Opening Atlantis

by Harry Turtledove

  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 François 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.

&nbs
p; 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 d
efend 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.