Harry Turtledove - Opening Atlantis

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 guns 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?"

"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."