Oh, he was glad to see, glad to touch, his wife when he came back from one of these jaunts. But even rutting palled sooner and sooner nowadays. Before long, he itched to be gone again. Other people were a stench in his nostrils, and the more of them there were, the worse the stench got. They lived with it all the time, so they didn't even know it was there. Richard hadn't himself, not till he was able to go away into the woods here for days at a time.
"How did I stand the stinks on a fishing boat?" he wondered aloud. He often talked to himself when he was out alone. Why not? And the answer was easy enough to find: he'd stood it because he'd known no better, the same way he'd stood getting jammed together with the other fishermen on the St. George, jammed almost as tight as the gutted slabs of salt cod they made.
Here in the wilderness, his words seemed to take on an importance they wouldn't have back in New Hastings, or even Bredestown. They echoed back from the boles of the trees that leapt skywards the way cathedral spires dreamt of doing. Some of the trees he'd seen rose higher than any cathedral spire-he was sure of that.
Only birdcalls-honkers' loud, nasal notes and the more melodious songs of smaller birds-had ever disturbed the stillness in these mountain passes before. Richard smiled. No, that wasn't quite true. There was also the chirping of the big green katydids that scurried and hopped through the undergrowth. They were as long as his thumb, and twice as fat. They couldn't fly; like the honkers, they had useless little stubs of wings. They didn't even hop particularly well. But, like mice back in England, they came out at night to nibble at whatever they could find.
And sometimes, here in the mountains, they came out by day, too, or what passed for day. Fog lingered long in the valleys here. Sometimes, as it thinned, Richard could see the green slopes above and to either side of the pass he was trying to get through. That was when he came out into the open; under the trees, mist might linger all through the day.
He knew he'd gone astray a few times, just because of the mist. Few trails wound through these forests. There were no deer or wild boar here to make them. Nor had men tamed these woods, as they had England's. Honkers made some paths, but honkers didn't care to go deep into the woods. Most of them were by choice creatures of the meadow and the forest edges. They sheltered under the trees to save themselves from the savage beaks and tearing talons of red-crested eagles. Without the birds that slashed down from the sky to slay them, they would have spent their time in the open.
The constant moisture made the air seem thick and textured in Richard's lungs. It also made the spicy scents of sap and needles even stronger and sweeter than they would have been were the weather drier. Of course, in drier weather the redwoods that gave the forest its upper story could never have grown.
Somewhere not far ahead, a stream gurgled. Richard came up to it, dipped up a cup, and drank. The clear, cold water that ran down his throat seemed as sweet and almost as strong as wine. It wasn't the greenish, nasty stuff that came out of the butts when you'd stayed at sea too long. It wasn't the vile stuff that came down to Hastings, either, already foul with inlanders' shit and piss and the leavings from tanneries and breweries. This was water, the way God intended it to be.
A frog stared at Richard out of golden eyes. That single singing sac under its throat still seemed strange to him. But so much of Atlantis was strange by English standards; why should that one small thing stand out? He couldn't have said why, but it did.
The frog didn't hop off the rock, as a sensible English frog would have. It didn't recognize him as a threat, which could have made him all the more dangerous to it. Luckily for it, he wasn't hungry right now. He plucked a leaf from a fern and dropped it in the stream.
It floated off…toward the east. "Damnation!" Richard muttered. He was still on this side of the watershed. One of these days, if that leaf didn't sink, it would wash out to sea somewhere not far from New Hastings. He wanted leaves to float west, and to follow them to Atlantis' farther shore. Thanks to Henry, he knew it was there.
More than half of him wished his brother hadn't found Avalon Bay, or anything else that had to do with Atlantis' western coast. What he already knew made his own explorations seem less weighty. Going off towards a land you already knew something about was like listening to a story where you already knew the ending. What lay in the middle might still be interesting, but it wasn't the same.
A flapjack turtle stuck its pointy-nosed head out of the water and eyed him with reptilian suspicion. He was suspicious of it, too. The creature had formidable jaws. He didn't want it taking off a finger joint if he tried to catch it. Flapjacks made good eating, but plenty of other prey was easier to hunt.
He pressed on. Light filtered through the mist, through the redwood canopy, and through the lower story of pines in sudden, startling shafts, almost as if it came through a stained-glass window in a cathedral. The tall columns of the tree trunks only strengthened the resemblance.
Richard thought God more likely to live in this pristine outdoor chapel than in any building men threw together. You could see the Creation here. The birds and the wind in the branches played a sweeter melody than any that burst from the throats of a choir. And the conifers' smell that filled the air in the woods made his nose happier than all the frankincense and myrrh brought in from distant shores.
Bishop John would not have been glad to hear his opinions. But Bishop John never would. Richard Radcliffe had no desire to fall foul of the Church. He hadn't even told his wife of his notions about the woods. She wouldn't understand them anyhow; she hadn't traveled far enough under the trees.
Maybe someone from Freetown had as little use for his neighbors and as much for the new world in which he found himself as Richard. Maybe one of Francois Kersauzon's Bretons, or a Basque from Gernika, also made a habit of plunging deep into the heartland of Atlantis for no better reason than to see what he could find. Maybe, but Richard had found no signs of other wanderings in the course of his own.
"What would I do if I did?" he wondered. He shrugged. He had no idea. It was like wondering what you would do if the mast suddenly toppled. The idea seemed far-fetched enough to be silly.
And yet, once it lodged, it didn't want to leave. He kept looking around. Every small forest sound made him wonder if he should draw his bow. He knew that was foolish, but he couldn't help it.
He'd been blazing trees to mark his path. He kept on doing it, but made his blazes point in the other direction, as if he were coming from the west. That might confuse a stranger who found them. Or it might do nothing but make him feel better. He did it anyhow.
Some of the snails that crawled up trees and foraged on ferns here in the mountains were almost the size of his fist. His first thought when he saw one was that a Frenchman would have thought he'd died and gone to heaven. His next thought was that the Frenchman might not be so foolish after all. A snail that size had a lot of meat, even if it came with eyestalks.
And, roasted over a small fire, giant snail didn't prove bad at all. It was bland enough to make him wish he'd brought more salt along, but he couldn't do anything about that now. He noted that a clean empty shell might do duty for a cup if he ever broke his.
Some of the slugs in the woods were even bigger than the snails. He needed longer to notice them, though: they were a dark green that made them look like patches of moss. But patches of moss didn't usually leave behind a trail of slime as wide as two fingers side by side when they glided along. And the slugs, of course, had eyestalks, too. They reminded Richard of slowly moving cucumbers.
They also had a lot of meat. He decided he wasn't hungry enough to find out what it tasted like. If he was missing a treat…then he was, that was all. One of these days, some other traveler, more intrepid or more desperate than he was, might find out.