The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica

by John Calvin Batchelor

  There was one Loyalist leader whose gift for demagoguery soon lifted him into the position of holy strategist for the movement. This was apt, if opportunistic, for he was the head pastor of the wealthiest and most aristocrat-packed Lutheran church in Stockholm. His power grew as the King’s government weakened, since he represented himself as the spokesman for, the embodiment of, the traditional Norse ideas of purity and vengeance, which he claimed would return the country to harmony. He was chief of those calling for a national oath of Christian fealty, and for a referendum on the question of making Sweden an Evangelical Republic. He was a fearmonger of the first rank, a genius at mass hysteria and at denouncing his detractors as demons. Also, he could throw himself completely into deranged calls for Peregrine’s death. His name was Mord Fiddle.

  “Me and Moll were down shopping on the quays last night,” Israel wrote me in the spring of my fourth year at Vexbeggar, “and we got rousted by a marshal for a Loyalist rally. It was a taffy pull. We went along, wanting no trouble from the thugs. They had the square fixed up like a birthday cake, with a chorus of one million eight-year-olds singing ‘Jesus Loves Me.’ That stirred them up, definitely a gooseberry crowd. I had to keep telling myself they were the same folk with the taste for arson. Old Adolf, he was partial to torchlight and kettledrums. These people are more for harps and pinwheels.

  “Then a couple of minor angels got up on the platform to remind us how wonderful we are. Sublime homes. Sublime children. Sublime duty. This is dopiness like who’d believe? Where is sense? What happened to it? It was just here. They burned out four tenements last week. In the daytime. They don’t like the night, claim it’s for wolves. Is it this bad back home? I can’t believe I’m on the same planet. Moll tells me I can’t let this get me down like I was. I haven’t got the rage I used to, something inside is broken. I promise I’m trying. I’m definitely off the drinking. I just want to run and keep on running. How did I get so far out of goose step?

  “Once the angels wrapped up their act, the crowd got heavy and male, mums and kids trundling home to make gingersnaps. The attention shifted from the platform to this podium set up on the bow of a ship tied up along the quays. There was an organ roll from somewhere, and their head witch doctor popped up from below and strode to the podium. They call him ‘Mord the Hard-Fisherman.’ He’s about twenty feet tall, with a funky white beard and hair down his back in braids. He had on preacher clothes. Back home this is what they call presidential timber. The man is a spellbinder. Evil spells, bad spells, but there it is. He has magic. I can’t say most of what he said, his Swedish was too fast and colloquial. It was a fearsome noise, and wild, you know? He kept his real madness till the end. Then he started in on poor Peregrine.”

  I won’t record what Israel wrote me of Mord the Hard-Fisherman cursing Father. It was hideous. It was Mord Fiddle who first said that if the King washed his hands at all, it would be to cleanse them of innocent blood, not of Peregrine’s, whom Grandfather called “that assassin.” It was Mord Fiddle who first waved the white handtowel—to dry the King’s hands, he said—that became the favorite of the Loyalist mobs, they waving those towels over their heads, chanting for executions, deportations, crimes against the helpless, and especially for Peregrine’s head. And it was Mord Fiddle who toppled the King’s government—more of that shortly. According to what Israel wrote me of that day on the quays, the issue was at the point where the Loyalists believed they could force an election. Mord Fiddle alluded in his speech to the raising of a vigilante force—“Evangelical Brigade”—to storm the King’s prison and relieve the King of his burden of Peregrine Ide.

  That Mord the Hard-Fisherman was my grandfather, that it was he who against nature and conscience had driven his daughter and grandson from the nursery, never occurred to us. The surname Fiddle was not rare in Sweden, or in the North. Indeed, Peregrine and Israel had always thought that my name on that piece of paper was a sad joke.

  It seems blind of us now, but really, we had so many problems, why should such a farfetched coincidence of surnames have seemed significant? What is more, I was not then fully informed of the details of my conception and birth, and Israel was almost as ignorant as I was. There was only one person in the Kingdom who had facts enough to act, and she was as far from a philosophical disposition to politics as my dogs, high-minded wolves, were to the leash. However, Mother was not one to pass by an opportunity for melodrama. I have often thought that her reentry into my life was less luck than premeditated showmanship.

  Lamba Time-Thief

  VEXBEGGAR had been a modest fishing village centered on its Lutheran church until speculators had transformed it into a seaside gambling resort for the idle rich. It was shaped like a fishhook about a natural inlet, the bulk of the saloons and casinos shoved up against the lower part of the J, the housing complexes spreading back from there. Our dilapidated camp—two bunkhouses and a mess hall—stood at the extreme upper part of the J, at the tip of shantytown that itself was back from the harbor. The poorest and most unwelcome of the resort’s domestics lived there, heaped like driftwood on the tides of fate.

  Because the bank would not buy it back from us, we had our own pier, jutting about forty yards into the Baltic. The Asians and Africans loved to fish from it, so it never appeared as sorrowful as the rest of the camp. After Molly returned to Israel, I closed up the inland houses and moved into the storage shack at the end of the pier, where we had tied up our ersatz six-meter Viking boat and our old ketch. My room, on the first story (an attic really, walls shaped by the pine roof), overlooked drifting hulks, abandoned warehouses, our two sad vessels, and the few craft tied up that far from the yacht club. It was damp up there, but with insulation and innovation it was tolerable in winter and heavenly in summer. I cooked my meals on a stove Guy had installed on the ground level, and used most of the shack as a kennel for Goldberg and Iceberg and the guests who followed them home frequently. Most of their friends were canine and male, and of consequence both had litters their third years; however, by that fourth year the human and feminine came regularly to my door.

  I was shy, necessarily secretive. At first, the daughters of the year-round domestics pried into my affairs. I learned to say “boy” and “girl” and so forth in Turkish, Korean, Urdu, and Brazilian Portuguese. In the summer, there were also the intriguing nymphs from the resorts whom I chanced upon along the harbor walks. I had more than my share of fun, made a fool of myself in many tongues, learned some unbelievable things about females, spent spring nights wishing I was not alone and autumn nights wishing I was, and generally blundered my way through first love, second love, just fun, and what Molly called “serious crushes.” The summertime girls knew things I could not accept and never understood. I disguised my ingenuousness by telling outrageous Norse tales and by making up even more absurd stories about my father, Perceval, and his comrade, Moses, who had both been killed in action in Vietnam.

  In brief, I moved from fumbling novice to casual heart-breaker. The wintertime girls had names: Lilli, an American halfbreed from Cam Ranh Bay who corrected my errors about the Vietnam war; Ananda from Bangladesh, who introduced me to Eastern eroticism; and Ethel-Bethel, the most sincerely devout Christian I ever met, who was from what once was called Mozambique (I have no knowledge of its name now). The summertime girls also had names: Gunnhild, who was called “Lace-Cuff”; Liva, who was called “Fine-Hair”; and the ultramarine-eyed Unn, whom I called “Sly-Eyes.”

  Sly-Eyes was the only daughter of a life peer, a minor count from the western dairylands. She was a major influence on my libido, three years older than me when we met, leaving me feeling too old when we parted. That last summer at Vexbeggar, I thought of Sly-Eyes as my Charity Bentham, for she was smarter, sexier, sneakier than all the rest. That was youthful fancy. I was yet to meet the real thing. Still, while she was there, Sly-Eyes twisted me about her vain self. Everything about her seemed to me careful, ladylike, gorgeous. I did love the way she smelled. She could make me do
anything, including dressing properly enough to attend the dissolute parties at her father’s shore house. And the more I feared her foolish friends, the more I clung to her. Lilli, in an uncharacteristic aside, said that Sly-Eyes was a pale snake in my tree of life. That was overmuch, though Sly-Eyes tempted me greatly. She taught me envy, jealousy, pettiness. She ran with a bad lot; her other suitors called me, to my face, a fishmonger. And I took it, because I thought that if I challenged them they might question my identity. My safety remained in my apparent thickheadedness. I hung at the fringe of that bright crowd, waiting for Sly-Eyes to bore herself with the pretty boys. She fancied me her Norse outlaw, as in the stories I told her. I was her “Grim Evening-Wolf,” hiding from the relatives of my victims. She said this innocently, without sense of the burning half-truth.

  One weekend under the harvest moon, Sly-Eyes and I fought over how much wine she could drink and still remain ladylike. I broke a bottle against the carriage of one of her feyest suitors. She refused my appeals for reconciliation the rest of the month. This did not annoy me, because I was very busy washing dishes at three different restaurants for funds I needed. By the new moon, I had lost patience and retreated to my shack to plan how to win her back. I aimed to make her regret that she had toyed with Beowulf-Come-Again, King of the Weather-Geats, slayer of Grendel and mother, bested finally by the unnamed dragon guarding an ancient gold-hoard.

  I gathered my harness from the tattered remains of Vikingland. I dressed my dogs as well, decided not to take along the three pups I had kept of their litters. We were decked in as much iron and wolf fur as we could heft. I let my hair down, combed out my red beard, coated myself in grease and fish oil. I looked and smelled unholy. I had not dressed the warrior since we had closed the camp ten years before, and my full-grown bulk made it no masquerade. I figured this would scare Sly-Eyes into submission. It scared me enough—examining myself in the polished helmet—that I mention that I carried no weapons that night. I was only crudely sensitive to my power then, intuited enough about the strange darkness inside me to avoid provocation.

  I knew from my friend Dede Gone, an angry Turk and fellow dishwasher, who also delivered groceries to the rich, including Sly-Eyes’s shore house, that she was giving a party that Saturday. My dogs and I approached her house—a cakelike affair set on stilts on a low cliffside amid other equally pretentious roosts—from the wooded plateau behind. In position by moon-rising, I climbed up a pinetree from which I had spent many embarrassed, delightful evenings watching people in their baths and so forth. I had first seen Sly-Eyes from that perch, since it was directly in line with the sun deck off her mother’s cluttered living room. I planned our howling entrance at midnight. Sly-Eyes had unwittingly prepared a surprise for me.

  Just before midnight, Sly-Eyes and her best friend, Asgerd, the daughter of a scoundrel who actually called himself the Duke of Vexbeggar (the King had made life peerages a lucrative game), swept onto the sun deck and waved the partygoers to attention. There were cheers. At fifty yards I could not hear what they said. Soon they had turned off the electric lights and distributed candles around the deck’s railing. They also arranged large pillows in thronelike display at the edge of the terrace.

  From out of the revelry and firelight, two cloaked figures appeared through the screens to the side. The larger figure sounded a long, high-pitched whine. It stunned the party, and shocked Goldberg and Iceberg, who commenced answering whines. I waved them to silence, checked the crowd to see if they had noticed. Instead, they were transfixed by the whining figure, who threw back her cowl to reveal a bloated face, caked with white powder, distorted with artifice. She had greased her hair back so that it hung to her shoulders like snakes. She carried a wooden staff a foot taller than herself, and this was a large woman; she used it to clear a circle about the pillow throne. In her sweep she paused, seemed to fix her eyes directly on me. It is not credible that she could have seen into a dark wood, as one generally uses the word see. I ducked. When I looked again, the smaller figure had fixed on me. Her eyes were bright in the candlelight. She stood as still as a statue. I knew something was wrong. Then, with a histrionic spin, the smaller figure dropped her cloak and began a dance around the pillow throne.

  The small woman was a prophetess. Such performers abounded in the Kingdom then, for they suited the chauvinistic need for Norse folklore. Sly-Eyes and Asgerd had hired a sibyl to titillate their guests. From the looks of her I knew they had paid a high price. The sibyl was dressed magnificently, a dark mantle adorned with polished stones, a gem necklace, a touchwood belt from which hung several lambskin pouches, black calfskin boots, and a lambskin hood. Her head was shaved, as was popular then among the spooky. I was enchanted, as were the partygoers. And as she danced, faster and lighter, clapping her hands while the hag banged her staff on the deck, the sibyl seemed to descend into herself. Watching her was like being drawn into a cave, or a chasm, or something misty, ashen, foreboding. It was as exhilarating as it was frightening. She danced so passionately that it did not seem a carnival act, more as if she were pleasing herself and we were being permitted to attend. She was erotic and fierce. She was magic. After all this time, recalling that dance, I confess truly, she was stupefying. If you can hear me now, Mother, you were very, very good.

  A short time later, my dogs and I sneaked up to the house and then inside the service entrance. Because the servants were also fascinated by the show on the sun deck, the kitchen was empty. We were untroubled getting into position outside the pantry door. I could hear the sibyl singing warlock songs to charm the spirits of the dead. She had a striking voice, fragile, authoritative, wounded, woeful. I concentrated on interpreting her words as best I could with what I knew of Old Norse. I supposed it was part of her act. She sang of “black seas,” and “red seas”; she sang of “islands reaching to the sun” made of “wind and blood”; she sang of “black and hurt half-men.” When she stopped, the silence was followed with moans.

  “Approach and declaim,” said a gruff-voice—the hag.

  Sly-Eyes and Asgerd asked trivial questions about love. The sibyl answered one in three in a monotone, not unpleasant, not vital. Several of the fancy boys called out vulgar requests. The hag warned them not to offend the spirits of the dead now gathered here to reveal the future. The hag also warned that it was folly to inquire of one’s own end, as the truth could be ruinous. That rocked the party. Finally, one man dared politics: “Who killed the couple at the rathskeller?” This referred to a recent crime in Vexbeggar that had been distorted into racial bigotry by the press.

  “The wretched and the righteous,” said the sibyl.

  “Was it Turks?”

  “The spirits say the men of the Great City do violence to themselves,” said the sibyl.

  “What should be done with the Turks?”

  The sibyl refused to answer. The crowd, stirred by her mystery, ventured increasingly dark inquiries. The sibyl replied to a few, always with foreboding imagery. I knew that none understood her learning. They had missed her reference to the “Great City,” which was what the ancient Rus (Norse peoples, for whom Russia was named) called modern Istanbul. I surmised that the sibyl was something more than a trickster. I did not begin to believe that the spirits told her what to say. I thought her quick and clever. That she held the crowd spellbound I explained by considering the black fatalism of the Norse. I was wrong, for then Mother called to me, as casually as if I had always been hers to beckon.

  “Skallagrim Ice-Waster, son of Out-Lander, Wolfman and Rune-Carver, seek your destiny.”

  I crashed from my hiding place. I felt compelled. My dogs thought me frightened, reacted with sisterly whines. This was too much for the skittish in the crowd, who thought Goldberg’s squeal was an angry spirit of the dead. There were screams. This upset the dogs, who, because I did not calm them quickly, began the wild barking of a wolfpack. I yanked on their harness. Several guests hurtled over us. The dogs panicked. It was not the entrance I had envisioned
, stampeding over tables, sofas, screens. We trampled as we were trampled. We caused havoc, the crowd tumbling pell-mell to flee this Norse spirit come to punish his degenerate posterity. It was a wicked prank. I did like it. There had been so little silliness in my last few years, it seemed fair. I bellowed as the dogs howled. I was finally hauled to the ground as Goldberg and Iceberg went for a lake of gooey cream spilled on the sun deck. In the quiet, I measured the field. We had carried the night, and two walls with it. Sly-Eyes lay on a couch, weeping.

  “You are not what you could be, Skallagrim Ice-Waster,” said the sibyl—Mother—seated above me. I certainly did not know this was Mother; it seems contrived to refer to her otherwise.

  “I hope I didn’t ruin your fee,” I said.

  “You are my fee. Speak your face.”

  “Do you really know who I am?”

  “I know your future. This is not your future,” she said, waving her hand over the destruction. “Your father is your future. Your wolves are your future. Tell me of Skallagrim Strider.”

  “Yes, yes,” I said, charged, controlled. I was under a mother’s power, which was such a novel experience for me that I confused it with her magic. It may be true that motherhood has powers beyond the natural, and it may be true that one who experiences his own mother’s nurture discovers the extraordinary. I note here that my mood that night was visionary. It passed, and later I would fall back onto the muddy course of reason; right then I told her what I knew, and many things I did not know I knew, of a Norse outlaw whose name was spoken portentously—in passion and hope—at the moment of my conception.