It screeched again, from the same place. He peered up, up, up. Peer as he would, he couldn't see the bird. It was high up in a redwood, and anything high up in a redwood was higher than it could be anywhere else. Countless branches all shaggy with needles hid the eagle from the ground. No doubt it could see a long, long way from there. If a honker anywhere within its range of vision walked out onto a meadow to forage, the red-crested eagle could take wing and strike.
Even though he couldn't see it, Richard didn't feel altogether safe from the eagle, for he feared it might be able to see him. One thing the settlers had learned: the eagles had better eyes than they did. A bird would appear out of nowhere to strike at a honker or a man, or to carry off a lamb or a dog or, once or twice, a toddler. A fishing-boat skipper with eyes like that could name his own price, but the birds outdid mere men.
This one called again. Now it was in the air. As its screeches receded into the distance, Richard breathed easy again. Whatever it was after, it wasn't after him. That meant he could press on.
Faint in the distance, he heard honker alarm cries. The bird must have struck. Whether it had killed…If it hadn't, chances were it would soon find some other perch. He needed to be careful, but you always needed to be careful when you were the only man in strange country.
Something slithered away through the ferns. Atlantis had far more serpents than England did, and more of them were venomous. You had to watch where you put your feet. Well, you didn't have to, but you were liable to be sorry if you didn't. Some of the vipers twitched their tails, perhaps in anger, just before they struck. If they happened to lie coiled among dry leaves, that twitching might make enough noise to warn a wary man. Or, of course, it might not.
He hadn't got a good look at this snake. He didn't know if it was one of the poisonous kind. He wasn't inclined to go after it and find out, either.
The ground sloped up under his feet. Then he topped the low rise and headed down instead. The afternoon sun flashed off water ahead.
At first, Richard could make out no more through the screening of trees and ferns ahead. A pond? A lake? He hadn't gone much farther before he realized that, if it was a lake, it was a big one. He pushed harder. Now he wanted to get out into open country, at least long enough to take a good look at what he'd found.
Sunshine meant he'd come to the edge of the woods. "Oh," he said softly as he got the look he wanted. After a moment's wonder, he added, "If that's not Avalon Bay, then this coast has two of them."
He could see the quiet water of the bay, the lips of land that almost closed around it, and the opening that gave access to the wide ocean beyond. Henry hadn't lied-this was a harbor in a million. It hardly mattered that there was nowhere to go from here. This was the sort of place where you wanted to build a town just because you could.
And there might be somewhere to go, after all. There were those copperskinned men the Basques had found, the ones with the name Henry and his crewmen pronounced differently every time they tried it. Did they have anything worth trading?
Another land across the sea, one you could reach from Atlantis…That was a surprise. But then, Atlantis itself was a surprise-one surprise after another, in fact. Richard wondered whether Francois Kersauzon rued the day when he sold the secret to his father. A third of a hold of salt cod? It didn't seem enough, not when the Englishmen had done so much more with the new land than Kersauzon's Bretons had.
Even the Basques had done more with Atlantis than the Bretons had, and the Basques had got off to a late start here. Richard paused, peering out into the bay. He thought the Basques had got a late start here. No matter what he thought, though, could he prove it? Like the Bretons, like the Englishmen, Basques and Galicians sailed deep into the Atlantic after cod. Just because his own father heard of Atlantis from the Bretons, that didn't mean the Basques and Galicians must have. Maybe they'd stumbled over the new land on their own.
Have to ask them, next time I see one-whenever that is, Richard thought. He had no idea when it would be. He'd never traveled south. Basques came up to New Hastings every now and again, but he couldn't remember the last time one went inland to Bredestown. Richard was curious about the copperskinned unpronounceables. How had they made out after they got to Gernika?
He looked out at the ocean again, or what he could see of it through the mouth of the bay. It wasn't impossible, he supposed, that he would see a sail out there on the Atlantic. Henry hadn't taken the Rose out around the northern cape this year, but maybe the Basques had gone around to the south and then sailed west toward their new land, their inhabited land.
Henry hadn't wanted them to find Avalon Bay. That had made sense even before Richard saw this marvelous harbor with his own eyes. Now that he had, he was as sure as his brother that nobody but Englishmen had any business exploring or making a home here.
A river ran into the northern part of the bay. Henry had said so. Henry and his crew hadn't taken a boat up the river, so nobody knew whether the stream ran west from the green ridge of mountains Richard had penetrated or came down from the north.
If it did rise in the mountains, it would make a wonderful highway across the western half of Atlantis. You could build a raft or a boat up in the mountain country and then ride the rest of the way. You could if there weren't too many rocks or mudflats, anyway.
That would be worth knowing. Richard went on blazing his trail as he headed north toward the river. If it didn't suit his purposes, he could always go back the way he'd come out. He didn't want to: he'd already been over that ground once. But he could, which was comforting in its way.
Shorebirds flew up in shrieking clouds when they caught sight of him. They wouldn't have done that on the eastern shore, or not to the same degree. A lot of the birds in the east were as naive about people as honkers were. What did that say? Was it close enough from here to the new land with the copperskinned people that more western shorebirds made the journey and grew familiar with hunters? Richard couldn't see what else it was likely to mean.
He swore under his breath. He'd seen snipe in those clouds of birds, and snipe made uncommonly fine eating. The ones back near New Hastings were tame enough to catch by hand. Not these. If he wanted them, he'd have to get them the hard way.
Even without snipe roasted in clay, he went on. Over along the eastern edge of the bay, what was water, what marsh, and what land seemed as much a matter of opinion as anything else. Although it was bright daylight, mosquitoes buzzed. Henry had made it plain the water was deeper out by the insweeping arms of land. One of those would be the place to build, then.
Birds swooped here and there after the swarms of insects. Some of the swallows were achingly like the ones he'd left behind in England. Others were larger, with a purple cast to their feathers. Instead of flitting all the time, some birds perched on branches and stumps and made forays against the mosquitoes. "Pee-bee!" they called gaily. "Pee-bee!"
Richard found the river a little before sunset. It meandered through low country, so he had trouble being sure, but he thought it came down from the east. "I'll find out tomorrow," he said.
With a bone hook, some worms he dug out of the boggy soil, and a length of line, he had no trouble pulling a couple of trout from the stream. They wouldn't make as good a supper as snipe would have, but they were a lot better than nothing.
He wondered how things were back in New Hastings. Cold and wet and boring, unless he missed his guess. Not much happened there, not these days. When he got back, he'd give people something to talk about for a while.
VIII
T hree of the Earl of Warwick's troopers tramped down the middle of New Hastings' widest street, pulling their boots out of the mud at every step. Rain pattered down, which would make the mud even thicker and gluier before long. The troopers' mailshirts jingled as they walked. To keep the rain off of their byrnies and helms, they wore hooded wool cloaks they'd taken from the settlers.