had been driven back for miles, replaced by farmlands and meadows and groves of apples and pears and plums that were still young but now starting to yield fruit.

"It's not so bad here now, is it, Nell?" he asked his wife.

"Not so bad as it was when we first came here, that's sure enough," she said. "And you got to go back to England, too. Me, I was stuck here all that time."

He frowned. "If you think all that sea voyaging was easy or fun…Well, you should have tried it yourself, is all I have to say."

Nell didn't back away from an argument-she never did. "We had to make do here when there wasn't enough to make do with. Before we had a blacksmith, breaking a tool was as bad as it could be, because we couldn't get another one, whatever it was. And the first houses were sorry affairs. Everyone who was here made a better shipwright than a proper carpenter."

"No danger of going hungry, though," Edward said, and Nell couldn't very well argue with that. Between the cod the fishermen pulled from the offshore banks and the big, foolish honkers, there was always plenty to keep a man's-or a woman's-belly full.

His wife did say, "I missed bread till the crops started coming in the way they should."

Edward only shrugged. When a fishing boat ran out of biscuit, men lived on what they could catch. He didn't much care what he ate, as long as he had plenty of it.

"You hardly see honkers any more, not here by the seaside," Nell remarked.

"Still plenty of them inland. They still make good eating. And as long as they come down into the fields to steal what we plant, what else are we going to do but kill them?" Edward said.

"Oh, I know. But the landscape seems so-so ordinary without them."

"I was thinking the same thing, or close enough." Edward smiled at his wife. If they didn't think the same way a lot of the time, they wouldn't have stayed as happily married as they had. "One of these days, it will be hard to tell Atlantis from England."

"No, it won't," Nell said at once. "In England, the nobles and the king's men can tell ordinary people what to do. They can take our money and use it to hire soldiers who steal from us. None of that foolishness here, by Our Lady."

"Not yet, anyhow," Edward said. "I wonder how long it will be before some duke or earl fits out a ship with guns and comes across the ocean to try to tell us what to do."

"To try to squeeze money out of us, you mean," Nell said. "That's what it comes down to in the end."

"Well, so it is," Edward agreed. "I just thank heaven we haven't had a fight with Freetown and we haven't got into a brawl with the Bretons yet, either. Tell me that's not coming, too. Make me believe it."

"I wish I could," his wife said. "We didn't leave all our troubles behind when we came over here, did we?"

Radcliffe shook his head. "I wish we would have, but it's too much to ask for. We have more room here, so not all of them show up the way they did back home, but they aren't gone."

As if to prove his point, a lookout on the beach winded a horn. That meant a strange ship was nearing New Hastings. Edward hurried into his house and came out with an axe. He wasn't young and he wasn't spry, but he didn't need to be either to defend the home he'd built from nothing. He hurried down toward the muddy strand.

But it wasn't a strange ship approaching-it was Henry's cog, the Rose. She wasn't the White Rose or the Red Rose: simply the Rose. No one here saw any point to angering whichever side eventually won the civil war. She was made from Atlantean lumber; her sails were made from Atlantean wool. Danes and Norwegians used woolen sails. They were heavier and baggier than linen, but the flax crop here was just beginning to come in.

Unlike Richard, Henry didn't mind putting to sea in anything at all. Edward thought his older son had traveled farther up and down the coast of Atlantis than any other man alive.

This run, the Rose was coming up from the south. Henry proved that. When he came ashore, he had a strange bird on his shoulder: it was bright green, with a yellow head, a red face, and a large, hooked beak. It squawked shrilly, then said something in a language Edward recognized.

"That's Basque, by God!" he said. "What does it mean?"

"I don't know, but it'll start a fight in any tavern full of those one-eyebrowed buggers," Henry answered.

"Is the Devil teaching birds Basque now?" Edward asked. "Is he trying to make liars out of the people who say he can't learn it himself? Or did you find the settlement people have been talking about?"

"I found it. Gernika, they're calling it, after a place in their country," Henry said. "They picked a good spot for it, most ways. A river bigger than the Brede flows into the ocean there, and an island offshore makes the harbor as well shielded from bad weather as any I've ever known-it puts New Hastings and Cosquer to shame. But by Our Lady, Father, it's hot down there! The worst of summer here seems like nothing beside it. And sticky! Your clothes melt to your skin. You stink all the time if you don't bathe, or even if you do, and you come down with rashes and ringworms and I don't know what all else."

"Well, then, they're welcome to it," Edward said. "How can they make a living in country like that? Why would they want to settle there?"

"The land is rich-no way around that," his son replied. "You stick a seed in the ground and you have to jump back in a hurry or the growing plant will poke you in the eye. And the hunting is good, they said."

Edward Radcliffe raised an eyebrow. "They said that? Where did you learn Basque? From your bird?"

"Clarence here speaks more of it than I do, and that's the Lord's truth," Henry said. "But some of the Basques down there know enough French to get by, and I do, too. You speak better, but I can get along."

"All right. Gernika, is it?" Edward clucked to himself. "We do need to start mapping this coast. Too many different folk settling along it to manage without knowing who lives where. Building a new village too close to somebody else's holding is the easiest way I can think of to start a fight."

"I'm doing it as best I know how," Henry said. "I'm not the best chartmaker in the world, but anything here is better than nothing. We can know latitudes, anyway, and curves of the coast."

"Better than nothing, as you say." Edward paused, remembering what Henry had said a moment before. "What do you mean, the hunting is good there? What have they got that we don't?"

"Well, for one thing, they have snakes big enough to swallow a honker-plenty big enough to swallow a man," Henry answered. "And they've got these river lizards… I don't know what else you'd call them. But they aren't lizards the way we have lizards in England, or even like the ones here-big as your arm. These are lizards-fifteen or twenty feet long, with big mouths full of big teeth. They eat turtles and honkers-and people, too, if you aren't careful down by the riverbank. Their hides make good leather. The Basques showed me some."

"They sound like…what's the name for the creatures in the Good Book?" Edward Radcliffe snapped his fingers in annoyance. "Dammit, I can't recall."

"Bishop John would know," Henry suggested.

"He would, yes." Edward didn't sound thrilled. "He knows almost everything. If you don't believe me, just ask him." Henry laughed, for all the world as if his father were joking.

But finding a name for those big river lizards kept bothering Edward. He and Henry went to the church at the center of New Hastings. It was only whitewashed redwood, but it was, as far as he knew, the finest in Atlantis. And Bishop John, paunchier and grayer than he had been when he set out from England all those years before, looked the very model of a prelate. The Radcliffes spelled out their problem for him.

"Those sound like crocodiles," John said gravely.

"Crocodiles!" Edward nodded. "That's what you call the things. I couldn't hook the name to save my life."

"You ever see one, Father, you'll remember what they are from then on," Henry said. "The Basques have their own word for them, too, but to me it sounds half like sneezing and half like spitting."

"Basques?" Bishop John asked. "I know you took the Rose south, Henry, but I don't know what you found-besides crocodiles, I mean." Henry told him, in less detail than he'd given his father: plenty of time for that later. The prelate heard him out, then said, "More and more folk flock to this shore. I thank God that we haven't yet brought our wars across the sea with us."

"I think yet is the word," Edward Radcliffe said. "I fear it's only a matter of time, though."

John crossed himself. "I shall pray you are mistaken."

"Oh, I pray for the same thing, your Grace," Radcliffe said. "But I want to be ready all the same, in case God doesn't feel like listening."

Henry's wife was a slim redhead named Bess. She clung to him outside the New Hastings church as if the Rose were another woman and not a ship at all. "Must you go away so soon?" she asked. "It seems you only just got home."

He kissed her, sensing that was some of what she wanted. It only made her cling tighter, though, and start to cry. "We have to learn what sort of land we have here," he said. "We have to know how big it is, how wide-"

"Do we have to find out right this minute?" Bess flared. "Do you have to do all the finding yourself?"

"It's not like that," Henry said. "Richard goes off into the woods for weeks at a time, and-"

"And it drives his wife wild." Bess seemed bound and determined not to let him finish a sentence. "Do you think Bertha and I don't talk about it? We have to talk to each other. Lord knows we don't get much chance to talk to the two of you."

"We need to explore," Henry said. "If we didn't-"

"If you didn't"-his wife poke him in the chest with a blunt-nailed forefinger, to make sure he understood that you was a singular-"you could settle down and farm and spend more time with me and your children. Would that be so dreadful?"

"You didn't fuss this much when I left Hastings on fishing runs," Henry said. "Sometimes I'd be gone longer then than I am on the trips I take these days."

His wife eyed him with a curious mix of exasperation and affection. "In those days, you had no choice. If you didn't help your father bring in the cod, we wouldn't eat. But now you don't have to go wandering. Neither does Richard. You do it anyway. Both of you do it anyway. It's not right. It's not fair." Her voice broke. More tears swam in her sea-green eyes.

Henry had never talked things over with his brother. He didn't know how they stood with Richard. He only knew for himself. "If I stayed on a farm all the time…It wouldn't be you, love." He wanted to make sure he said that, because it was the truth. "But if I stayed in the same place all the time, if I saw the same things around me all the time…" He shook his head. "Something inside of me would die. I'd be living in a cage."

"And the Rose isn't?" Bess crossed herself. "Mary, pity women!"

Richard thought a ship was a cage. But Richard also had to think a farm was a cage. He'd proved that, again and again. So instead of putting to sea, he'd thrust deeper into the Atlantean wilderness than any man alive. Didn't it add up to, if not the same thing, then something not so very different?

Deeper into the wilderness than any man alive? Henry suddenly realized he couldn't be sure of that. Bound to be restless Bretons, restless Basques, even restless Dovermen…Deeper into the wilderness than anyone who'd started from New Hastings, anyhow. That would do.

Bess shook her head. She said, "The Rose," under her breath in a tone not far from hatred. But then she went on, "What's the use? If I burnt that cursed scow to the waterline, you'd only go and build another one. And you'd enjoy doing it, too." By the way she said it, that was the worst crime of all.

And she wasn't even wrong. Henry had enjoyed building the Rose. If he had to craft another cog, he thought he could do a better job the next time. He kissed Bess again, not sure whether that would make things better or worse. He wasn't sure after he'd done it, either. He was sure of one thing, though: "I've got to go. I'll be back before too long."

"It will only seem like forever," Bess said bitterly.

He kissed her one more time. Some men who went to sea for weeks and months at a stretch worried about their wives being unfaithful while they were away. Some men who went to sea for weeks and months at a stretch had children that looked like their neighbors who stayed home. People mostly didn't talk about such things, which didn't mean they didn't happen.

Henry didn't worry about Bess. He knew he could count on her. And he didn't reward her for her fidelity by going into strange women when he came into a strange port…not very often, anyhow. If he'd brought home the gleets and passed them on to her, she would have been even less happy with him than she was now.

"Come back to me, do you hear?" Bess said.

"I always have," Henry answered. "I always will." I pray I always will.

He walked out onto the beach, right up to the edge of the Atlantic, and waved out to the Rose. The mate waved back; the cog's boat went into the water. A couple of fishermen rowed it toward shore.

One of these days, the settlers would have to build jetties out into the ocean so cogs could tie up more conveniently. Either that or they would have to find a proper sheltered harbor instead of this bare stretch of coast open to wind and sky. If they did, New Hastings might wither away. Henry shrugged. Bess wouldn't like that, but to him one place on land wasn't much different from another. Like his father, he only felt at home with a rolling, pitching deck under his feet.

The boat's keel scraped sand and mud. "Hop in, skipper," one of the fishermen said.

"Bide a moment." Henry turned back to wave to Bess and blow her a kiss. She waved back. Both rowers snickered. They were bachelors. They didn't understand how a woman could get under a man's skin and into his heart. He hoped they would find wives for themselves one of these days. More men than women came to Atlantis, so it wasn't a sure bet.

He wondered whether that was so for the Bretons and the Basques. If they had more girls than men…well, wouldn't that make a strange sort of commerce among the new settlements? But, from what he'd seen farther south, it seemed more likely to be the same with them as it was here.

"Ready to fare north this time?" the other fisherman asked as they started back to the Rose.

"Damned if I'm not, Sam," Henry answered. "We won't stew in our own juices sailing that way, anyhow. Only a couple of little settlements that anyone knows about north of New Hastings, too. Most of what we find will be new."

"That anyone knows about, yes," Sam said. "But who can guess whether there's a pirates' nest up there?"

"Not likely," Henry said. "We'd know if there were pirates, because they'd prey on us. We've lost a couple of boats since we came here, but nobody thinks it was on account of anything but bad weather and uncharted rocks. Plenty of both to go around, Lord knows."

"You're not wrong there," Sam admitted. "Still and all, though, what do we know about those other settlers? Maybe they fish part of the time and farm part of the time-aye, and steal part of the time, too, whenever they see the chance."

"Maybe they do," Henry said. Sam had a notion of what he was talking about. Henry couldn't swear he'd never turn pirate himself. If the chance for a big haul appeared out of nowhere, if he was sure he could get away with it and not start a feud that would hurt him and his for generations yet to come…Well, who could say what he'd do if something like that came along? The Rose carried swivel guns to ward off raiders, which didn't mean she couldn't turn raider herself.

He clambered up the nets stretched along her port side. Sam and Geoff-the other rower-came right behind him. The fishermen in the cog grabbed hold of their hands as they scrambled up over the gunwale and pulled them aboard. Then they brought in the boat, stowing it abaft the mast.

The mate was a broad-shouldered fellow named Bartholomew Smith. "Are we ready?" Henry asked him.

"Ready as we'll ever be," he answered. "Weighing anchor is all that wants doing-and then we find out what happens when we get colder instead of hotter."

"You're not old enough to remember fishing runs in the North Sea," Henry said. "Count your blessings that you're not. This could be something like that."

"Then why are we doing it?" Smith asked.

"If we don't, someone else will." For Henry, that was reason enough and more.