Harry Turtledove - Opening Atlantis

"Running out of honkers!" Rodney said. "Bloody hell! What's Atlantis coming to if we're running out of honkers?"

Meinheer Piet Kieft had impressive waxed mustaches and an even more impressive pot belly. The governor of Nieuw Haarlem nodded to William Radcliff. "I do not love your cousin," he said in gutturally accented English.

"Well, your Excellency, I must say that I'd wager I've not loved him for longer than you have," William replied. "He has robbed me, plundered my ships, done all he could to hurt me."

Piet Kieft snapped his fingers and poured more rum into his pewter cup. "Did he ever make you jump out a window naked when you were about to futter a serving girl with the best tits in the world?" He paused meditatively. "It was a second-story window."

"Oh, dear," Elijah Walton said before William could respond to that. "I'd heard you were somewhat discommoded in that raid, your Excellency, but I confess I did not realize the full extent of your, ah, difficulties. Please accept my sympathies."

"And mine," William added. He hoped, for the serving girl's sake, she'd been about to get on top.

"This is not even the worst of it," Kieft continued. "That son of a sow of a Red Rodney Radcliffe, that black-handed bastard, he stole from me my prime cook, and would not sell him back to me. It is war to the knife between me and him."

Yes, you look as if you've spent all the time since starving, William thought. Piet Kieft hadn't come to Stuart to be mocked, though. "Well, your Excellency, now is the time to see whether we can pay him back."

"Pay him back for sacking my town-ja," Kieft said. "I sack his. Pay him back for stealing Cornelius and making Katrina giggle when she sees me instead of opening her legs?…Even if I cut his heart out, it is not enough." His piggy little eyes flashed. He wasn't pretty, but William Radcliff wouldn't have wanted him for an enemy.

"You have ships," Walton said. "Mr. Radcliff here, our kindly host, has ships. I also have ships at my beck and call. If we gather together our separate contingents and sail against Avalon with overwhelming force-"

"It will be the greatest miracle since the Resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ," Radcliff finished for him.

"Your lack of spirit is distressing," Walton said.

"I don't lack spirit-no such thing," William replied. "But who will bell the cat, and when, and how? I admire you, sir, for persuading Meinheer Kieft to confer with us. Nevertheless, people have been mooting the fall of Avalon since the pirates first seized it. That is many years ago now, but they hold it still."

"They go on holding it, too, if we don't work against them," Piet Kieft said. "I aim to work against them-and most against Red Rodney-no matter what you do. But Master Walton is right. We have a better chance if we work together. I will do this. I do not even claim command."

That made William Radcliff blink. That a Dutchman would take orders from an Englishman at sea…was no small miracle itself. The Dutch reckoned themselves the best sailors in the world, and the English would have been hard pressed to prove them wrong. England and Holland had fought two naval wars in the past generation, and the Dutch had got the better of it both times.

"Well, well." William Radcliff turned to Elijah Walton. "If our comrade is so generous, can we fail to match him?"

Walton frowned. "My instructions are that an Englishman should lead the fleet against the corsairs."

"And what am I if not an Englishman-and the man on the spot?" Radcliff asked angrily. "If you call me a damned honker, sir, as if I were a New Hastings man, I will wish you joy of our enterprise-and much luck in taking it anywhere without the aid of Radcliff of Stuart."

"Be not overhasty, Mr. Radcliff, I pray you," Walton said. "All these insults come from your own mouth, and none from mine."

"You say this. Can you prove it? Will you prove it?" William pressed. "Or, by saying I am but an Atlantean, will you make me out to be a worthless settler, not deserving to associate with, let alone lead, his betters from the mother country?"

Coughing, Elijah Walton answered, "You cannot deny, sir, that your roots have been transplanted away from English soil these two centuries past."

"Bugger my roots. My heart is English," Radcliff said.

Piet Kieft stirred. "You started this, Walton. You set the pot on the fire. Will you now take it off and let it go cold because you cannot get all of your way? Or did you come here for just that purpose, so you could go back to London and say, 'I tried, but we could reach no agreement against these corsairs'?"

"Before God, Meinheer Kieft, I did not!" Walton exclaimed.

Kieft looked around William Radcliff's baroque jewel box of a study: the bookshelves, with volumes in English and Latin and French; the polished brass astrolable on the wall, part decoration, part tool; the ready-cut quills and the jars of ink; the coffee simmering over a low fire; the calico cat curled up asleep on a cushion. "This place seems English enough to suit me. Does it not seem to you the same?"

Perhaps Walton flushed, or perhaps it was a trick of the light streaming in through the south-facing octagonal window. The veritable Englishman's gaze fixed on a honker skull, cleaned and polished, that held down one of the piles of paper on Radcliff's desk. The honker seemed to stare back from empty eye sockets.

"Oh, come now, sir!" William said. "Come now! You might see the same, the very same, in a merchant's residence in London, or a scholar's, as a curiosity of natural philosophy. Deny it if you can."

Instead of denying it, Elijah Walton grunted. "Oh, very well," he said-most grudgingly, but say it he did. "Shall we style you Grand High Admiral of the Hesperian Gulf, then?" He gave a mocking seated bow.

"I care little what you call me," William Radcliff answered. "If I do what I set out to do, everyone who comes along will try his damnedest to filch the credit from me. And if I fail, I'll be that stupid honker from Atlantis, and all the blame will come down on my head. You win either way, Mr. Walton."

Piet Kieft chuckled and nodded. He too knew what being a settler meant. As for Walton…he did not seem entirely displeased at the prospect.

A pigeon fluttered into the roost at Black Hand Fort. Pigeons had spread with men in Atlantis. Several native varieties of dove lived here, including a couple with wings too stunted to let them fly, but there had been no pigeons till people brought them hither.

This particular pigeon had a piece of parchment tied to its left leg. The handler who spied the parchment gently removed it, read the note on the inner surface, and hotfooted it to Red Rodney's chamber.

His knock didn't quite interrupt the pirate captain at play, which was lucky for him. Rodney's companion squeaked and yanked a silk coverlet-loot from one of the small, Spanish-held islands south of Atlantis-up to her chin. "Don't fret yourself, Jenny. He wouldn't dare bother me if it weren't important," Radcliffe said. As he pulled up his breeches, he also raised his voice: "What's toward?"

"A pigeon from Stuart," came the voice from the other side of the door.

"Ha!" Red Rodney threw on his shirt, too. He was still barefoot, but he didn't care. He went without shoes aboard ship more often than not, the better to feel the deck under his soles. "I knew it had to be something that mattered."

"And I don't?" Jenny said sulkily, but he was already striding toward the door.

His mind moved perhaps even faster than his feet. Of course he had spies on the east coast. Who in his right mind wouldn't? He assumed his foes had spies in Avalon, too. They had reason not to love him and reason to try to find out what he was up to. With luck, he could feed them full of lies.

And maybe they were trying to do the same to him. Well, he'd find out. His thumb came down on the latch. He scowled at the man in the hallway. "What's going on, Mick?" It had better be interesting, his voice warned.