"Well, Mistress Louisa, we'd go hungry if I didn't." Edward kicked the offal towards one of the sows, which fed greedily. "Don't you ever kill any of your own meat?"
Louisa Cawthorne gave a reluctant nod. "I do, and I cry every time I wring a pullet's neck."
She was a tender-hearted creature, then. She was tender in other ways, too. Sailing with a woman aboard when your wife wasn't proved an unexpected strain. Edward kept his hands to himself, but his dreams were warmer than the ones he usually had at sea.
He breathed a sigh of relief when they sighted land at last. He didn't see New Hastings, or the smoke rising from its fires. That didn't surprise him; he hadn't seen any English fishing boats-or any others-bobbing in the ocean. Navigation was anything but exact; Edward wasn't even sure whether he was north or south of the new settlement.
He shot the sun with his cross-staff. Then he did it again, and then once more. If he weighed all three measurements together and gave a little something extra to the one he trusted most, he thought the St. George lay south of where she should have been. Most of the fishermen agreed with him. Nobody was positive, though. One of the men said, "Well, we'll go north and see what happens. If we don't like it in the end, we can bloody well turn around."
Edward nodded. That sounded about right to him. And that very afternoon, a fisherman shouted, "Sail ho!"
If she was an English cog, everything would be fine. If she wasn't…Edward ordered the swivel guns loaded with scrap iron. If you got ready for a fight, sometimes you could stay away from one.
The lines of that cog did look familiar. Edward Radcliffe squinted north. Where had he seen her before? He cursed. "Bugger me blind if that's not the Morzen!"
Sure enough, the hail that came was in Breton: "Ahoy, the St. George! Is that you, Moses?" Yes, that was Francois Kersauzon's voice, all right.
"Moses?" Edward shouted back. "What are you talking about, you blasphemous toad?"
"You mistake me for your mother," Kersauzon said sweetly. "And is it not that you have led your people to the Promised Land? I saw your new town, and all the cogs in the sea close by. You've done well, Edward, well enough to make me jealous."
They were closing fast on each other. Radcliffe looked to his guns. If he opened fire now, maybe he could cripple the Morzen and finish her off at his leisure. He didn't want anyone jealous of New Hastings. If Francois Kersauzon didn't come home to Le Croisic, wouldn't that make other Bretons less likely to sail far into the west? The temptation!
But Kersauzon hadn't done anything to him, or, from what Edward gathered, to New Hastings. He'd done Edward a favor, in fact, by leading him to Atlantis. Yes, he'd profited from it, but he'd deserved to. If Edward returned evil for that great good, wouldn't he pay in the next world, pay for all eternity? He crossed himself. He was a believing man. He didn't want to imperil his soul.
And so he waved to the west, to the waiting Atlantean shore. "It's a broad land, Francois," he said. "Room for Englishmen and Bretons-and Frenchmen and Basques, too, I shouldn't wonder."
"It could be that we'll end up neighbors here one day, then," Kersauzon replied. "I always thought Englishmen were better at a distance, but what can you do?" His comic shrug was very French. He would have got furious had Edward told him so.
Instead, Radcliffe made sure he really was south of the English settlement. Kersauzon didn't mock him for asking. Where dead reckoning left off at sea and prayer began was a question every sailor had to face now and then. The two cogs parted with fishermen on each calling, "Good luck!" to the other.
Henry came back to Edward as he steered the St. George toward New Hastings. Quietly, the young man said, "I wondered if you'd fight him."
Edward Radcliffe sighed. "I wondered the same thing. But how could I? We wouldn't be here if not for him."
His son sighed, too. "Well, Father, it's not that you're wrong. I only pray you won't spend the rest of your life sorry for being right."
"God forbid it!" Edward said, and crossed himself again.
New Hastings thrived. How could it do anything else, set on fertile soil with the closest enemies an ocean away? Swarms of fish came out of the sea. Crops and livestock burgeoned. Hogs and rabbits got loose in the wild, but no one had imagined that they wouldn't.
Not many years went by before honkers grew scarce around the settlement. People complained that they had to walk a day or two to find the big flightless birds and kill them. The birds couldn't seem to figure out that these strange two-legged creatures were a menace to them.
Red-crested eagles grew scarcer, too, though not fast enough to suit Edward Radcliffe. The eagles killed a child and a woman, and seemed especially fond of the fat above the kidneys of sheep. Shooting them while they attacked was hopeless.
Shooting them while they perched, on the other hand…The great fierce birds often sat in trees on the edges of the woods so they could spot honkers grazing in the fields and meadows beyond. The eagles did see humans as prey, but didn't seem to see them as threats. Archers could get close to the trees and let fly.
After a while, the eagles around the settlement thinned out. Mothers still watched their small children more carefully than they would have back in England, for the danger from the sky was diminished, not gone.
When Edward Radcliffe sailed the St. George back to England again, six years after he first set eyes on Atlantis, he found the country fallen into the civil war everyone had dreaded so long. The port officials at Hastings roughly demanded whether he favored the White Rose or the Red. Finding they were loyal to the House of York, he declared for the White Rose himself, though in truth he couldn't have cared less whether the king was Yorkist or Lancastrian.
He didn't need long to find that most of the people in Hastings felt the same way he did. Who ruled hardly mattered to them. All they cared about was that someone should rule and bring the land peace. As usual, the lords who fought were profoundly indifferent to what the people wanted.
Edward wasn't. The trouble in England made people in Hastings who'd laughed at him on his last visit suddenly eager to find quiet across the ocean. "Marry, it'd be wonderful to go about my business without worrying about soldiers stealing my stock or burning down my shop," a leatherworker said.
"They wouldn't do that in New Hastings," Radcliffe said. "There are no soldiers in New Hastings."
"No soldiers!" The other man might have had a vision of a miracle. "Isn't that a fine thing!" He paused, scratching his poorly shaved chin. "D'you need a man who makes leather?"
"Well, we might," Edward replied.
"I'd pay," the artisan said. "By God, I'd pay plenty to get away from these swaggering thieves in chainmail. I have a daughter who's fifteen, and I'd pay even more to get her away from them."
"I understand that," Radcliffe said. If his womenfolk were here now, he would have wanted to get them away, too. He rubbed his chin. Getting money for taking new settlers across the ocean hadn't occurred to him till now. He wondered why not. "We'll see what we can do for you, friend."
"I am your friend-your friend for life-if you take me away from this," the leather maker said.
Radcliffe knew not to count on that too much. Gratitude went bad almost as fast as fish did. But it might last to the other side of the sea. "Let's talk," he said, and so they did.
The leather maker wasn't the only one who spent silver for his passage. That proved just as well, because Edward had to pay a fat bribe to take the St. George out of the harbor. Even then, he left under cover of darkness. But he did leave, and once he was at sea he didn't worry about anybody catching him.
Once they'd put Land's End behind them, Henry came over to him and said, "I wonder how long it will be before ships full of people we never heard of start dropping anchor right offshore."