Opening Atlantis by Harry Turtledove Page B

year ahead of us. But do you say the Dovermen want a war with us?”
    â€œThey’re sure thinking about it. They’re thinking hard, I’d say,” Edward answered. “I told them to their faces I’d sooner stand with you if they start a fight. They didn’t care to hear that, but I told them anyway.”
    â€œYou are a gentleman.” François Kersauzon bowed, as if to a nobleman in his own country. “It could be that Cosquer and New Hastings should band together and take this Freetown pesthole off the map before more trouble comes from it.”
    Radcliffe had wondered whether the Breton would say that. Not without some regret, he shook his head. “No, I don’t want to. There’s enough fighting across the sea—why bring more here? That’s the other thing you need to know: if you strike first at Freetown, New Hastings will stand with her, too.”
    Kersauzon scowled at him. Some of the other Bretons swore. One or two of them ostentatiously turned their backs. Their leader asked, “Who appointed you the man to say who may war and who may not?”
    â€œI say nothing of the kind,” Edward answered. “I only say what will happen if a war does start.”
    â€œAnd if Cosquer and Freetown move against New Hastings together?”
    â€œGood luck,” Radcliffe said. “Watch your back—you’ll need to.”
    Kersauzon stared at him, then started to laugh. “Well, when you’re right, Saoz gast, you’re right. But how long do you think you’ll be able to keep the peace all by yourself?”
    â€œI don’t know. As long as I can.” Edward sighed. “Sooner or later, something will go wrong. We aren’t in Eden, so it has to. We’re closer to Eden here than we were back home, though. I feel that in my bones. So maybe—I hope—it will be later, not sooner.”

V
    A n axe on his shoulder like a soldier’s spear, Richard Radcliffe strode through the woods of Atlantis. No man had ever seen what he was seeing now; the only tracks in the soft, damp earth were the big, deep three-toed ones that belonged to honkers and other, smaller, bird prints.
    The air smelled spicy. It smelled green, Richard thought. It made you wish you could fill a bottle with the scent and take it back with you. Wherever people lived for a while, things started to stink. Smoke and manure and slops and unwashed bodies…Getting away was a relief to the nose.
    Moss and ferns grew between the curious barrel trees and the pines that rose above them and the enormous trees—redwoods, the Bretons’d named them—that towered over the pines. Some of those redwoods seemed a bowshot tall. No way to be sure just how immense they were till you felled one and measured it. Since the monsters were as thick through the base as three or four men were tall, that wouldn’t happen right away.
    Something stared out at Richard from behind a barrel tree. He stood still and waited. His father was right: the creatures here had no natural fear of man. After a moment, this one came out and walked along with a rolling motion that brought a smile to his face.
    â€œOil thrush,” he murmured. Not since Adam and Eve had people needed names for so many new creatures. The birds and lizards and snakes of the new land were for the most part unlike any the settlers had seen back in England. Oh, ravens croaked from tree branches and sometimes harried hawks and eagles. Barn owls glided ghostly through the night. Fork-tailed swallows dipped and darted after flying insects. They were all familiar enough. And the red-breasted thrush that acted and sounded like a blackbird was easy to get used to. But the oil thrush…
    It had the shape of one of those red-breasted thrushes. (Some people were calling them robins, though they were bigger and less vivid than the redbreasts back home.) It had the shape, yes, but it was the size of a chicken, or