Opening Atlantis

VIII

T hree of the Earl of Warwick's troopers tramped down the middle of New Hastings' widest street, pulling their boots out of the mud at every step. Rain pattered down, which would make the mud even thicker and gluier before long. The troopers' mailshirts jingled as they walked. To keep the rain off of their byrnies and helms, they wore hooded wool cloaks they'd taken from the settlers.

Edward Radcliffe wore a cloak himself, and a broad-brimmed hat in lieu of a hood. He made sure he steered well clear of Warwick's men. The less reason they had to get angry at him, the smaller the chance they would do something he'd regret. He watched them trudge by. They paid him no attention at all.

The soldiers seldom went about in groups smaller than three, not any more. Two of them had suffered unfortunate accidents while walking around by themselves. Nobody could prove anything. Even Warwick admitted as much. But the exiled noble had called Edward in to the house he'd appropriated and laid down the law like Moses coming down from Mount Sinai.

"This will stop," Warwick said bluntly. "It will, or I shall turn loose my wolves, and New Hastings will not be the happier for that."

"Your Lordship, I had nothing to do with it," Edward said.

"I believe you. If I didn't believe you, you would be dead, and I would be talking to someone else." Richard Neville didn't waste sweet words on his social inferiors-which meant he wasted them on no one in Atlantis. "Still, these people listen to you. And they had better, if they don't want to see what slaughter looks like. They will not play me for a fool. D'you understand me?"

"Oh, yes. You always make yourself very plain, sir," Edward Radcliffe answered. "But may I ask you one question?"

"Go ahead." By Warwick's tone, he was granting a favor to a man who didn't deserve it.

"Even if your soldiers hold New Hastings down, what good will it do you? What will you get from it?"

Richard Neville stared at him. They might both use English, but they didn't speak the same language. "If I cannot be a lord in England, Radcliffe, I shall be a lord-no, a king-here. This may be a miserable puddle of a realm, but it is my miserable puddle of a realm. Do you understand me now?"

"I certainly do, your Lordship," Edward said.

"Good. Then get out."

Get out Edward Radcliffe did, thanking heaven the noble let him leave. And he spread the word, as Warwick wanted him to do. But he spread it for his own reasons, not for the earl's.

"We don't want a king here, do we?" he said when he visited his son after getting away from Warwick, and answered his own question: "No, by God, of course we don't, not if he uses his soldiers to steal from us and to hold us down."

"Why shouldn't we knock 'em over the head as we find the chance, then?" Henry said-and he was only the first of many. "If we get rid of a few now, the rest will be easier to dispose of later."

Reluctantly, Edward shook his head. "If Warwick keeps them all together, think what they can do to us. Do you want England's worthless war coming to the shores of Atlantis?"

"Sooner or later, we'll have to kill them all." Again, Henry was only the first who said that. The Earl of Warwick's soldiers had not endeared themselves in New Hastings.

"How can we, without raising the whole settlement?" Edward asked. "They have training. They have discipline. They have armor. One of them is worth more in the field than one of us."

His son smiled a most unpleasant smile. "We have longbows."

He was right. A clothyard shaft from a longbow would pierce any mailshirt ever made. A shot at close range would pierce plate. But he seemed to think being right was enough. Edward Radcliffe feared he knew better.

"Unless we kill them all at once, the rest take their revenge," he said. "The whole settlement is hostage to them. Trying and failing is worse than not trying at all."

Henry shook his head. "Nothing is worse than not trying at all. If we don't try at all, what are we but their dogs?"

"Patience," Edward told him. "Patience. What we have to do is, we have to make sure we don't fail when we try. And we have to make sure Warwick and his wolves-his name for them, not mine-think we are their dogs till we try. If they're ready for us, if they're waiting for us, our work gets that much harder. Am I right or am I wrong?"

"I am a man, not a dog," Henry said, but then, shaking his head, "I'll be a quiet man, I suppose-for a while."

"That's what we need." Edward didn't try to hide the relief in his voice.

He had to play the dog, too, no matter how it galled him. And acting subservient wounded him all the more because he knew he wouldn't be worth much if it came to a fight. For a man his age, he was healthy enough. He could still see well-at a distance. He hadn't gone deaf. He still had most of his teeth. All the same, he was nearer seventy than sixty. He wasn't very strong, and he wasn't very fast. His wind wasn't what it had been, either.

When he grumbled about it, Henry set a hand on his shoulder. "Don't fret, Father. You've still got more brains than any three men in Atlantis, and that includes Warwick. When we move against him, we'll move because of you."

"You flatter me," Edward said. "I think you're wrong, though. When New Hastings rises against Warwick, chances are it will be because a soldier does something so horrible, he'll make everyone hate him-and his lord. These things work out that way."

"If you say so." Henry winked at him. "What I say is, you show you've got all those brains by knowing such things."

"What I say is, you're a miserable pup," Edward said with rough affection.

Henry winked again. "And where do I get that? From you or from Mother?"

"Don't let her hear you ask, or you'll get it, all right," Edward said. They both laughed, as if he were kidding.

Snow on the ground and sleet in the air told Richard Radcliffe he was back on the east side of the mountains again. His breath smoked, as if he were a dragon. He had a dragonish temper right now. Just a few miles back, the weather had been tolerable-not warm, but tolerable. No more.

"We're living in the wrong place. We all ought to pack up and head for Avalon Bay," he grumbled. Fog spurted from his mouth and nose with every word. And if that didn't prove his point, he couldn't imagine what would.

He also couldn't imagine getting everyone in New Hastings and Bredestown to pack up and travel across Atlantis or sail around it to get to the land where it was always April. Most people were like plants; they found a spot, and they put down roots. He didn't even intend to try to talk the whole English settlement into leaving. A few men, a few families, might. More likely, nobody would.

"Bloody fools," Richard said, scuffing through the snow. He kept his head down, partly to ward against the nasty wind and partly to spot any tracks there might be. If he could follow a trail straight to a honker or an oil thrush…

When the weather got cold, you needed to eat more. The fire inside you needed more fuel to keep going. And, before long, he found some. This country was extravagantly rich in extravagantly stupid game. The oil thrush he came upon eyed him in mild confusion as he approached. Maybe, like the red-crested eagles, it thought he was some strange kind of honker. It probably wondered what he was doing right up to the moment when he knocked it over the head.

He found shelter behind a fallen pine. Dried-out needles made good tinder: he dug around under the trunk till he found some the snow hadn't reached. Once he got the fire going, he fed it with twigs and branches. The warmth felt good-felt wonderful, in fact. He butchered the oil thrush and started cooking a leg. He hadn't done the best job of plucking it; the stink of singeing feathers filled his nose. Grease dripped down onto the flames and made them sputter and pop.

He carved chunks of meat off the bones with his knife. He didn't admire his own cookery. Part of the bird was nearly burnt, the rest nearly raw. He didn't care. After tossing the gnawed leg bones aside, he cooked the liver and the heart and the gizzard, and then the other thigh. The breast and the wings had less meat on them.

A couple of soft, slow, almost sleepy chirps startled him. Then he started to laugh. He wasn't the only one who thought the fire felt good. One of those mouse-sized katydids had taken shelter against the cold under the downed pine. With the fire close by to heat it up, it revived. Maybe it thought spring had come early.

"Sorry, bug," Richard said. "Pretty soon, I'm going to push on, and then you'll go back to sleep." In England, dormice snoozed away the winter. No dormice here. No mice of any kind, except the ones that had sneaked aboard the cogs that brought the settlers from England. No native rats, either. Richard didn't miss them. Who but a cat would?

After he built up the fire to burn for a while, he rolled himself in his blanket and went to sleep. It wasn't a soft bed, but it would do. Now he hoped the weather wouldn't warm up. If it started to rain, it would soak through even his thick, greasy woolen blanket. Then weariness claimed him, and he stopped worrying about the weather or anything else.

He was shivering when he woke up. That meant he woke sooner than he might have. It was still dark, with only the faintest hint of twilight in the east. New Hastings lay farther south than its namesake in England, so its wintertime days were longer and its nights shorter than the ones he'd grown up with. All the same, its winters seemed harsher than the ones in the land he'd left behind. He wondered why that should be so, but had no doubt it was.

"Father should have settled farther south yet," he muttered as he poked the embers to red life, fed more tinder onto them, and got the fire going again. From everything he'd heard, the cold season was milder down in Cosquer and much milder down in Gernika. The Bretons and Basques had it easier than their English counterparts did.

Of course, that coin was two-sided. New Hastings' summers were hotter and stickier than the ones back in England. The farther south you went down Atlantis' east coast, the more pronounced that got. By the time you reached Gernika, wouldn't you turn into a puddle of sweat?

There had to be a better way-and there was, on the far side of the mountains. From what he'd seen and from what Henry had reported, the weather near Avalon Bay came close to perfection the whole year round. Again, he wondered why there should be such a difference, and, again, he didn't know. That the difference was there and that it was real, he couldn't help believing. He'd seen it. He'd felt it.

His stomach growled. He roasted the oil thrush's other drumstick and broke his fast with it. He left the rest of the carcass behind when he went east once more. In England, he wouldn't have, for he wouldn't have been confident of catching anything else. Even a halfway decent hunter, though, had a hard time going hungry in Atlantis. He'd left a lot of big birds behind him, dead, in his travels. He could always kill another one when he needed to.

Downhill again. Downhill all the way to New Hastings. All he needed to do was find the trail he'd blazed and follow it, and it would take him home again. What could be easier?

"Yes? And then what?" he asked himself aloud. When he got back, how many people would care where he'd gone? How many would care what he'd done? Oh, some would, but most of the settlers just wanted to get on with the lives they'd made here. They thought him strange for plunging into the wilderness every chance he got. He wondered why they'd bothered leaving England.

Even his wife thought him strange for plunging into the wilderness-and for leaving her alone. He hoped she hadn't done anything to make a scandal while he was gone. Fishermen who went to sea for weeks and months at a time ran that risk. Richard had no reason to think Bertha was unfaithful, but he knew it was one of the things that could happen to a traveling man.

Of course, it was also one of the things that could happen to a man who lived over his shop. If a woman was going to, she was going to. The same held true for men, but women had a harder time doing anything about it.

He was perhaps halfway down from the mountains to the sea when he got a surprise-he saw a hog drinking at a swift-running stream. A heartbeat later, the hog saw him or smelled him or heard him. It snorted and trotted away. Unlike honkers and oil thrushes, it knew what a man would want from it.

"By Our Lady, they've come a long way!" Richard exclaimed. If he'd seen this one here, some were bound to have traveled even farther west. He wondered if any swine had reached the mountains or gone over them. He laughed. They would give the local beasts a lively time.

Halfway up the towering spire of a redwood, a parrot screeched. Others started to call, too, till the woods echoed with their cries. That made Richard laugh again. Back in England, he'd heard of parrots, but never seen them. From everything he'd heard, they lived in hot countries. Not in Atlantis. Here they were, screaming their heads off in the middle of winter. You never could tell.

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

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

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

"What the devil are you?" the other one added.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, you miserable hound, it is me," Richard said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"He's a dog with teeth," Nell warned.

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

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

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

"Can you?" Nell asked-the right question, sure enough.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You'll never prove it," he said.

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

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

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

Not quite by chance, one of his mittened hands came to rest on the wrought-iron barrel of a swivel gun. "I wonder if we could hit New Hastings from here," he said in musing tones. "I wonder if we could hit a particular house in New Hastings from here."

"Hit the town? I think the piece'd reach that far," Bartholomew Smith said. Henry nodded; he gauged the range, and the gun's power, about the same. The mate went on, "Hit one house in particular? That'd take the Devil's own luck, don't you think?"

Regretfully, Henry nodded again. "Afraid I do."

Smith eyed him. "Which house have you got in mind?"

"Oh, let's just say I was thinking of putting a ball through my father's door, to wake him up if he was sleeping."

"You can say that if you want to." Smith looked around to make sure no one besides Henry was in earshot. "Me, I'd sooner put one through Warwick's door-or through Warwick, though from here that'd take more than the Devil's luck."

"It would, wouldn't it?" Henry said sadly. He sent the mate a hooded glance. "So you're not fond of his Lordship?"

"Lucy Fenner's mother is my first cousin," Smith said.

"I should have remembered that." Henry thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. "Well, no, then you have good reason not to be."

The mate scowled. "Lucy's a good girl, a sweet girl, damn him. Not her fault she was born pretty, and she shouldn't have to pay for it like that."

"Women have been paying for their looks that way since the days of Adam and Eve," Henry said. Seeing the mutinous expression on the mate's face, he quickly added, "Not that that makes it right."

"I should say not," Bartholomew Smith spat. "The day is coming when Warwick'll push all of us too far, like he's already pushed me. I think it's coming soon, and when it does…" His strong, scarred hands folded into fists.

"My father feels the same way. I do believe he's felt that way since he first set eyes on Warwick, before the earl even set foot on our soil." Henry looked around again. No one was paying him or Smith any special heed. In a low voice, he continued, "When the day does come, he aims to fight."

"Skipper, I always knew your father was a good man," Smith said. "I always knew he was a smart man, too. Only question is, can we kick those bastards when we have to?"

"That's what's held him back this long. And, he says, even winning you can pay too high a price. If the battle tears New Hastings and Bredestown to pieces, if half the people die and half the houses and shops burn down, we'll all be years getting over it," Henry said. "When he was a lad, he says, his old grandfather would tell him stories about what England was like just after the Black Death passed over the countryside."

The mate shuddered and made the sign of the cross. "God keep the plague on the other side of the sea. That bloody Warwick's plague enough for these lands."

"Plague enough and to spare," Henry agreed. "But that's just Father's point. A war here could be as bad as the plague. It could set us back the way the Black Death set England back. That's why he doesn't want to fight unless we can beat the soldiers in a hurry without ruining ourselves in the doing."

"That's sensible, no doubt about it," Bartholomew Smith said. "How long do you think poor Lucy will want us to go on being sensible?" Henry grunted; that shot hit the target in the bull's-eye. Smith asked another question: "Isn't it better to die on our feet than to live on our knees?"

Henry grunted again-he hadn't dreamt the other man had so much fire in his belly. Slowly, he answered, "It is, yes. My father would not say otherwise. But he would say it's better still to live on our feet. He's looking for a way to do that, which is why he waits."

"God grant he find one," Smith said. "How long can he-how long can we-keep waiting, though? If we get used to saying, 'Yes, Lord,' to whatever Warwick demands of us-well, we'll be living on our knees then, and I fear me we'll forget how to climb up on our feet again."

"I don't think it will go that far," Henry said. "Back in England, even the king has trouble telling his people what to do. That's why the wars go on and on. If the king can't make Englishmen obey, Lord have mercy on a poor earl who tries, eh?"

Smith's smile touched his lips, but not his eyes. "Don't they call Warwick the Kingmaker, though?"

"That was his nickname, all right. But the king he made unmade him. And if a mere king can cast him down"-Henry winked-"don't you suppose a settlement full of Englishmen can do the same when the time comes?"

"Belike you're right." Despite his words, Smith still didn't smile with his whole face. "It had better come soon, I tell you, for Lucy's sake. A woman's not like a man, you know-she keeps her honor between her legs."

"Warwick has dishonored her, but he hasn't taken her honor away. It's not the same thing," Henry said. "Everyone knows what he would have done to her kin if she didn't yield herself to him. That would have touched off the fight, I expect, but it wouldn't have done the Fenners any good."

"No, it wouldn't… Touched off…" Smith set his own gloved hand on the wrought-iron barrel of the swivel gun. He swung it toward the house the Earl of Warwick had taken for his own, as he'd taken Lucy Fenner for his own.

As he aims to take New Hastings for his own, Henry thought. When you got down to it, wasn't it that simple? Warwick didn't want to be a kingmaker here: he wanted to be a king himself. It would be a small kingdom. Maybe that would suffice him, or maybe he dreamt of taking England in King Edward's despite, using Atlantis as his base. If he did, Henry judged him a madman, but wasn't a madman all the more dangerous for being mad?

"We'll settle him," he declared. "What does Atlantis need with kings?"

"King Warwick?" Smith followed his thoughts without trouble. "King Neville? King Richard? Whatever he'd style himself, let him carve it on his tombstone instead."

"My brother would make a better King Richard than Warwick would," Henry said. "He's better suited to the job, too, by God."

"How's that?"

"He doesn't want it."