"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.
VI
O cean. When you looked west from the Rose's bow, there was nothing but ocean. How far? Henry Radcliffe wondered. All the way to Cathay? All the way to the edge of the world, where it spilled off in God's waterfall? All the way to some land as unimaginable as Atlantis had been when Henry was a young man?
He didn't know. How could he? He wanted to, hungered to, find out. But that was a voyage for another time, with another ship. The Rose was a fine coasting vessel, and the best job a gang of amateur shipwrights could have done when they hacked her out of timber. For striking out across the broad, stormy Atlantic to shores unknown? Well, no.
"Where now, skipper?" Bartholomew Smith asked.
Whenever Henry heard that, he started to look around to see where his father was. But Edward Radcliffe stayed behind in New Hastings. He still put to sea, to fish or to go down the coast to one of the other settlements. Heading off to nowhere for the fun of it, though, was beyond his old bones and creaking muscles.
Or maybe he just thought the Rose didn't have much of a chance of coming back from nowhere. And maybe he was right. But if he was, he judged with an old man's sour wisdom. Henry hoped that kind of judgment passed him by. Yet if enough years piled onto him, it probably wouldn't.
"Where now?" he echoed. "West along the coast for a while, and we'll see what it does. If it goes straight, we do the same. If it tends south, we follow. If it tends north…well, we still follow, but I won't like it so well."
"Who would?" the mate replied. "Can't run all the way up to Iceland, though, or the squareheads would have found this country a long time ago."
Henry grunted. He hadn't thought of that, and he should have. "We won't go hungry, anyhow," he said. "Plenty of little fish to net out, and plenty of birds getting fat feeding on them."
Even as he spoke, a bright-billed puffin plunged into the sea and came out holding three or four sardines. Murres and auks and guillemots also preyed on the abundant fish. So did bigger birds that looked like auks but seemed unable to fly. They swam like small porpoises instead.
Smith must have been thinking of them, for he said, "Shame we can't render some of these birds down to oil, like the thrushes ashore. They'd yield tun after tun, Devil take me if they wouldn't."
"We ought to think about setting up a trying works here," Henry said. "Not just for the birds, but for the whales, too." He'd seen several of the big beasts blowing and breaching not far from the Rose. If one of them had risen right under her…There were all kinds of reasons why ships didn't come home.
"Far as the whales go, I'm surprised we didn't find the damned Basques up here ahead of us." Bartholomew Smith made some gabbling noises that were supposed to be Basque.
Henry laughed, even if the mate's imitation didn't sound much like the real thing. "They're whaling men, all right," he agreed. There were no more intrepid whalers than the Basques. They had their reasons, too. Like any other fish, whale meat was allowed during Lent and on Fridays. Henry himself was mighty fond of salted whale-craspoix, the French called it-and peas.
The big auklike birds were easy to catch. Like so many of Atlantis's creatures, they were ignorant of men. Some of the flying sea birds behaved the same way, but others were warier. Henry wondered what that meant. Did some of them stay in Atlantean waters all the time, while others flew to lands where men were liable to hunt them? Or were some simply stupider than others? A nice question, but one he had no idea how to answer.
Before the Rose got very far west at all, her progress slowed even though the wind remained favorable. The water through which she sailed changed color, too, turning lighter and bluer than it had been before. It was also noticeably warmer than the stretch of ocean from which they'd just come.
"Strong current," Henry remarked.
"Right strong," Smith agreed. "Seems to scoot along the shore here."
"It does. Might almost have been put here to make sure we don't get anywhere in a hurry," Henry said.
"You don't s
uppose-?" The mate sounded alarmed. Even by the standards of his age and trade, he was a superstitious man.
By the standards of his age and trade, Henry wasn't. "No, I don't think anything of the kind," he answered. "Old Scratch has better things to do than worry about the likes of us. Or I hope he does, anyhow." He crossed himself, on the off chance.
Bartholomew Smith did the same thing. "I hope so, too." His voice quavered a little.
Satan did seem busy elsewhere. Just as Henry hoped, the coast soon started tending southward. Strong breezes blew down from the north to push the Rose on her way. She didn't travel as fast as she might have, for the current coming up from the south fought against her, but she did travel.
And the warm current seemed to bring balmy weather with it as it came. They still lay far to the north of New Hastings, but the climate here in the west was far milder than it had been on Atlantis' eastern shore.
"I wonder what it's like here come winter," Henry said.
"Foggy, I warrant," Smith replied. "All this warm water striking cold air…Might make London look to its laurels."
"Have you ever seen London?" Henry asked.
The mate shook his head. "Why on earth would a Hastings fisherman want to go and see London? Have you, skipper?"
"No, never once," Henry admitted.
"Well, there you are," Bartholomew Smith said. "And I've been a New Hastings fisherman as long as you have, and I don't much want to go back across the sea any more, either. By God, I like it here."
"So do I. Any land where no lord can tell you what to do and you don't owe taxes to anybody…I like that fine," Henry said.
When they found a good-sized stream flowing into the ocean, they rowed the water butts ashore to refill them. A gaggle of honkers stared at them in mild curiosity, as if to say, You're the strangest-looking birds we've ever seen. They were the strangest-looking honkers Henry had ever seen. They were a pale gray, with orange feet and beaks. Their wings were bigger than those of any variety near New Hastings, though still utterly useless as far as getting them off the ground was concerned.
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