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!"
In a twinkling, all the fishermen in all the boats were rowing as hard as they could. Edward was working harder than he had on the St. George, but exhaustion fell away. He laughed as he worked his oar and shouted out the stroke to the others in the boat. And he heard other laughs float across the green sea. The men racing to be first ashore weren't racing because they had to but because they wanted to, and it made all the difference in the world.
Sand and mud grated under the boat's keel. Edward sprang out into ankle-deep water. "Mine!" he shouted, throwing his arms wide. "Mine!"
He thought he was the first man on the beach. If he was, though, he wasn't by much. Other skippers and fishermen stepped out onto the shores of Atlantis. Little gray and brown shorebirds skittered along at the edge of the advancing and retreating waves, pausing now and again to peck at something or other. They left their tiny hentracks behind to be washed away by the next incoming surge.
Richard set a hand on his father's shoulder. "We're here again," he said.
"We are. By God, we are," Edward Radcliffe agreed. "We're here again, and this time we're not going to leave."
"What's that?" said one of the fishermen who'd rowed the boat ashore. "We aren't going back to the St. George?"
Edward laughed. "We'll go back, Alf. But we'll go back to get what we need to set up a new town here. It may be a while before we go back to England." I wonder if I'll ever go back. I wonder if I'll want to, he thought, and then, I suppose I'll have to, one of these days. It's not the same as wanting to.
Alf nodded; he might not be bright, but he was willing. "Well, that's all right, then," he said. "That's what I came for, that is."
The biggest adventure was getting the horses and cattle off the cogs and onto the land ahead. Some skippers solved it with brutal simplicity by pushing the animals over the side and making them swim. Others ran their lightly laden cogs aground at low tide and lowered gangplanks so the beasts could descend. When the water rose, it lifted the fishing boats and let the skippers move them out to sea again.
"Where are these honkers you kept telling me about?" Nell demanded as soon as she came ashore. She bent to wring out the dripping hem of her skirt, giving Edward a glimpse of a still-shapely ankle.
"Well, I don't know just where they are," he admitted. "I expect we'll see them sooner or later, though-sooner, unless I miss my guess. We saw a good many when we were here before." Remembering what else they'd seen before, he raised his voice to a carrying shout: "Watch the sky! The eagles here are huge, and they have no fear of men-they think we're prey."
Those little shorebirds had darted between-sometimes even over-men's feet, too. In England or France, they would have kept their distance. It seemed they'd never met men before, and didn't know such creatures were dangerous.
And that was only a tiny strangeness among so many larger ones. The plants were the same curious mixture of conifers, ferns, and those barrel-trunked plants with the leaves that shot up from the top of the barrel. The honkers-even if absent at the moment-were like nothing Edward or anyone else had seen before. And the red-breasted thrushes acted like blackbirds but looked more like oversized robins. And all this within an hour's walk of the shore!-for no one, yet, had dared venture farther inland.
Some of the first things the newcomers made were salt pans at the edge of the ocean, to trap the seawater and let it evaporate, leaving salt behind. What they got would not be anywhere near so fine as the pure white flower of salt bought in Le Croisic. Right this minute, though, Edward worried more about quantity than quality. He wanted to be sure he had the salt to preserve enough cod to get the settlers through their first winter on the new shore.
He didn't worry about having enough cod. The banks off the east coast of Atlantis were abundant beyond anything he'd ever imagined, and he knew the great fisheries in the North Sea as well as any man alive. "Maybe the North Sea was like this when fishermen first started going out there," he said after the St. George's boat brought in load after load of huge, plump gutted fish. "No more, though. We've taken the very best out of it, and that best is still here."
"It is," Henry agreed. "The fish we don't salt down, we'll be able to use to manure the fields." He held his nose. "The smell will be bad, but the crops will be good."
"Yes." Edward Radcliffe nodded. "So much to do all at once, but this goes so well, it frightens me."
His son frowned. "Frightens you?"
Edward nodded again. "By Our Lady, it does. We work. We sweat and swink and toil. We build. And what if some sea wolves-Bretons or Basques, say-swoop down on us with swords and spears, and steal all we've made by our labor? I know what I want to buy when we see England again."
"What's that?" Henry asked.
"Some fine iron guns, by God, and powder and shot for 'em," Edward said. "A couple here ashore, and a couple on the St. George, too. I want to be able to fight if I have to, not to be raiders' meat."
After pursing his lips in thought, Henry also nodded. "I do like that notion. And if we're not the only ones putting down roots in this new soil…"
He let the words hang. "What then?" Edward prompted.