He carried a stout bludgeon on his belt. The honker glanced at him, but it didn't even try to dodge when he clouted it. Down it went, kicking with the random thrashes any creature from fish to man might make when suddenly killed. Richard jumped back to make sure those flailing feet didn't catch him. They weren't aimed his way, which didn't mean they couldn't hurt him.
After the honker stopped twitching, he butchered it. Its heart was almost as big as his fist: big enough, with a chunk of liver, to make a meal. He cut off a big chunk of thigh meat to take with him when he traveled on. The rest of the carcass he left where it lay. Hawks and vultures and snakes and lizards were welcome to it. He could always find another honker or oil thrush to kill a little farther west.
As evening fell, frogs began to sing. They came in all sizes, from little peepers no longer than the last joint of his thumb up to baritone croakers large enough to make a cat think twice. Like so much in Atlantis, they were at the same time familiar and strange. Frogs in England sang with small inflated sacs on either side of their throat. Atlantean frogs, by contrast, had a single, larger throat sac under the chin.
The frogs' croaking couldn't mask another swamp sound: the buzz of mosquitoes. Atlantis had more of them than England did, and fiercer ones, too. Summer here got hotter and stickier than it did over there; maybe that had something to do with it. Richard put more wood on the fire, hoping the smoke would hold them at bay. No matter what he hoped, it didn't.
The bigger fire did let him see farther out into the night, though. Eyes glowed back at him. He wasn't frightened, as he would have been back in England. These eyes were all low to the ground and set close together. They belonged to frogs or lizards or snakes. No four-legged killers prowled Atlantis' wilds.
Darkness deepened. The chorus of frogs grew louder and more various. A pair of big frogs hopped straight at each other, both of them croaking as loud as they could. They were only a couple of feet apart when one broke and ran, vanishing into the night beyond the campfire's bright circle.
An owl hooted. The note was different from the ones English owls used, but unmistakable all the same. Then Richard saw a moving light that wasn't paired. "Glow-worm!" he said in delight. Some people called them fireflies. England had only a few. In summer, they made the air itself here seem to dance.
Something else also scooted through the night air, from left to right. It was bigger than a mosquito, bigger than a glow-worm, and it didn't dance in the air the way bugs did. The motion was straight and not too swift. Richard scratched his head. That straight track also meant it was no bat or nightjar come to feed on the insects drawn to his campfire.
He scratched his head again. In that case, what was it? Had he seen only one such strange scoot, he would have shrugged and gone back to eating toasted honker liver. He even had coarse sea salt to scatter on his supper. After he finished, he intended to swaddle himself in his blanket so that, if the mosquitoes wanted him, they would have to find the tip of his nose.
Then he spotted another of those curious fliers, and then another. They all came from the left and vanished to the right. "What the-?" he said, climbing to his feet. Atlantis was full of surprises. He seemed to have run into another one, one that made his curiosity itch.
He walked out about as far from the fire as he thought the things were flying. As like as not, he thought, I'll scare them away. He shrugged. If he did, he would go back to the honker liver, that was all.
But he didn't. One of them, whatever it was, scooted right past in front of his face. Startled, he grabbed for it, but he missed. Another one went by. He missed that one, too, and swore. The trouble was, he could see them only when they came close to the fire. That didn't give him much time to catch them.
It would have to be luck, then. If they kept coming, he was bound to snag one sooner or later…wasn't he? After five or six fruitless lunges, he started to wonder. Then he did catch one. The cool, moist smack against the palm of his hand made him wonder whether he was glad to have it even as his fingers closed.
"What have I got?" he said out loud. He turned so that firelight would help him, and opened his hand.
A little frog, green with streaks of yellow, stared up at him out of big black eyes. It looked like any other tree frog he'd ever seen-except for its hands and feet. The fingers and toes were ridiculously long, with webbing stretched between them. The frog had to use those webs to glide through the air the way a ship used sails to push it along.
Richard started to laugh. He set the frog down on the ground. It hopped off into the darkness the way any other little frog might have. He wiped his hand against his trousers. "Atlantis!" he said. "You won't find another place where the birds don't fly and the frogs damn well do."
Laughing still, he went back to his supper.
These days, Edward Radcliffe's bones creaked when he got out of bed in the morning. Sometimes sitting by the fire for a while or going out into the warm sun would get him moving again, almost as freely as he had when he was younger. Sometimes he creaked and ached from dawn to dusk, and woke up aching if he had to ease himself in the night.
Hard to believe fifteen years had gone by since Francois Kersauzon talked him out of a third of his catch in exchange for a secret-hard to believe till he looked around, anyway. New Hastings was more than a village at the edge of unknown wilderness nowadays. It was well on the way to becoming a town. Farms and mills went up the river all the way to Bredestown, and beyond. Whenever Richard came back from a journey into the woods, he kept muttering that he would have to pull up stakes and move west again. Things were getting too crowded where he was.
Edward didn't think that would change, either. The War of the Roses went on and on in England. Once people had had their homes plundered and burnt, once men had been robbed and killed and women violated, the idea of getting on a ship and heading for a strange land across the sea no longer seemed so frightful. And so New Hastings swelled, as did Freetown; settlers founded other towns up and down the northern part of the east coast of Atlantis.
Francois Kersauzon's Cosquer also flourished. Two or three other Breton villages grew not far away from it. Edward had heard that there were Basque and Galician settlements in the southern regions of the new land, but he didn't know for a fact whether that was so. The Bretons came up to New Hastings to trade; most of them still wanted nothing to do with Freetown. No folk from the Spanish kingdoms had turned up here yet. Still, it had to be only a matter of time.
When Radcliffe looked west toward the mountains no man had yet visited-not so far as he knew, anyhow-what struck him was how much things had changed since he founded New Hastings. The dark forests of pine and redwood had been driven back for miles, replaced by farmlands and meadows and groves of apples and pears and plums that were still young but now starting to yield fruit.
"It's not so bad here now, is it, Nell?" he asked his wife.
"Not so bad as it was when we first came here, that's sure enough," she said. "And you got to go back to England, too. Me, I was stuck here all that time."
He frowned. "If you think all that sea voyaging was easy or fun…Well, you should have tried it yourself, is all I have to say."
Nell didn't back away from an argument-she never did. "We had to make do here when there wasn't enough to make do with. Before we had a blacksmith, breaking a tool was as bad as it could be, because we couldn't get another one, whatever it was. And the first houses were sorry affairs. Everyone who was here made a better shipwright than a proper carpenter."
"No danger of going hungry, though," Edward said, and Nell couldn't very well argue with that. Between the cod the fishermen pulled from the offshore banks and the big, foolish honkers, there was always plenty to keep a man's-or a woman's-belly full.