Harry Turtledove - Opening Atlantis

"No, skipper-from the pinnace." The Irishman held out an unfolded scrap of parchment.

"Give me that!" Radcliffe snatched it out of his hands. We are not far from North Cape, he read. Enemy now coming into sight. Fleet is about the size you guessed it would be. Will get away if we can. The message was dated the fourteenth. "What's today's date?" Red Rodney demanded.

"The fifteenth, isn't it?" Jenny said from behind him. Mick nodded.

Rodney Radcliffe calculated how fast the enemy fleet could sail. With reasonable winds, they would get to Atlantis in three or four more days. They would, that is, unless they were stopped. He had the chance to do just that.

"We move!" he shouted, so that both his mistress and the pigeon man jumped. He went on shouting, too, so that first his own crew and then the rest of the corsairs of Avalon would pay attention to him. And they did. The ragged, mismatched fleet sailed the next morning. Aboard the Black Hand, Red Rodney wore a smile that stretched from ear to ear. If William Radcliff wanted the pirates wrecked, he would have to do it the hard way.

William Radcliff looked discontentedly toward the Atlantean coast. Here in the west, with the warm current bathing the shore, the weather stayed mild much farther north than it did on the other side of the Green Ridge Mountains. "I wish we'd been able to sink that pinnace," he grumbled.

"Don't worry, Admiral," Elijah Walton said. William thought the Englishman used the title to pacify him, the way a mother might give a baby her breast. Walton went on, "We made the bastards aboard it beach themselves so they wouldn't be caught. They won't pass word on to the freebooters that we bear down on Avalon-we'll get there long before they can."

"You are a clever man, sir-but, perhaps, not so clever as you might be," William said. "How have the pirates been spying out our every move in Stuart?"

"By pigeon. But you seem to have put a stop to that."

"Well, I can hope I did." William Radcliff shrugged broad shoulders. "Whether I did or not, though, I couldn't very well stop the men aboard that little ship from loosing whatever birds they had. And I think it very likely they had some. Why was that ship there, if not to spy out our coming? No other reason makes sense. And they would pass word on to Avalon as quickly as ever they could. They would know we'd have swift ships aplenty, and that they might be overtaken themselves. Only pigeons make sense, then."

Walton chewed on that with even less enthusiasm than he used for eating at sea. He was not a good sailor, not when the ocean turned rough, as it had in the voyage up from Stuart to North Cape. "Well, you are right," he said at last. "You are right, and I wish to heaven you weren't."

"Oh, so do I," Radcliff replied, "but what difference does that make? If we fail against the freebooters, the ones who ran off the beach before we burnt their pinnace will come down to Avalon sooner or later and find their fellows carrying on just as they were before."

A regiment might be unable to sustain itself traversing a long swath of Atlantean terrain. Marcus Radcliffe had made that all too plain to William. But a smaller group, as long as they kept their heads, would not have much trouble finding enough to eat.

"Maybe a band of copperskinned renegadoes or escaped blackamoors will fall on them before they reach their promised land," Walton said.

"Maybe, but not likely, not in this quadrant of Atlantis," William Radcliff said. "Far more Negro slaves in the French and Spanish holdings in the southeast, and the same holds true in lesser measure for the Terranovan natives. This is the least settled part of the land."

"A pity, for it seems no less fruitful than any other, and rather more so than some farther east," Elijah Walton said. "The only thing holding it back is its remoteness-well, that and the dampening effect a bloody nest of pirates is apt to have on the settlements of honest men."

"Its time will come." Radcliff spoke with sublime confidence. "One day-and sooner than many believe, especially back in England-this land will be as well settled as the home islands, and far more populous and prosperous."

Walton looked shoreward himself. No axe had ever touched these redwoods. No farmhouses stood out in the meadow. No cattle or sheep or horses grazed upon them. No smoke betrayed human habitation anywhere close by. A honker, symbol of all that was old and wild about Atlantis, stared incuriously out to sea. The Englishman neither said anything nor needed to.

Stubbornly, William Radcliff said, "That time will come, sir. Not in my lifetime or yours, perhaps, but it will. You may rely upon it. We shall also continue with the deposition of the Terranovan savages from their longtime haunts until they cease to encumber the western continent."

"There I can scarcely disagree with you, not when some of the savages have gold," Walton said. "A great pity the Spaniards jumped on them first, but we have not got poor on Spain's leavings, indeed we haven't. If the corsairs plundered only Spain's ships, I should not mind them a bit."

"Nor I," William said. "But, since they plunder me and mine, I will end them if I can. And with a fleet like this under my command, I believe I can do nothing else."

The fleet was a grand sight, spread out across the sea, the great ships of the line bunched together in the center, with faster, more nimble vessels on either wing. Nothing matched the splendor of a big sailing ship's stately passage over the sea. It put Radcliff in mind of a dowager gliding across the dance floor in skirts that swept out and concealed all the motion of her lower body. But for the thrum of the breeze in the rigging and the laundry-line sound of a sail filling with wind now and then, the journey was almost silent, which only added to its grandeur.

However grand and splendid it might be, it wasn't fast enough to suit the admiral. He didn't know what he could do about that. Well, actually, he did know: he could do nothing. Even with a breeze from the north, the fleet had to make headway against the warm current that came up from the other direction. Farther out in the Hesperian Gulf, the current did not flow, but the added distance and the unending uncertainty about longitude made evading the current anything but a sure time-saver.

"We may still come upon Avalon unawares," Walton said.

"We may, yes, but I doubt we shall," William replied.

"Oh, ye of little faith." The Englishman's smile took most of the sting from the words.

"I have faith," Radcliff said. "I have faith that the freebooters are less foolish than you make them out to be."

And his faith, such as it was, was vindicated when shouts from the fleet's crow's nests came down to the decks: "Sail ho! Sail ho! Sail ho!"

"Sail ho!" the lookout shouted from high in the Black Hand's rigging. "Sail ho! Sail ho!" The third repetition seemed to carry an almost desperate urgency.

Red Rodney Radcliffe peered north. He couldn't see anything from the brigantine's deck. He would soon enough, though-all too soon. Sailors had known the world was round long before landlubber scholars realized as much. The way things came up over the sea's long, smooth horizon showed it plain as plain.

"Send form line of battle abreast!" he shouted to the Royal Navy renegade who made signals for him.

"Aye aye, skipper!" Quint answered with a grin, and ran up the flags.

Not far away, the nominal admiral's ship would hoist the same signal, and hardly anyone would know Red Rodney had ordered the move first. He only hoped the freedom-loving captains who commanded the other ships would take the order seriously.

The bastards on the other side would do what their admiral told them to. Rodney Radcliffe was only too sure of that. He usually despised the men of Stuart and England and Nieuw Haarlem for their slavish obedience. In battle, though, he knew how much it mattered.