Opening Atlantis a-1

by Harry Turtledove

  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 Atlan
tis, 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 gun
s 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?"