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Informationen zum Autor Harry Turtledove Klappentext Atlantis lies between Europe and the East Coast of Terranova. For many years! this land of opportunity lured dreamers from around the globe with its natural resources! offering a new beginning for those willing to brave the wonders of the unexplored territory. It is a new world indeed: ripe for discovery! for plunder! and eventually for colonization?but will its settlers destroy the very wonders they had journeyed to Atlantis to find? Edward Radcliffe steered the St. George toward Le Croisic. Soon he would take the fishing boat out into the Atlantic after cod. Before he did, though, he needed salt, or his cargo would spoil before he brought it back to England. The marshes of Guérande, in southern Brittany, yielded the best salt in this part of the world. That was what he wanted. Edward Radcliffe, though far from rich, had never been one to settle for anything less than the best. He was nearly fifty, a big bull of a man, with broad shoulders, weathered red skin, and a thick shock of hair going from yellow toward white because of the sun at least as much as because of the years. Two of his sons, Richard and Henry, were part of the little cog's crew. They showed what Edward had looked like before the years began to challenge him. Le Croisic stood on a spit of land that stuck out three miles into the sea from the marshes. As always, ships from every land in the western part of the world crowded the waters around the port. They all had different lines and rigging. A lubber couldn't have told one from another?but then, Edward Radcliffe neither knew nor cared about the various breeds of sheep. He was, however, no lubber. When he saw a Basque boat, he didn't think it came from Ireland. The French built different from the Dutch, and the English differently from either. Endless variations on each theme . . . "You know what?" he called from his place at the tiller. A couple of the fishermen nodded. More of the crew laughed at him. "We've got to take you into town and get you drunk, Father," Henry said. "You're thinking too much. You need to salt down your brain." Everybody laughed at that, even Edward. "Sharper than a viper's fang to have a snot-nosed brat," he said. With a chilly wind driving them on from the northwest, everybody's nose?including his own?was dripping snot. Henry stuck out his tongue. Like Richard, he was even bigger than their father, and at the high spring of his strength rather than at the beginning of its autumn. "We need to go into town," Richard said, more than half to himself. He would have been a lubber if he could. He didn't love the sea the way Edward and Henry did. But he was a fisherman's son, and so he sailed with them. The St. George squeezed into a place at the quays jut ahead of a Basque boat. The Basques, dark, blocky fellows with eyebrows that ran straight across their foreheads with no break above the nose, shouted what sounded like abuse in their peculiar language. People said the Devil himself couldn't learn it. Edward didn't know about that, but he knew he couldn't?and, besides English, he could get along in Dutch and French and, not quite so well, Breton. "First things first," he declared. "We get the salt. We bring it back to the boat. Then we worry about everything else. Nobody told him no, which only showed how much the crew respected him. The fishermen were men ?they wanted to gamble and drink and whore before they sailed off into the wild wet wasteland of the Atlantic. They'd already had a rough passage around Cap Finistère?Land's End, the same name as the westernmost tip of Cornwall?to get here. They'd earned relief. And they would get it . . . once they did what needed doing. Master Jean Abrgall sold the best salt in Le Croisic. The flower of salt , he called it?none of the gray...
