Read Online Opening Atlantis by Harry Turtledove - Free Book Online

Edward by surprise. It caught him by surprise twice, in fact: he didn’t remember falling asleep on the deck some time in the dark hours before dawn, and fog had still shrouded the St. George when he did. But now the sun shone, the sky was blue, and a warm breeze from the southwest carried the green smells of land with it.
    He sprang to his feet. “Land ho!” he bawled—the line on the western horizon was hard to make out, but he had no doubt it was there. “Land ho! Praise the Lord! He has brought us safe to this new shore!”
    Other cogs began shouting it, too, but he thought he was the first. If those shouts were what woke him and not the sunbeam after all, he didn’t want to know about it.
    Nell came over to his side. She peered west, shading her eyes with the palm of her hand. “That’s it?” she said. “It doesn’t look like much.”
    â€œNot yet.” Edward bowed, as if he were a nobleman. “Kindly give us leave to draw closer, if you’d be so gracious.”
    His wife dropped him a curtsy. “Oh, very well, since ’tis you as asks.” Her impression of a high-born lady’s airs and accent also left something to be desired. They grinned at each other.
    With the wind in that quarter, drawing closer wasn’t easy. They had to slew the big square sail around on the yard again and again, tacking toward the land that almost seemed to retreat as they beat their way westward. But they did gain, even if not so fast as Radcliffe would have liked.
    And they did find their first rock on the new shore. The sea boiled white just above it. “That’s a bad one,” Henry said. “If the tide runs a little higher, it’ll hide the bastard altogether—but it won’t lift a boat high enough to get over it.”
    â€œNote the landmarks,” Edward said. “We’ll chart these waters one day. By God, we will.”
    â€œThis isn’t right where Kersauzon brought us,” his son said.
    â€œI know.” Edward sighed and nodded at the same time. “We did the best we could, and this is what we got. A few leagues north? A few leagues south? Who can say? Maybe we didn’t have the latitude quite right when we were here last. Maybe we drifted in the fog. I don’t know. But that’s Atlantis ahead, the land where we’re going to put down roots.”
    Henry muttered something under his breath. Edward couldn’t make out what it was, and supposed he might be lucky. He knew Richard had more enthusiasm for the new land than Henry did. Well, Henry was here, whether he was glad to be here or not.
    The fishing boats kept fighting toward the alluring coast ahead. The only way the wind could have been worse would have been for it to blow straight into their faces. No boat could make headway against a directly contrary wind; they would have had to drop anchor and wait for it to swing around. Edward might have been tempted to do that anyway, were the land not so near—the constant tacking wore out the crew. With women and children and beasts on deck, it was harder, more dangerous, more aggravating work than it usually would have been, too.
    But the hard work had its reward; to Edward Radcliffe’s way of thinking, hard work commonly did. The St. George dropped anchor in eight fathoms of water as the sun sank toward the newly notched horizon ahead. “Can we get ashore before sunset?” Richard asked.
    â€œOnly one way to find out,” Edward answered. The boat went into the water. The fishermen began to row. Looking around, Edward spied other boats heading for the beach. He hadn’t raced François Kersauzon, but he did now. “Pull hard, damn you!” he roared, and pulled hard enough himself to come close to jerking the thole pin out of the gunwale. “Pull hard! No one’s going to beat me back to Atlantis!”
    In a twinkling, all the fishermen in all the boats were rowing as