Harry Turtledove - Opening Atlantis

"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.