Harry Turtledove - Opening Atlantis

Downhill again. Downhill all the way to New Hastings. All he needed to do was find the trail he'd blazed and follow it, and it would take him home again. What could be easier?

"Yes? And then what?" he asked himself aloud. When he got back, how many people would care where he'd gone? How many would care what he'd done? Oh, some would, but most of the settlers just wanted to get on with the lives they'd made here. They thought him strange for plunging into the wilderness every chance he got. He wondered why they'd bothered leaving England.

Even his wife thought him strange for plunging into the wilderness-and for leaving her alone. He hoped she hadn't done anything to make a scandal while he was gone. Fishermen who went to sea for weeks and months at a time ran that risk. Richard had no reason to think Bertha was unfaithful, but he knew it was one of the things that could happen to a traveling man.

Of course, it was also one of the things that could happen to a man who lived over his shop. If a woman was going to, she was going to. The same held true for men, but women had a harder time doing anything about it.

He was perhaps halfway down from the mountains to the sea when he got a surprise-he saw a hog drinking at a swift-running stream. A heartbeat later, the hog saw him or smelled him or heard him. It snorted and trotted away. Unlike honkers and oil thrushes, it knew what a man would want from it.

"By Our Lady, they've come a long way!" Richard exclaimed. If he'd seen this one here, some were bound to have traveled even farther west. He wondered if any swine had reached the mountains or gone over them. He laughed. They would give the local beasts a lively time.

Halfway up the towering spire of a redwood, a parrot screeched. Others started to call, too, till the woods echoed with their cries. That made Richard laugh again. Back in England, he'd heard of parrots, but never seen them. From everything he'd heard, they lived in hot countries. Not in Atlantis. Here they were, screaming their heads off in the middle of winter. You never could tell.

At last, near the headwaters of a small stream running east, he came to a pine marked not with one of his usual blazes but with a B. He smiled. That blaze marked the Brede. All he had to do was follow the river, and it would take him home.

But when he neared Bredestown, he got another surprise, and one not nearly so welcome as the hog. More game out in the woods was always welcome. Strange men tramping the edges of the cleared ground wearing helmets and chainmail were anything but.

"Who the devil are you?" one of the strangers said when Richard stepped out from the shelter of the trees.

"What the devil are you?" the other one added.

He looked down at himself. His clothes were filthy and tattered, his beard long and unkempt. When he was alone in the forest, what difference did it make? It made one now.

"My name is Richard Radcliffe." Talking to other people, especially to strangers, felt odd after so long in his own company. "I've been to the other side of Atlantis, and now I'm back. Who are you?"

"Why, the Earl of Warwick's men." By the way the soldier said it, even someone just back from the other side of Atlantis-or the other side of the moon-should have known that. In case Richard didn't know that, the man added, "Warwick's in charge here now."

"Is he?" Richard said tonelessly. Both soldiers nodded. Both of them kept hand on swordhilt. Richard got the idea they would make him sorry if he said that didn't suit him. That being so, he didn't. "When I set out, the earl was on the far side of the sea. So were you two, I expect," seemed safer.

Both men at arms nodded. "But we're bloody well here now, so we have to make the best of it," the bigger one said. He had a scar on his upper lip and two missing front teeth. He also had bushy eyebrows, which came down and together as he frowned. "Radcliffe, is it? You'll be the old grumbler's other son?"

No one had ever talked about Richard's father that way before. Richard had brawled-who hadn't?-but he was no warrior. He wouldn't have cared to take on one of these bruisers, let alone both of them, even if they weren't armored. Another soft answer seemed best, so he gave one: "Henry is my brother, yes."

They put their heads together and muttered to each other. Richard wondered whether he ought to bolt back into the woods. But the soldier with the missing front teeth said, "Well, now that you're back, you'd damned well better keep your nose clean-that's all I've got to tell you."

"You'd damned well better keep all of you clean." The other soldier held his nose. "You stink like a dung heap, friend."

Richard had no doubt the Earl of Warwick's man was right. "It's been cold," he said with such dignity as he could muster. "Not much chance to wash." It hadn't been all that cold on the other side of the mountains, but the soldiers didn't need to know that. When you were all by yourself, though, what point to washing? Most people didn't bother very often even when they weren't by themselves: Warwick's men stank of sour sweat, too. But Richard had no doubt he was riper. He looked forward to a bath.

After a last couple of growls, Warwick's men let him go on. A sigh of relief gusted from him as soon as they got far enough away not to hear it. Cows and sheep and a few horses grazed on the meadows and gleaned what they could from the fallow fields, manuring them with their dung. Dogs barked and growled. A brindled cat sneaked around the corner of a barn. It might almost have been England.

It might, that is, till Richard looked past the plowed and settled ground. Those somber woods had no counterpart in the lands across the sea. Here and there in the settlement, a pine or a barrel tree still stood. The redwoods were gone. Not only was their timber useful, but living under their shadow would have made the English feel like mice living under a church steeple.

Prince, the family dog, snarled at Richard as he came up. Then the beast took his scent and stared like a player doing a comedy turn in a mummers' show. Is that really you? his line would have been.

"Yes, you miserable hound, it is me," Richard said.

Whining, the dog came up and licked his hand. He wondered what would happen if he stayed away long enough for Prince to forget him. He would get bitten, that was what.

Bertha was down on her knees in the garden plot by the farmhouse. You could keep things alive through these winters if you looked after them. Up to a certain point, carrots and parsnips got sweeter if you left them in the ground. And far fewer pests plagued them here than would have been so back in England.

Richard's wife glanced up from her work. Her mouth dropped open. The way he looked didn't faze her-she'd seen him come home from the woods before. She scrambled to her feet and ran to his arms.

"Hello, dear," he said. She felt good pressed against him; her solid warmth reminded him how long he'd been away.

"So good to see you." Bertha tilted her face up for a kiss. "I was beginning to worry-not a lot, but some."

"Just a long trip, not a hard one," Richard said. "But who are those damned brigands in chainmail? Where did they come from?"

He didn't hold his voice down. His wife looked alarmed. "You've met them, have you? Be careful how you talk about them. If anyone makes them angry, he pays."

"Somebody ought to make them pay, by God," Richard said. "Those byrnies won't hold out arrows."

Bertha crossed herself. "Sweet suffering Jesus, you sound like your father. He's wild to do them in, but they don't give many chances."

"What's this Warwick doing here, anyway?" Richard asked.

"He was sent here for our sins-and for his own," his wife answered. "He made the king angry, so Henry sent him off to Freetown, to do his worst there. But his captain landed here instead, and now we're stuck with him."