"Where now, skipper?" Bartholomew Smith asked.
Whenever Henry heard that, he started to look around to see where his father was. But Edward Radcliffe stayed behind in New Hastings. He still put to sea, to fish or to go down the coast to one of the other settlements. Heading off to nowhere for the fun of it, though, was beyond his old bones and creaking muscles.
Or maybe he just thought the Rose didn't have much of a chance of coming back from nowhere. And maybe he was right. But if he was, he judged with an old man's sour wisdom. Henry hoped that kind of judgment passed him by. Yet if enough years piled onto him, it probably wouldn't.
"Where now?" he echoed. "West along the coast for a while, and we'll see what it does. If it goes straight, we do the same. If it tends south, we follow. If it tends north…well, we still follow, but I won't like it so well."
"Who would?" the mate replied. "Can't run all the way up to Iceland, though, or the squareheads would have found this country a long time ago."
Henry grunted. He hadn't thought of that, and he should have. "We won't go hungry, anyhow," he said. "Plenty of little fish to net out, and plenty of birds getting fat feeding on them."
Even as he spoke, a bright-billed puffin plunged into the sea and came out holding three or four sardines. Murres and auks and guillemots also preyed on the abundant fish. So did bigger birds that looked like auks but seemed unable to fly. They swam like small porpoises instead.
Smith must have been thinking of them, for he said, "Shame we can't render some of these birds down to oil, like the thrushes ashore. They'd yield tun after tun, Devil take me if they wouldn't."
"We ought to think about setting up a trying works here," Henry said. "Not just for the birds, but for the whales, too." He'd seen several of the big beasts blowing and breaching not far from the Rose. If one of them had risen right under her…There were all kinds of reasons why ships didn't come home.
"Far as the whales go, I'm surprised we didn't find the damned Basques up here ahead of us." Bartholomew Smith made some gabbling noises that were supposed to be Basque.
Henry laughed, even if the mate's imitation didn't sound much like the real thing. "They're whaling men, all right," he agreed. There were no more intrepid whalers than the Basques. They had their reasons, too. Like any other fish, whale meat was allowed during Lent and on Fridays. Henry himself was mighty fond of salted whale-craspoix, the French called it-and peas.
The big auklike birds were easy to catch. Like so many of Atlantis's creatures, they were ignorant of men. Some of the flying sea birds behaved the same way, but others were warier. Henry wondered what that meant. Did some of them stay in Atlantean waters all the time, while others flew to lands where men were liable to hunt them? Or were some simply stupider than others? A nice question, but one he had no idea how to answer.
Before the Rose got very far west at all, her progress slowed even though the wind remained favorable. The water through which she sailed changed color, too, turning lighter and bluer than it had been before. It was also noticeably warmer than the stretch of ocean from which they'd just come.
"Strong current," Henry remarked.
"Right strong," Smith agreed. "Seems to scoot along the shore here."
"It does. Might almost have been put here to make sure we don't get anywhere in a hurry," Henry said.
"You don't suppose-?" The mate sounded alarmed. Even by the standards of his age and trade, he was a superstitious man.
By the standards of his age and trade, Henry wasn't. "No, I don't think anything of the kind," he answered. "Old Scratch has better things to do than worry about the likes of us. Or I hope he does, anyhow." He crossed himself, on the off chance.
Bartholomew Smith did the same thing. "I hope so, too." His voice quavered a little.
Satan did seem busy elsewhere. Just as Henry hoped, the coast soon started tending southward. Strong breezes blew down from the north to push the Rose on her way. She didn't travel as fast as she might have, for the current coming up from the south fought against her, but she did travel.
And the warm current seemed to bring balmy weather with it as it came. They still lay far to the north of New Hastings, but the climate here in the west was far milder than it had been on Atlantis' eastern shore.
"I wonder what it's like here come winter," Henry said.
"Foggy, I warrant," Smith replied. "All this warm water striking cold air…Might make London look to its laurels."
"Have you ever seen London?" Henry asked.
The mate shook his head. "Why on earth would a Hastings fisherman want to go and see London? Have you, skipper?"
"No, never once," Henry admitted.
"Well, there you are," Bartholomew Smith said. "And I've been a New Hastings fisherman as long as you have, and I don't much want to go back across the sea any more, either. By God, I like it here."
"So do I. Any land where no lord can tell you what to do and you don't owe taxes to anybody…I like that fine," Henry said.
When they found a good-sized stream flowing into the ocean, they rowed the water butts ashore to refill them. A gaggle of honkers stared at them in mild curiosity, as if to say, You're the strangest-looking birds we've ever seen. They were the strangest-looking honkers Henry had ever seen. They were a pale gray, with orange feet and beaks. Their wings were bigger than those of any variety near New Hastings, though still utterly useless as far as getting them off the ground was concerned.
One of the honkers puffed up its chest and flapped its silly wings at another. "Honnnk!" it screeched. The other bird skittered away, as well as something as tall as a man and considerably heavier could skitter.
Getting the water butts back onto the boat once they were filled was slow, careful work. If you made a mistake, you could put one right through the bottom. Henry was calling out instructions when the rambunctious honker ambled up to him. Perhaps because he was making noise, it seemed to think him some kind of rival. It went through the same sort of display it had with the other honker, puffing itself up, flapping its wings, and making a noise like a badly played horn full of spit.
Henry straightened up. He was, he noted with satisfaction, a couple of inches taller than the orange-legged honker. He jumped up and down. He waved his arms. "Yaaah!" he yelled at the top of his lungs.
The honker started at him in bird-brained disbelief. Then, with a piglike grunt of dismay, it backpedaled, turned, and hastily retreated. The fishermen cheered Henry to the skies. "Well done, skipper!" Sam cried. "I didn't know you spoke its language!"
Laughing, Henry answered, "Hell, it's got to be easier to learn than Basque. And if it decided to give me more trouble, I could always clout it over the head."
"That works pretty well with the damned Basques, too," Sam said.
"It does," Henry agreed. "But they've got harder heads than honkers, and they're liable to try and clout first."
"You're right about that. Can't trust any of those foreign folk," Bartholomew Smith said. It never occurred to him, or to Henry, or to Sam, or to any of the other Englishmen, that foreigners might feel the same way about them. In fact, the mate added, "Bugger me blind if we can trust those bloody Dover bastards, either. Freetown? Free, my arse!" He spat to show what he thought of the neighboring settlement.
Sam nodded. "The Bretons are a better bargain than the Dovermen, even if Kersauzon's getting old. Your father's right about that, skipper."
"Yes." Henry tried not to sound too glum. Thinking that Francois Kersauzon was getting old reminded him that his father was, too. The graveyard back of the church already had its share of headstones and more. He didn't want to think about its having one more in particular. And thinking about death and dying reminded him of something else. "Keep an eye out for eagles," he called. "Wherever we find honkers, chances are we'll find them, too."