Opening Atlantis

VII

P retty soon, Richard Radcliffe would reach the downhill slope. That was what he was waiting for-proof he'd made it into the western part of Atlantis, proof he'd got through the mountains at last.

If only I'd done it last year! He'd been exploring in the Green Ridge then. He hadn't got to the crest and over. And so his brother, sailing around, got to the far side of the new land ahead of him. Richard muttered under his breath. In a way, you hardly mattered at all if you weren't first.

But only in a way. The Radcliffes hadn't got to Atlantis first. By all accounts, though, New Hastings and Bredestown and the other settlements that sprang from their first visit were growing far faster than Cosquer. Richard didn't know for a fact whether that was true; he'd never gone down to the Breton town. The more he traveled through the heartland of Atlantis, the less patience he had for his fellow human beings, even the ones who happened to be Englishmen and-women.

Oh, he was glad to see, glad to touch, his wife when he came back from one of these jaunts. But even rutting palled sooner and sooner nowadays. Before long, he itched to be gone again. Other people were a stench in his nostrils, and the more of them there were, the worse the stench got. They lived with it all the time, so they didn't even know it was there. Richard hadn't himself, not till he was able to go away into the woods here for days at a time.

"How did I stand the stinks on a fishing boat?" he wondered aloud. He often talked to himself when he was out alone. Why not? And the answer was easy enough to find: he'd stood it because he'd known no better, the same way he'd stood getting jammed together with the other fishermen on the St. George, jammed almost as tight as the gutted slabs of salt cod they made.

Here in the wilderness, his words seemed to take on an importance they wouldn't have back in New Hastings, or even Bredestown. They echoed back from the boles of the trees that leapt skywards the way cathedral spires dreamt of doing. Some of the trees he'd seen rose higher than any cathedral spire-he was sure of that.

Only birdcalls-honkers' loud, nasal notes and the more melodious songs of smaller birds-had ever disturbed the stillness in these mountain passes before. Richard smiled. No, that wasn't quite true. There was also the chirping of the big green katydids that scurried and hopped through the undergrowth. They were as long as his thumb, and twice as fat. They couldn't fly; like the honkers, they had useless little stubs of wings. They didn't even hop particularly well. But, like mice back in England, they came out at night to nibble at whatever they could find.

And sometimes, here in the mountains, they came out by day, too, or what passed for day. Fog lingered long in the valleys here. Sometimes, as it thinned, Richard could see the green slopes above and to either side of the pass he was trying to get through. That was when he came out into the open; under the trees, mist might linger all through the day.

He knew he'd gone astray a few times, just because of the mist. Few trails wound through these forests. There were no deer or wild boar here to make them. Nor had men tamed these woods, as they had England's. Honkers made some paths, but honkers didn't care to go deep into the woods. Most of them were by choice creatures of the meadow and the forest edges. They sheltered under the trees to save themselves from the savage beaks and tearing talons of red-crested eagles. Without the birds that slashed down from the sky to slay them, they would have spent their time in the open.

The constant moisture made the air seem thick and textured in Richard's lungs. It also made the spicy scents of sap and needles even stronger and sweeter than they would have been were the weather drier. Of course, in drier weather the redwoods that gave the forest its upper story could never have grown.

Somewhere not far ahead, a stream gurgled. Richard came up to it, dipped up a cup, and drank. The clear, cold water that ran down his throat seemed as sweet and almost as strong as wine. It wasn't the greenish, nasty stuff that came out of the butts when you'd stayed at sea too long. It wasn't the vile stuff that came down to Hastings, either, already foul with inlanders' shit and piss and the leavings from tanneries and breweries. This was water, the way God intended it to be.

A frog stared at Richard out of golden eyes. That single singing sac under its throat still seemed strange to him. But so much of Atlantis was strange by English standards; why should that one small thing stand out? He couldn't have said why, but it did.

The frog didn't hop off the rock, as a sensible English frog would have. It didn't recognize him as a threat, which could have made him all the more dangerous to it. Luckily for it, he wasn't hungry right now. He plucked a leaf from a fern and dropped it in the stream.

It floated off…toward the east. "Damnation!" Richard muttered. He was still on this side of the watershed. One of these days, if that leaf didn't sink, it would wash out to sea somewhere not far from New Hastings. He wanted leaves to float west, and to follow them to Atlantis' farther shore. Thanks to Henry, he knew it was there.

More than half of him wished his brother hadn't found Avalon Bay, or anything else that had to do with Atlantis' western coast. What he already knew made his own explorations seem less weighty. Going off towards a land you already knew something about was like listening to a story where you already knew the ending. What lay in the middle might still be interesting, but it wasn't the same.

A flapjack turtle stuck its pointy-nosed head out of the water and eyed him with reptilian suspicion. He was suspicious of it, too. The creature had formidable jaws. He didn't want it taking off a finger joint if he tried to catch it. Flapjacks made good eating, but plenty of other prey was easier to hunt.

He pressed on. Light filtered through the mist, through the redwood canopy, and through the lower story of pines in sudden, startling shafts, almost as if it came through a stained-glass window in a cathedral. The tall columns of the tree trunks only strengthened the resemblance.

Richard thought God more likely to live in this pristine outdoor chapel than in any building men threw together. You could see the Creation here. The birds and the wind in the branches played a sweeter melody than any that burst from the throats of a choir. And the conifers' smell that filled the air in the woods made his nose happier than all the frankincense and myrrh brought in from distant shores.

Bishop John would not have been glad to hear his opinions. But Bishop John never would. Richard Radcliffe had no desire to fall foul of the Church. He hadn't even told his wife of his notions about the woods. She wouldn't understand them anyhow; she hadn't traveled far enough under the trees.

Maybe someone from Freetown had as little use for his neighbors and as much for the new world in which he found himself as Richard. Maybe one of Francois Kersauzon's Bretons, or a Basque from Gernika, also made a habit of plunging deep into the heartland of Atlantis for no better reason than to see what he could find. Maybe, but Richard had found no signs of other wanderings in the course of his own.

"What would I do if I did?" he wondered. He shrugged. He had no idea. It was like wondering what you would do if the mast suddenly toppled. The idea seemed far-fetched enough to be silly.

And yet, once it lodged, it didn't want to leave. He kept looking around. Every small forest sound made him wonder if he should draw his bow. He knew that was foolish, but he couldn't help it.

He'd been blazing trees to mark his path. He kept on doing it, but made his blazes point in the other direction, as if he were coming from the west. That might confuse a stranger who found them. Or it might do nothing but make him feel better. He did it anyhow.

Some of the snails that crawled up trees and foraged on ferns here in the mountains were almost the size of his fist. His first thought when he saw one was that a Frenchman would have thought he'd died and gone to heaven. His next thought was that the Frenchman might not be so foolish after all. A snail that size had a lot of meat, even if it came with eyestalks.

And, roasted over a small fire, giant snail didn't prove bad at all. It was bland enough to make him wish he'd brought more salt along, but he couldn't do anything about that now. He noted that a clean empty shell might do duty for a cup if he ever broke his.

Some of the slugs in the woods were even bigger than the snails. He needed longer to notice them, though: they were a dark green that made them look like patches of moss. But patches of moss didn't usually leave behind a trail of slime as wide as two fingers side by side when they glided along. And the slugs, of course, had eyestalks, too. They reminded Richard of slowly moving cucumbers.

They also had a lot of meat. He decided he wasn't hungry enough to find out what it tasted like. If he was missing a treat…then he was, that was all. One of these days, some other traveler, more intrepid or more desperate than he was, might find out.

He wondered how long he'd been walking downhill before he realized he was. Excitement flowered in him. Was he past the watershed at last, or was this nothing but a trick of the ground? He didn't see it rising up ahead of him, but he couldn't see very far ahead.

"A stream. I have to find a stream," he said. Finding one didn't take long, not in that moist country.

Did the water taste different, or was he imagining things? He couldn't say, not for sure. He scrabbled around in the dirt till he found a few pine needles, and he dropped them in. He felt like shouting when they slid off toward the west.

He went another half-mile or so, then repeated the test in a different rivulet. When a leaf also floated westward there, he let out a whoop that came back from the redwood trunks: "I'm on the other side!" He pressed on.

When a ship came out of the east in the middle of November, Edward Radcliffe was surprised. The Atlantic turned blustery by then; he wouldn't have wanted to put to sea at this season. Sometimes you had to, but he wouldn't have wanted to. This was a fancy trading cog, too: not a beat-up fishing boat like most of the ones that crossed the sea to Atlantis.

He walked out along the pier to meet her and see what her crew wanted. Cold, nasty drizzle blew into his face. Yes, it was November, all right, even if few of the trees here in the new land lost their leaves.

Edward stared at the fellow looking down at him from the forecastle. Under a sleeveless leather jerkin, the stranger wore a tunic of crimson silk. Edward couldn't remember the last time he'd seen silk. He didn't think any of the settlers had brought any hither. Oh, maybe a hair ribbon; maybe even a scarf. Surely no more than that.

He hadn't seen a look like the one on the stranger's face for a long time, either. He needed a moment to recognize it for what it was. The newcomer was looking down at him, all right. That was a man of high birth surveying a social inferior. It wasn't a look Edward was glad to see: he thought he'd left such fripperies behind for good.

When he didn't speak, the stranger glowered more. As far as Edward was concerned, he could glower all he pleased. And he could freeze, too, for all Edward cared, and he was probably doing just that; silk might be pretty, but it wasn't warm. Edward's dun-colored woolen cloak was homely, yes, but it shed cold and rain.

At last, grudgingly, the newcomer said, "God give you good day, old man."

"And you," Edward Radcliffe replied, more grudgingly still. True, he was old, but he didn't care to be reminded of it.

"Tell me, old man"-the stranger didn't just remind him of it, but rubbed it in on top of that-"do you know, do you have any idea, whom you will have the honor of meeting when he steps off this God-cursed scow?"

If he thought that ship was a scow, he knew nothing about the sea. Well, likely he didn't. As for the alleged honor…"No," Edward said. "Don't much care, either." He turned and started to walk away.

"Hold, varlet, or you die before your feet touch solid ground!" barked the man in silk. As if by magic, three archers had appeared behind him. Each aimed a clothyard shaft at Edward's short ribs. The rain would play merry hell with their bowstrings soon, but not soon enough.

The archers had the look of hired muscle. If the stranger told them to shoot, shoot they would. They would worry about it later, if they worried at all. Radcliffe stopped and came back. "Well, you talked me into it," he said.

"I thought I might." Yes, the bastard up there was used to giving orders, used to having them obeyed, and used to enjoying having them obeyed. His self-satisfied smirk said so even more clearly than his snotty tone of voice. "I ask you once again, old man-and better than you deserve, too-do you know whom you'll have the honor of meeting when he disembarks? Think carefully on your answer this time, if you want to meet him on your feet and not lying at his."

"No, I don't know. Please tell me," Edward said-carefully.

Anyone who knew him would know he was seething. Anyone who knew him would know, too, that only a fool angered him and thought to come off unscathed. This fellow didn't know him, or care to, and didn't worry about angering him: all of which only proved the man a fool. But he was a fool with important news, for he answered, "Why, none other than his grand and glorious Lordship, the Earl of Warwick."

"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.

He hadn't got a good look at this snake. He didn't know if it was one of the poisonous kind. He wasn't inclined to go after it and find out, either.

The ground sloped up under his feet. Then he topped the low rise and headed down instead. The afternoon sun flashed off water ahead.

At first, Richard could make out no more through the screening of trees and ferns ahead. A pond? A lake? He hadn't gone much farther before he realized that, if it was a lake, it was a big one. He pushed harder. Now he wanted to get out into open country, at least long enough to take a good look at what he'd found.

Sunshine meant he'd come to the edge of the woods. "Oh," he said softly as he got the look he wanted. After a moment's wonder, he added, "If that's not Avalon Bay, then this coast has two of them."

He could see the quiet water of the bay, the lips of land that almost closed around it, and the opening that gave access to the wide ocean beyond. Henry hadn't lied-this was a harbor in a million. It hardly mattered that there was nowhere to go from here. This was the sort of place where you wanted to build a town just because you could.

And there might be somewhere to go, after all. There were those copperskinned men the Basques had found, the ones with the name Henry and his crewmen pronounced differently every time they tried it. Did they have anything worth trading?

Another land across the sea, one you could reach from Atlantis…That was a surprise. But then, Atlantis itself was a surprise-one surprise after another, in fact. Richard wondered whether Francois Kersauzon rued the day when he sold the secret to his father. A third of a hold of salt cod? It didn't seem enough, not when the Englishmen had done so much more with the new land than Kersauzon's Bretons had.

Even the Basques had done more with Atlantis than the Bretons had, and the Basques had got off to a late start here. Richard paused, peering out into the bay. He thought the Basques had got a late start here. No matter what he thought, though, could he prove it? Like the Bretons, like the Englishmen, Basques and Galicians sailed deep into the Atlantic after cod. Just because his own father heard of Atlantis from the Bretons, that didn't mean the Basques and Galicians must have. Maybe they'd stumbled over the new land on their own.

Have to ask them, next time I see one-whenever that is, Richard thought. He had no idea when it would be. He'd never traveled south. Basques came up to New Hastings every now and again, but he couldn't remember the last time one went inland to Bredestown. Richard was curious about the copperskinned unpronounceables. How had they made out after they got to Gernika?

He looked out at the ocean again, or what he could see of it through the mouth of the bay. It wasn't impossible, he supposed, that he would see a sail out there on the Atlantic. Henry hadn't taken the Rose out around the northern cape this year, but maybe the Basques had gone around to the south and then sailed west toward their new land, their inhabited land.

Henry hadn't wanted them to find Avalon Bay. That had made sense even before Richard saw this marvelous harbor with his own eyes. Now that he had, he was as sure as his brother that nobody but Englishmen had any business exploring or making a home here.

A river ran into the northern part of the bay. Henry had said so. Henry and his crew hadn't taken a boat up the river, so nobody knew whether the stream ran west from the green ridge of mountains Richard had penetrated or came down from the north.

If it did rise in the mountains, it would make a wonderful highway across the western half of Atlantis. You could build a raft or a boat up in the mountain country and then ride the rest of the way. You could if there weren't too many rocks or mudflats, anyway.

That would be worth knowing. Richard went on blazing his trail as he headed north toward the river. If it didn't suit his purposes, he could always go back the way he'd come out. He didn't want to: he'd already been over that ground once. But he could, which was comforting in its way.

Shorebirds flew up in shrieking clouds when they caught sight of him. They wouldn't have done that on the eastern shore, or not to the same degree. A lot of the birds in the east were as naive about people as honkers were. What did that say? Was it close enough from here to the new land with the copperskinned people that more western shorebirds made the journey and grew familiar with hunters? Richard couldn't see what else it was likely to mean.

He swore under his breath. He'd seen snipe in those clouds of birds, and snipe made uncommonly fine eating. The ones back near New Hastings were tame enough to catch by hand. Not these. If he wanted them, he'd have to get them the hard way.

Even without snipe roasted in clay, he went on. Over along the eastern edge of the bay, what was water, what marsh, and what land seemed as much a matter of opinion as anything else. Although it was bright daylight, mosquitoes buzzed. Henry had made it plain the water was deeper out by the insweeping arms of land. One of those would be the place to build, then.

Birds swooped here and there after the swarms of insects. Some of the swallows were achingly like the ones he'd left behind in England. Others were larger, with a purple cast to their feathers. Instead of flitting all the time, some birds perched on branches and stumps and made forays against the mosquitoes. "Pee-bee!" they called gaily. "Pee-bee!"

Richard found the river a little before sunset. It meandered through low country, so he had trouble being sure, but he thought it came down from the east. "I'll find out tomorrow," he said.

With a bone hook, some worms he dug out of the boggy soil, and a length of line, he had no trouble pulling a couple of trout from the stream. They wouldn't make as good a supper as snipe would have, but they were a lot better than nothing.

He wondered how things were back in New Hastings. Cold and wet and boring, unless he missed his guess. Not much happened there, not these days. When he got back, he'd give people something to talk about for a while.