"Sorry, bug," Richard said. "Pretty soon, I'm going to push on, and then you'll go back to sleep." In England, dormice snoozed away the winter. No dormice here. No mice of any kind, except the ones that had sneaked aboard the cogs that brought the settlers from England. No native rats, either. Richard didn't miss them. Who but a cat would?
After he built up the fire to burn for a while, he rolled himself in his blanket and went to sleep. It wasn't a soft bed, but it would do. Now he hoped the weather wouldn't warm up. If it started to rain, it would soak through even his thick, greasy woolen blanket. Then weariness claimed him, and he stopped worrying about the weather or anything else.
He was shivering when he woke up. That meant he woke sooner than he might have. It was still dark, with only the faintest hint of twilight in the east. New Hastings lay farther south than its namesake in England, so its wintertime days were longer and its nights shorter than the ones he'd grown up with. All the same, its winters seemed harsher than the ones in the land he'd left behind. He wondered why that should be so, but had no doubt it was.
"Father should have settled farther south yet," he muttered as he poked the embers to red life, fed more tinder onto them, and got the fire going again. From everything he'd heard, the cold season was milder down in Cosquer and much milder down in Gernika. The Bretons and Basques had it easier than their English counterparts did.
Of course, that coin was two-sided. New Hastings' summers were hotter and stickier than the ones back in England. The farther south you went down Atlantis' east coast, the more pronounced that got. By the time you reached Gernika, wouldn't you turn into a puddle of sweat?
There had to be a better way-and there was, on the far side of the mountains. From what he'd seen and from what Henry had reported, the weather near Avalon Bay came close to perfection the whole year round. Again, he wondered why there should be such a difference, and, again, he didn't know. That the difference was there and that it was real, he couldn't help believing. He'd seen it. He'd felt it.
His stomach growled. He roasted the oil thrush's other drumstick and broke his fast with it. He left the rest of the carcass behind when he went east once more. In England, he wouldn't have, for he wouldn't have been confident of catching anything else. Even a halfway decent hunter, though, had a hard time going hungry in Atlantis. He'd left a lot of big birds behind him, dead, in his travels. He could always kill another one when he needed to.
Downhill again. Downhill all the way to New Hastings. All he needed to do was find the trail he'd blazed and follow it, and it would take him home again. What could be easier?
"Yes? And then what?" he asked himself aloud. When he got back, how many people would care where he'd gone? How many would care what he'd done? Oh, some would, but most of the settlers just wanted to get on with the lives they'd made here. They thought him strange for plunging into the wilderness every chance he got. He wondered why they'd bothered leaving England.
Even his wife thought him strange for plunging into the wilderness-and for leaving her alone. He hoped she hadn't done anything to make a scandal while he was gone. Fishermen who went to sea for weeks and months at a time ran that risk. Richard had no reason to think Bertha was unfaithful, but he knew it was one of the things that could happen to a traveling man.
Of course, it was also one of the things that could happen to a man who lived over his shop. If a woman was going to, she was going to. The same held true for men, but women had a harder time doing anything about it.
He was perhaps halfway down from the mountains to the sea when he got a surprise-he saw a hog drinking at a swift-running stream. A heartbeat later, the hog saw him or smelled him or heard him. It snorted and trotted away. Unlike honkers and oil thrushes, it knew what a man would want from it.
"By Our Lady, they've come a long way!" Richard exclaimed. If he'd seen this one here, some were bound to have traveled even farther west. He wondered if any swine had reached the mountains or gone over them. He laughed. They would give the local beasts a lively time.
Halfway up the towering spire of a redwood, a parrot screeched. Others started to call, too, till the woods echoed with their cries. That made Richard laugh again. Back in England, he'd heard of parrots, but never seen them. From everything he'd heard, they lived in hot countries. Not in Atlantis. Here they were, screaming their heads off in the middle of winter. You never could tell.
At last, near the headwaters of a small stream running east, he came to a pine marked not with one of his usual blazes but with a B. He smiled. That blaze marked the Brede. All he had to do was follow the river, and it would take him home.
But when he neared Bredestown, he got another surprise, and one not nearly so welcome as the hog. More game out in the woods was always welcome. Strange men tramping the edges of the cleared ground wearing helmets and chainmail were anything but.
"Who the devil are you?" one of the strangers said when Richard stepped out from the shelter of the trees.
"What the devil are you?" the other one added.
He looked down at himself. His clothes were filthy and tattered, his beard long and unkempt. When he was alone in the forest, what difference did it make? It made one now.
"My name is Richard Radcliffe." Talking to other people, especially to strangers, felt odd after so long in his own company. "I've been to the other side of Atlantis, and now I'm back. Who are you?"
"Why, the Earl of Warwick's men." By the way the soldier said it, even someone just back from the other side of Atlantis-or the other side of the moon-should have known that. In case Richard didn't know that, the man added, "Warwick's in charge here now."
"Is he?" Richard said tonelessly. Both soldiers nodded. Both of them kept hand on swordhilt. Richard got the idea they would make him sorry if he said that didn't suit him. That being so, he didn't. "When I set out, the earl was on the far side of the sea. So were you two, I expect," seemed safer.
Both men at arms nodded. "But we're bloody well here now, so we have to make the best of it," the bigger one said. He had a scar on his upper lip and two missing front teeth. He also had bushy eyebrows, which came down and together as he frowned. "Radcliffe, is it? You'll be the old grumbler's other son?"
No one had ever talked about Richard's father that way before. Richard had brawled-who hadn't?-but he was no warrior. He wouldn't have cared to take on one of these bruisers, let alone both of them, even if they weren't armored. Another soft answer seemed best, so he gave one: "Henry is my brother, yes."
They put their heads together and muttered to each other. Richard wondered whether he ought to bolt back into the woods. But the soldier with the missing front teeth said, "Well, now that you're back, you'd damned well better keep your nose clean-that's all I've got to tell you."
"You'd damned well better keep all of you clean." The other soldier held his nose. "You stink like a dung heap, friend."
Richard had no doubt the Earl of Warwick's man was right. "It's been cold," he said with such dignity as he could muster. "Not much chance to wash." It hadn't been all that cold on the other side of the mountains, but the soldiers didn't need to know that. When you were all by yourself, though, what point to washing? Most people didn't bother very often even when they weren't by themselves: Warwick's men stank of sour sweat, too. But Richard had no doubt he was riper. He looked forward to a bath.
After a last couple of growls, Warwick's men let him go on. A sigh of relief gusted from him as soon as they got far enough away not to hear it. Cows and sheep and a few horses grazed on the meadows and gleaned what they could from the fallow fields, manuring them with their dung. Dogs barked and growled. A brindled cat sneaked around the corner of a barn. It might almost have been England.