Swine were bound to get loose, too. They were much closer to wild beasts than sheep and cattle and horses. Swine, at least, made good hunting and good eating.
Day followed day. Edward had a compass, to give him a notion of north. He had a cross-staff, to give him a notion of latitude-as long as he kept the date straight. As soon as he got out of sight of land, he had only a rough guess, based on how far he thought he'd sailed, about longitude. He wished someone would figure out how to keep track of it, but no one had.
"Are we almost there?"
He expected to hear that from his grandchildren, and he did. He was less happy to hear it from his sons' wives, and from his own. The more he heard it, the more it grated on him, too. "Do you see land out there?" he would ask, and point west. There was, as yet, no land to see. When whoever was grumbling admitted as much, he would say, "Then we aren't almost there, are we?"
When the fishermen started pulling cod that weighed as much as they did out of the gray-blue water, Edward smiled to himself. The lubbers aboard went right on wondering where land was. Edward knew it wasn't very far. They really were almost there-and he said not a word.
He thought they would spot land the very next day, but they didn't-fog closed in around the little fleet of cogs and held them wrapped in wet wool for the next two days. Sailors shouted to one another and blew horns to keep from drifting apart, because no one could see from stern to bow of one fishing boat, let alone farther.
Edward hadn't been worried till then; everything on the journey west had gone as well as he could have hoped, or maybe even better. But those two days made him pace and mutter and crack his knuckles and do all the other things a badly rattled man might do. He wasn't fretting only about one cog colliding with another, either. Here he was, off a shore about which he knew next to nothing. How many rocks and shoals did it have, and where did they lurk? Was a rock he couldn't see only a few feet away, waiting to rip the bottom out of the St. George?
To ease his mind, he cast a line into the water. It came back showing thirty fathoms and a sandy bottom. That made him feel a little better, but only a little. A rock could rise suddenly, and he knew it too well. He set one of the fishermen to casting the lead every time he turned the glass. "If we go under twenty fathoms, scream at me," he said.
No screams came, only the shouts and braying trumpets from the other fishing boats. Radcliffe didn't mind those. He would have started and sworn had a horn bellowed from right alongside the St. George, but that didn't happen, either.
"You're jumpy as one of the cats," Henry told him.
"It's my boat," Edward said simply. "It's my notion to start a new town in the new land. And if anything goes wrong, it's my fault."
"We're fine, Father," Henry said.
"We are now. We are now, as long as God wants us to be." Edward crossed himself. A moment later, so did his son. "If God decides He doesn't want us to be-"
"Then we can't do anything about it anyway," Henry broke in.
"We have to do everything we can do, everything we know how to do," Edward insisted. "If we don't, we've got only ourselves to blame. God put the rocks wherever He put them. If we don't look for them, though, that's our fault."
"Whose fault is it if we strike one just after we cast the lead and find naught amiss?" Henry asked.
"Ours. No. His. No." Edward's glare should have been hot enough to burn off the fog by itself. "You're trying to tie me in more knots than the lines."
His son laughed. "Well, if you're storming at me, you won't keep stalking the deck and scaring the poultry."
"I'm not scaring the-" Hearing his own voice rise to a level he usually used only in a gale, Edward started to laugh. "All right-maybe I am."
"As long as you know you might be, maybe you won't," Henry said, and then half spoiled it by adding, "so often, anyhow."
Edward made as if to cuff him. He'd done that plenty with both boys when they were younger. If he tried it in earnest now, he feared he would be the one who ended up lying on the deck. Henry and Richard had their own boys to tame these days. Henry knew he was joking here, and made as if to duck. Then he clapped Edward on the back.
"If I go down, which God prevent, I'll go down in good company," Edward said.
"Which God prevent, is right," Henry said.
A sunbeam in the face caught Edward by surprise. It caught him by surprise twice, in fact: he didn't remember falling asleep on the deck some time in the dark hours before dawn, and fog had still shrouded the St. George when he did. But now the sun shone, the sky was blue, and a warm breeze from the southwest carried the green smells of land with it.
He sprang to his feet. "Land ho!" he bawled-the line on the western horizon was hard to make out, but he had no doubt it was there. "Land ho! Praise the Lord! He has brought us safe to this new shore!"
Other cogs began shouting it, too, but he thought he was the first. If those shouts were what woke him and not the sunbeam after all, he didn't want to know about it.
Nell came over to his side. She peered west, shading her eyes with the palm of her hand. "That's it?" she said. "It doesn't look like much."
"Not yet." Edward bowed, as if he were a nobleman. "Kindly give us leave to draw closer, if you'd be so gracious."
His wife dropped him a curtsy. "Oh, very well, since 'tis you as asks." Her impression of a high-born lady's airs and accent also left something to be desired. They grinned at each other.
With the wind in that quarter, drawing closer wasn't easy. They had to slew the big square sail around on the yard again and again, tacking toward the land that almost seemed to retreat as they beat their way westward. But they did gain, even if not so fast as Radcliffe would have liked.
And they did find their first rock on the new shore. The sea boiled white just above it. "That's a bad one," Henry said. "If the tide runs a little higher, it'll hide the bastard altogether-but it won't lift a boat high enough to get over it."
"Note the landmarks," Edward said. "We'll chart these waters one day. By God, we will."
"This isn't right where Kersauzon brought us," his son said.
"I know." Edward sighed and nodded at the same time. "We did the best we could, and this is what we got. A few leagues north? A few leagues south? Who can say? Maybe we didn't have the latitude quite right when we were here last. Maybe we drifted in the fog. I don't know. But that's Atlantis ahead, the land where we're going to put down roots."
Henry muttered something under his breath. Edward couldn't make out what it was, and supposed he might be lucky. He knew Richard had more enthusiasm for the new land than Henry did. Well, Henry was here, whether he was glad to be here or not.
The fishing boats kept fighting toward the alluring coast ahead. The only way the wind could have been worse would have been for it to blow straight into their faces. No boat could make headway against a directly contrary wind; they would have had to drop anchor and wait for it to swing around. Edward might have been tempted to do that anyway, were the land not so near-the constant tacking wore out the crew. With women and children and beasts on deck, it was harder, more dangerous, more aggravating work than it usually would have been, too.
But the hard work had its reward; to Edward Radcliffe's way of thinking, hard work commonly did. The St. George dropped anchor in eight fathoms of water as the sun sank toward the newly notched horizon ahead. "Can we get ashore before sunset?" Richard asked.
"Only one way to find out," Edward answered. The boat went into the water. The fishermen began to row. Looking around, Edward spied other boats heading for the beach. He hadn't raced Francois Kersauzon, but he did now. "Pull hard, damn you!" he roared, and pulled hard enough himself to come close to jerking the thole pin out of the gunwale. "Pull hard! No one's going to beat me back to Atlantis!"