Edward nodded. That sounded about right to him. And that very afternoon, a fisherman shouted, “Sail ho!”
If she was an English cog, everything would be fine. If she wasn’t…Edward ordered the swivel guns loaded with scrap iron. If you got ready for a fight, sometimes you could stay away from one.
The lines of that cog did look familiar. Edward Radcliffe squinted north. Where had he seen her before? He cursed. “Bugger me blind if that’s not the Morzen!”
Sure enough, the hail that came was in Breton: “Ahoy, the St. George! Is that you, Moses?” Yes, that was François Kersauzon’s voice, all right.
“Moses?” Edward shouted back. “What are you talking about, you blasphemous toad?”
“You mistake me for your mother,” Kersauzon said sweetly. “And is it not that you have led your people to the Promised Land? I saw your new town, and all the cogs in the sea close by. You’ve done well, Edward, well enough to make me jealous.”
They were closing fast on each other. Radcliffe looked to his guns. If he opened fire now, maybe he could cripple the Morzen and finish her off at his leisure. He didn’t want anyone jealous of New Hastings. If François Kersauzon didn’t come home to Le Croisic, wouldn’t that make other Bretons less likely to sail far into the west? The temptation!
But Kersauzon hadn’t done anything to him, or, from what Edward gathered, to New Hastings. He’d done Edward a favor, in fact, by leading him to Atlantis. Yes, he’d profited from it, but he’d deserved to. If Edward returned evil for that great good, wouldn’t he pay in the next world, pay for all eternity? He crossed himself. He was a believing man. He didn’t want to imperil his soul.
And so he waved to the west, to the waiting Atlantean shore. “It’s a broad land, François,” he said. “Room for Englishmen and Bretons—and Frenchmen and Basques, too, I shouldn’t wonder.”
“It could be that we’ll end up neighbors here one day, then,” Kersauzon replied. “I always thought Englishmen were better at a distance, but what can you do?” His comic shrug was very French. He would have got furious had Edward told him so.
Instead, Radcliffe made sure he really was south of the English settlement. Kersauzon didn’t mock him for asking. Where dead reckoning left off at sea and prayer began was a question every sailor had to face now and then. The two cogs parted with fishermen on each calling, “Good luck!” to the other.
Henry came back to Edward as he steered the St. George toward New Hastings. Quietly, the young man said, “I wondered if you’d fight him.”
Edward Radcliffe sighed. “I wondered the same thing. But how could I? We wouldn’t be here if not for him.”
His son sighed, too. “Well, Father, it’s not that you’re wrong. I only pray you won’t spend the rest of your life sorry for being right.”
“God forbid it!” Edward said, and crossed himself again.
New Hastings thrived. How could it do anything else, set on fertile soil with the closest enemies an ocean away? Swarms of fish came out of the sea. Crops and livestock burgeoned. Hogs and rabbits got loose in the wild, but no one had imagined that they wouldn’t.
Not many years went by before honkers grew scarce around the settlement. People complained that they had to walk a day or two to find the big flightless birds and kill them. The birds couldn’t seem to figure out that these strange two-legged creatures were a menace to them.
Red-crested eagles grew scarcer, too, though not fast enough to suit Edward Radcliffe. The eagles killed a child and a woman, and seemed especially fond of the fat above the kidneys of sheep. Shooting them while they attacked was hopeless.
Shooting them while they perched, on the other hand…The great fierce birds often sat in trees on the edges of the woods so they could spot honkers grazing in the fields and meadows beyond. The eagles did see humans as prey, but didn’t seem to see them as threats. Archers could get close to the trees and let fly.
After a while, the eagles around the settlement thinned out. Mothers still watched their small children more carefully than they would have back in England, for the danger from the sky was diminished, not gone.
When Edward Radcliffe sailed the St. George back to England again, six years after he first set eyes on Atlantis, he found the country fallen into the civil war everyone had dreaded so long. The port officials at Hastings roughly demanded whether he favored the White Rose or the Red. Finding they were loyal to the House of York, he declared for the White Rose himself, though in truth he couldn’t have cared less whether the king was Yorkist or Lancastrian.
He didn’t need long to find that most of the people in Hastings felt the same way he did. Who ruled hardly mattered to them. All they cared about was that someone should rule and bring the land peace. As usual, the lords who fought were profoundly indifferent to what the people wanted.
Edward wasn’t. The trouble in England made people in Hastings who’d laughed at him on his last visit suddenly eager to find quiet across the ocean. “Marry, it’d be wonderful to go about my business without worrying about soldiers stealing my stock or burning down my shop,” a leatherworker said.
“They wouldn’t do that in New Hastings,” Radcliffe said. “There are no soldiers in New Hastings.”
“No soldiers!” The other man might have had a vision of a miracle. “Isn’t that a fine thing!” He paused, scratching his poorly shaved chin. “D’you need a man who makes leather?”
“Well, we might,” Edward replied.
“I’d pay,” the artisan said. “By God, I’d pay plenty to get away from these swaggering thieves in chainmail. I have a daughter who’s fifteen, and I’d pay even more to get her away from them.”
“I understand that,” Radcliffe said. If his womenfolk were here now, he would have wanted to get them away, too. He rubbed his chin. Getting money for taking new settlers across the ocean hadn’t occurred to him till now. He wondered why not. “We’ll see what we can do for you, friend.”
“I am your friend—your friend for life—if you take me away from this,” the leather maker said.
Radcliffe knew not to count on that too much. Gratitude went bad almost as fast as fish did. But it might last to the other side of the sea. “Let’s talk,” he said, and so they did.
The leather maker wasn’t the only one who spent silver for his passage. That proved just as well, because Edward had to pay a fat bribe to take the St. George out of the harbor. Even then, he left under cover of darkness. But he did leave, and once he was at sea he didn’t worry about anybody catching him.
Once they’d put Land’s End behind them, Henry came over to him and said, “I wonder how long it will be before ships full of people we never heard of start dropping anchor right offshore.”
“How would they know where to go?” Edward asked, automatically setting himself against the rolling and pitching of the cog in the Atlantic’s long, tall swells.
His son laughed at him—one of the less endearing things a son can do to his father. “Word has to be all over the Cinque Ports by now—likely all up and down the coast,” Henry answered. “Load what you hope is enough food into a cog, sail west and a bit south till you think you’re going to fall off the edge of the world, and what do you know? You end up in Atlantis!”
“What do you know?” Edward Radcliffe echoed in distinctly hollow tones. It wasn’t that Henry was wrong. No, it was that he was much too likely to be right. If you had the nerve to sail the open sea, you could come to Atlantis. And if you were sure Atlantis was there, if you were sure you wouldn’t fall off the edge of the world, wouldn’t that help you find the nerve to set sail? Edward clapped a hand to his forehead. “All the riffraff of the kingdom, landing in our laps!”
That wasn’t fair. Riffraff wouldn’t be able to sail a cog so far, or to afford passage in one. But just then, anyone he hadn’t handpicked to come to New Hastings seemed like riffraff to him.
And Henry, damn him, was grinning. “Not just our riffraff, either,” the younger Radcliffe said. “So
mewhere between Atlantis and Le Croisic, François Kersauzon and his son are talking the same way—what do you want to bet? The land is there. More and more people know it’s there. A land with no kings, a land with no soldiers…Why wouldn’t half the folk in the world want to pack up and move to a place like that?”
When Edward looked at it that way, he could see no reason why lots of people wouldn’t want to travel to Atlantis, either. But he said, “I’ll tell you one thing, son. If Atlantis does start filling up, it will need soldiers soon enough, to keep some folk from taking what others have.”
“No doubt,” Henry said. “Then the soldiers will start taking on their own, because that’s what soldiers do.”
“I know,” Edward said unhappily. He sighed. “And I suppose that’s why we need kings—to keep soldiers from taking too much.”
“Well, sometimes kings can do that,” Henry said. “And sometimes…”
He didn’t go on, or need to. The war in England they’d barely escaped did most of his talking for him. “God grant that civil war stay far from Atlantis’ shores,” Edward said.
“I’m sure He will—for a while,” his son replied. “How many of the folk in New Hastings stand with the White Rose, how many with the Red?”
“I have no idea. I never tried to find out,” Edward Radcliffe said.
“As long as you can say that, and say it truly, we’re safe from civil strife,” Henry said. “As soon as you know, as soon as you need to know…”
“Yes.” Edward could gauge the political winds along with those of the world. “May that day stay far away, too.” His son—both sons—had bumped heads with him a great many times growing up. But Henry, having at last attained manhood himself, only nodded now.
The War of the Roses did stay away from the western shores. Neither Yorkists nor Lancastrians cared who followed their emblem in the lands across the sea. Not enough people dwelt there to matter to either side.
Yes, the war stayed away. But flotsam and jetsam from it did mark Atlantis. As Henry had foretold, a good many Englishmen thought a land without soldiers and without kings sounded wonderful. They swarmed aboard anything that would float and sailed west.
Some of them, no doubt, starved before they got anywhere close to Atlantis. It was a long journey across rough seas. If the winds went against you, if you crammed too many people aboard for the food you carried, if you couldn’t pull in enough fish to make up for your dwindling store of biscuit, if your water butts went dry or got too foul to drink before you sighted land—if any of those things happened, you were doomed.
The fishermen who sailed out of New Hastings didn’t see the worst disasters. They saw the folk who planned better, but not quite well enough. Every so often, a shipload of living skeletons would come ashore. Caring for them strained what the settlers could do. The land was rich; hunting and fishing were good. But what would have been plenty for a small village proved a good deal less than that with more mouths to feed.
Edward Radcliffe was almost relieved when a well-equipped flotilla from Dover founded a new town eighty miles down the coast from New Hastings. They called the place Freetown, though some of the people who set it up seemed more interested in running things than he ever had.
But, as he said when he came back from a visit, “The more, the merrier. The land can hold them, and once they get in a couple of crops they’ll be able to help us with the rest of the newcomers, the ones who have no notion of what they’re doing.”
“Will they help, or will they just turn them away?” Henry asked.
“They’d better not.” Edward’s hands folded into fists. “If they try to leave us with all those folk…Well, we won’t have it, that’s all. But if they’re proper Christian men, they’ll remember the parable of the Good Samaritan.”
“And if they aren’t, we’ll remind them of it, by God,” Henry said. Edward nodded.
Richard Radcliffe seemed discontented in a different way. He hadn’t gone to Freetown. He hadn’t gone back to England with his father and older brother, either. When he wasn’t working his farm, he spent a lot of time staring west. “How far does Atlantis run?” he asked one winter’s day. “What’s on the other side of the mountains we can see?”
“Plenty close to the sea to keep us busy for a while,” answered the relentlessly pragmatic Edward. “One of these days, I expect we’ll find out what’s over yonder, but where’s the hurry?”
Richard might not have heard him. “I’d like to head up the Brede,” he said: they’d named the closest stream for one that ran not far from the town where they were all born. “Who knows what lies in the forests? We could float trees down to New Hastings….”
“We?” Edward said.
“I’m not the only one,” Richard replied. “So much land for the taking. I feel—fenced in here.”
“How did you stand it aboard the St. George?” asked Edward, who knew his younger son hadn’t always had an easy time on the fishing boat.
Richard shrugged. “What choice had I? I couldn’t start a farm in England—the land was all taken. If I lived in town, I’d be cramped, too. So I tried to keep my mouth shut and do what needed doing. But here I have choices, and I aim to make the most of them.”
“Well, I don’t know how I can hold you back if you’re bound and determined to go,” Edward said. “Go on, then, and God bless you—and yes, we’ll be able to use the timber, for houses and for boats.”
Eight or ten families went up the Brede with Richard and his wife and children. Edward watched them lead their livestock along the riverbank with a curious mixture of pride and fear. He didn’t know what could go wrong with them in the woods, but he worried all the same. If anything did, they would be too far away for the folk remaining in New Hastings to help them in a hurry.
And they hadn’t been gone more than a couple of weeks when a boat came up from Freetown. The Dovermen were in high dudgeon. “Do you know what?” one of them said in portentous tones.
“Not yet,” Edward answered, “but since I think you’re about to tell me, I will pretty soon. What’s your news?”
“There’s a town full of God-cursed Frenchmen down the coast from us!” the Freetown man cried.
“Frenchmen, you say? Or is it Bretons?” Edward asked.
“By Our Lady, it only matters to them!” the man from Freetown said.
“Is that François Kersauzon’s settlement?” Radcliffe persisted.
The fellow who’d been talking just shrugged. One of the other new settlers nodded. “That was their leader’s name, yes,” he said. “They all speak French with a funny accent, the ones who speak it at all, but I could follow that much.”
“I have no quarrel with Kersauzon. No one here does,” Edward said. “He was the one who showed us the way to this land. We owe him a debt, if anything.” Several people standing close by him nodded.
That wasn’t what the men from Freetown wanted to hear. “Atlantis should be English! Atlantis must be English!” howled the one who liked to hear himself talk. “We ought to chase those French scuts back across the sea with their tails between their legs!”
“Do you think they’d stay chased?” Edward inquired. “Would you?”
“I’d kill the French dog who tried to make me leave!” the Freetown man blustered. “And if I did go, I’d come back with a fighting tail and make the knaves sorry they ever troubled me to begin with.”
Radcliffe sighed. Some men were impressively blind. “Why d’you think Kersauzon’s one pin different? If you tell him to go, he’ll spit in your eye. If you somehow make him leave, he’ll come back with soldiers himself. Do you want to farm and fish here, or do you want to fight?”
The question sounded sardonic, but he meant it. Some men did fight for the sport of it. He’d never understood that himself, but he knew it was so. To him, life was hard enough without making it harder still. Others, though, used brawls to spice up their days the way cooks used cinnamon and cloves and pepper to spice meats.
“I ought to let the king know he has such spineless subjects here,” the Freetown man grumbled.
“If you do, I will hunt you down and kill you,” Edward said matter-of-factly, as if he’d remarked, The sun will come up tomorrow. “And now you have quite worn out your welcome. Get out. If you fight Kersauzon, who is my friend, you may expect to fight me, too. I tell you that now, so you cannot say I will have taken you by surprise, and I aim to tell him the same as soon as may be.”
“You won’t get away with this, Radcliffe,” the man from the new settlement said.
With a shrug, Edward answered, “I’m not trying to get away with anything. Only a blind idiot would think any different. Since you do, you have named yourself.”
Muttering, their fists clenched, the Dovermen got into their boat and went south toward Freetown. “What do we do now?” Henry asked. “They won’t let it lie—they aren’t the sort who could.”
“I know.” Edward sighed. “We always find a serpent in Paradise, even if we have to bring it with us. We’ll need a watch, to see that the Freetown men don’t seek to serve us and the Bretons the same way. We’ll need to hold the St. George between here and Freetown for a while—I am glad I got those guns. And we really will need to warn François Kersauzon.”
“Which may provoke the Freetown men enough to make them complain of us back in England,” Henry said.
“Let them bellow and bawl like branded calves, for all I care,” Edward answered. “Will King Henry send knights here to make us behave when civil war’s aflame back home? Give me leave to doubt, son—give me leave to doubt.”
“What would you do if he should send knights?” Henry asked.
“Well, it depends on how many,” Edward said. “A few? Our longbowmen can deal with a few knights, beshrew me if they can’t. An army of ’em? An army of ’em would tell me he’s gone quite mad. But if he does send so many—if he can send so many—why then going up the Brede with Richard looks better and better. We can live off the land. Can knights newly come here do the same? I would rejoice to see them try.”
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