Harry Turtledove - Opening Atlantis

The sea called him. He could smell it again, a smell he'd known all his life but one that had gone out of his nostrils as he crossed Atlantis' fog-filled spine. He couldn't see it yet-the ground rose ahead of him. But it was there.

And beyond that sea lay more land, with strange people living in it. He'd heard that from Henry, too, and from the fishermen on the Rose. He shrugged. Seeing that new land meant getting into a cog again. He supposed he could if he had to. If he didn't have to, he didn't want to. Atlantis was plenty big enough to satisfy him.

A crow cawed from the edge of the woods. It wasn't just like an English carrion crow-the call was different, and it didn't have such a heavy beak. It wasn't just like a rook, either: it lacked the pale patch on its face. But it couldn't be anything but some kind of crow.

Ravens in Atlantis, as far as he could tell, were just like the ravens back in England. Crows here were similar, but not identical. Jays were quite different: they were blue and white and crested, not pinkish brown. But they were plainly jays. Their feisty habits and raucous calls proclaimed that to anyone with eyes to see and ears to hear.

Richard wondered why it should be so. Why did birds that acted like English blackbirds have robinlike red breasts here? Why were there so many Atlantean birds that couldn't fly? Honkers, several kinds of duck, oil thrushes…He scratched his head. The question was easy to ask, but he had no idea what the answer was.

He trudged on. Before long, he was sweating-in November! That made him smile. He knew the kind of work he would have to do back in New Hastings to sweat there. Just walking along wouldn't do it, not at this time of year.

Thinking of oil thrushes made him hungry. He would have to hunt before long. Well, at least hunting was easy here, when the quarry didn't know enough to run away. Going after rabbits in England hadn't been like that. Deer and boar knew enough to flee, too, not that the likes of a fisherman could go after them.

He didn't miss working hard on a hunt. He did miss apples and pears and plums and all the juicy berries he'd known back in England. Nothing like those here. The settlers had planted orchards, but they weren't bearing abundantly yet. The trees in those orchards were the only fruit trees in Atlantis.

One of the native barrel trees had a sweet sap that could be boiled down into a honeylike syrup or fermented into something halfway between beer and wine. It was pleasant, but it wasn't the same as wandering through the woods and finding fruit. He couldn't do that here.

No matter how much he craved the sun, he didn't stay out in the meadow longer than he had to. Around New Hastings and Bredestown, red-crested eagles-and their attacks on settlers-had grown scarce. Here in the west, though, no one had hunted them. No one had gone after their nests. The birds were still common, and still deadly dangerous. A lone man had scant hope of fighting one off if it took him for a honker.

Under the trees, Richard breathed easier. The birds went right on singing as he walked along. The big katydids fell silent at his approaching footfalls. They feared men. They feared everything, because so many things ate them.

Richard had eaten them two or three times, when he couldn't catch anything bigger. If you peeled off their legs and feelers before you roasted them, and if you ate them in a couple of bites, without much thinking about what you were doing…If you did all that, they tasted a little like shrimp. But they tasted more the way he thought bugs would taste-sort of greenish-and so he wasn't anxious to repeat the experiment.

A salamander on a tree trunk eyed him. It didn't scurry away or show any sign of alarm. Nor did it try to look like something else, the way so many crawling things did. Even in the gloom under the trees, it stood out: its background color was blood red, while the spots that measled it were a brilliant yellow.

He left it alone. There were brightly colored salamanders back near New Hastings, too. They weren't identical to this one, but they had to be close cousins. He'd seen what happened when a dog ate one: it took a few steps, then fell over dead. A few years earlier, they'd found a two-year-old girl who'd gone missing also dead, with half a colorful salamander in her mouth.

"You can do as you please for all of me, deathworm," Richard told the creature, and gave it a wide berth. For all he knew, just touching it could kill. He didn't care to find out the hard way.

High overhead, a red-crested eagle screeched. Richard flattened himself against a tree-not the one where the salamander insolently rested. He didn't think the eagle was hunting him-he didn't know the eagle was hunting anything. Why take chances, though?

It screeched again, from the same place. He peered up, up, up. Peer as he would, he couldn't see the bird. It was high up in a redwood, and anything high up in a redwood was higher than it could be anywhere else. Countless branches all shaggy with needles hid the eagle from the ground. No doubt it could see a long, long way from there. If a honker anywhere within its range of vision walked out onto a meadow to forage, the red-crested eagle could take wing and strike.

Even though he couldn't see it, Richard didn't feel altogether safe from the eagle, for he feared it might be able to see him. One thing the settlers had learned: the eagles had better eyes than they did. A bird would appear out of nowhere to strike at a honker or a man, or to carry off a lamb or a dog or, once or twice, a toddler. A fishing-boat skipper with eyes like that could name his own price, but the birds outdid mere men.

This one called again. Now it was in the air. As its screeches receded into the distance, Richard breathed easy again. Whatever it was after, it wasn't after him. That meant he could press on.

Faint in the distance, he heard honker alarm cries. The bird must have struck. Whether it had killed…If it hadn't, chances were it would soon find some other perch. He needed to be careful, but you always needed to be careful when you were the only man in strange country.

Something slithered away through the ferns. Atlantis had far more serpents than England did, and more of them were venomous. You had to watch where you put your feet. Well, you didn't have to, but you were liable to be sorry if you didn't. Some of the vipers twitched their tails, perhaps in anger, just before they struck. If they happened to lie coiled among dry leaves, that twitching might make enough noise to warn a wary man. Or, of course, it might not.

He hadn't got a good look at this snake. He didn't know if it was one of the poisonous kind. He wasn't inclined to go after it and find out, either.

The ground sloped up under his feet. Then he topped the low rise and headed down instead. The afternoon sun flashed off water ahead.

At first, Richard could make out no more through the screening of trees and ferns ahead. A pond? A lake? He hadn't gone much farther before he realized that, if it was a lake, it was a big one. He pushed harder. Now he wanted to get out into open country, at least long enough to take a good look at what he'd found.

Sunshine meant he'd come to the edge of the woods. "Oh," he said softly as he got the look he wanted. After a moment's wonder, he added, "If that's not Avalon Bay, then this coast has two of them."

He could see the quiet water of the bay, the lips of land that almost closed around it, and the opening that gave access to the wide ocean beyond. Henry hadn't lied-this was a harbor in a million. It hardly mattered that there was nowhere to go from here. This was the sort of place where you wanted to build a town just because you could.

And there might be somewhere to go, after all. There were those copperskinned men the Basques had found, the ones with the name Henry and his crewmen pronounced differently every time they tried it. Did they have anything worth trading?