The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica

by John Calvin Batchelor

  “Skallagrim Strider was a chieftain, originally from Ireland,” I began. “He was exiled from Iceland for the slaughter of his wife’s family. The legend says that he sailed to the sun with forty outlaws. The legend says that he became King of the South, where his sons still reign.”

  “No!” Mother called, leaping from her pillow throne. She was livid, as if I had bungled my education. I knew the legend of Skallagrim Strider as well as anyone. I had studied the Icelandic texts religiously in order to piece together that sorry, amazing tale. I supposed that she wanted more than bookish deduction.

  Born Grim, son of Thrain Otterson of Falconess, near the Fort of Hurdles (modern Dublin: as Peregrine once joked with me when I told him of Skallagrim Strider, this was another tale of blarney and lost opportunities, of men making a success in order to make a grand failure), he was called “Skalla,” meaning bald, because of his early loss of hair, and he was called “Strider” because of his luck (the crucial concept to the Norse, all-telling) as a navigator in the storms of the Irish Sea and English Channel.

  Skallagrim Strider was the grandson of the notorious Otter Black-Nose, whose assassination was avenged by his brother, Eyvind Fast-Sailer, who was then forced to flee Ireland for Ice land to escape vengeful factions. In time, Skallagrim Strider’s good luck attracted the King of Ireland’s greedy attention, and, getting the bad luck that goes hand in hand with the good, Skallagrim Strider was forced to flee Ireland. He too found refuge in Iceland, which was then still a young colony filled with political and fratricidal refugees from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Lapland, Normandy, and other Norse kingdoms washed by the North Sea.

  Skallagrim Strider settled with the wealthy descendants of Eyvind Fast-Sailer, by then called the Men of Red River, in western Iceland. Skallagrim Strider was adopted by Eyvind Fast-Sailer’s eldest son, Alfstan the Peacock, whose own son had been killed in a duel at twelve. At Alfstan the Peacock’s direction, Skallagrim Strider married a wealthy widow, Dotta Long-Hands, from Laxriverdale in northwestern Iceland. He soon became a bountiful farmer and serious poet, as well as continuing to enhance his reputation as a wild outlaw, going off once a year (“going viking”) in summer, after the common law assembly, the Althing, to plunder his old enemies in Ireland.

  After several years, it was revealed that Dotta Long-Hands loved another man (there were actually two contradictory saga fragments, one saying that she loved her own brother, another saying that she spurned her husband because she could not accommodate him physically in the sex act). Skallagrim Strider acted ruthlessly. He left her bed, made her a prisoner of the farm. He remained away on summer adventures for longer periods. He broadcast her infamy, boasted how he would not take another wife until Dotta Long-Hands begged his mercy. She was a bright, vindictive woman. She convinced her family to carry her back to Laxriverdale, which they did, in secret and with full knowledge of the risk.

  To avenge this humiliation, Skallagrim Strider conducted himself with cold logic. First, at the Althing, he demanded huge reparations in gold from Dotta Long-Hands’ family, knowing they would not and could not oblige him. With the false pretense of not being able to obtain justice peacefully, Skallagrim Strider then led his forty best men to Laxriverdale one spring and murdered Dotta Long-Hands and her entire family, more than four-score people. He also killed the livestock, burned the fields, poisoned the wells. Even for a Viking raid it was a ghastly act of vengeance.

  The lawgivers at the Althing, pressed by an outraged Christian faction, ruled that Skallagrim Strider and his men be banished forever, forfeiting all their lands and claims.

  One account, another saga fragment, indicates that Skallagrim Strider and his best men took to their best longship, a “wave-cutter,” and sailed to a small settlement in eastern Greenland, which they were soon forced to leave because of more mischief with a prominent settler’s wife. They then sailed southwest to the fledgling settlement of Vinland (somewhere on the North American continent), where they lived for many years, peacefully if disconsolately, among the Skralings, or wretches, who were actually the North American Indians. Growing infirm and melancholy, Skallagrim Strider and his remnant took to their wave-cutter one last time and sailed south, to the sun, where the Skneling legends had told them that there were calm seas and rich lands and warmth for their old bodies. Skallagrim Strider thus disappeared from the sagas.

  There is a map fragment, however, from a sultan’s library in Istanbul, that dates from Byzantium and the Great City. It was signed “Men of Red River.” How it came to Istanbul cannot be known with certainty, though it is possible that Islamic traders from as far east as the Philippine Islands and as far south as Madagascar could have carried it to the Great City to trade with the wealthy court scholars. The map fragment shows a sailing course from “Vinland” into the “Sea of Sun.” The course touches on “Sandland” and “Boneland” and “Serpentland.” It ends in what is called “Nightland,” which is also called, in a rune poem at the edge of the map fragment, “the wall of blizzards and behemoths.” Of course, without longitude or latitude markings (since the Norse sailed dead reckoning, perhaps assisted by noontime and North Star sightings), the map’s geography is not truly decipherable.

  The poem on the edge of the fragment, however, introduces a whole new concept to the saga—the hint of an apotheosis. The poem seems to say that the legend of Skallagrim Strider and the Men of Red River ended in the south, where Skallagrim Strider was crowned the King of the South by the animals living there. His children were said to be half man and half beast.

  I recited the tale slowly to Mother. I finished, “And his sons still reign there.”

  “No! No!” called Mother again. She grabbed the staff from the hag (who was Astra, Mother’s mentor) and raised it over my head. With a grunt, she dropped it on me. I was knocked sideways. I rolled over, sat up, the room spinning. Mother clubbed me again. I fended it off the third time, grabbed the staff from her hands, and flung it off the deck.

  “His sons do not rule there! You are his only heir!” called Mother. My dogs growled at her. She hissed at them. Mother was the only living thing who ever cowed my dogs. They hid behind me. I recall being frightened of her powers just then, for the first and not the last time.

  “This is my prophecy,” she continued. “You shall rule the South as king. Flee the fire. Seek the ice. You are Ice-Waster. Follow the counsel of Skallagrim Strider. He will guide you. Listen to him. Follow your heart. Listen to it. It will protect you. The black and hurt half-men of the wall of blizzards and behemoths await your coming, Wolfman and Rune-Carver. And hurry, hurry, hurry!”

  I pleaded for more intelligibility. I felt her words, but could not accept them.

  “I am Lamba, called Time-Thief. The spirits of the exiled and unavenged have told me your future. Heed the hardest heart. Trust the fisher-of-men. Your destiny is with the cold and the cruel.”

  I was uncomfortable now, probably angry. She was pushing me too far and too fast. I stiffened. I scowled. I flaunted my defiance. I think now she might have been trying to protect me from the truth, which she could see and which was then too unacceptable to say aloud. She was wrong to protect me from the truth, even if it was the worst imaginable. I forgive her that; it might have been mother-love, a sad bargain, a bad bargain, part of her fate to have given birth to an heir of magic, wonder, crime. I suppose that she realized then that I was about to reject her completely, for she paused. She stepped back. Astra covered Mother with her robe. The two stood to the side, chatting in Old Norse, too quietly for me to hear. Mother turned back to me to whisper, “This is what I can tell you. You are not yet what you could be, Skallagrim Ice-Waster. Remember that if you fail, it was fated and is no fault of yours. Remember that all things are not set. You are loved. As long as you are loved, you are safe from shame. Also, you are lucky.”

  Mother danced away. I was dumbfounded. I wanted more. And yet I did not want more. It is no easy thing to demand to know the future, one’s own destiny. I sho
ok my head—it was too much for me. I got to my feet. Mother and Astra vanished into the shadows. I did not pursue. I kicked rubbish and cursed the night, the sky above me, black and star-packed. I barked at my dogs to follow me. They whimpered, joined just then by another female whom I had forgotten in my temper.

  “Oh, Grim baby,” said Sly-Eyes, moving across the room, weeping, acting, manipulating. “What am I to tell Mother?”

  “I wouldn’t know about mothers,” I said, turning my passion on her, forcing my advantage, warrior claiming his bride of mischief. Sly-Eyes responded in kind, and it was easy to dismiss for the rest of that night, and for many self-indulgent nights afterward, that my future was said not to be there in silk and woman’s heat, was instead somewhere far beyond the constellations of the northern sky, on the track of a thousand-year-dead outlaw, at the end of which I would come to rule the cold and the cruel.

  The Fire

  I DID nothing about what Mother foretold. I did have wild dreams, of herds of animals, of immense blue pools covered with sunbursts. There were also feelings of loss, or irreparable damage, and, contradictorily, a sense of swirling adventure. I was not a player in these phantasms, more an observer, or most accurately: a listener to descriptions of vivid events. This passive role—listener—was based on what I knew of Norse lore, in which the spirits of the restless and unavenged dead are said to whisper to the living in their sleep. There were indeed aspects of the images that made me think the scenes were of long ago. I thought them like pictures I had seen of Iceland, those volcanic ridges cut by glaciers and washed by ashen clouds. That was not Iceland. I pushed all this aside at the time. It was not that different from the rich, boyish fantasy life I played out in my daydreams. I was very young and very easily persuaded. I told myself that the sibyl’s prophecy had engaged my yearning for such experiences. I certainly never saw fire in those dreams, and this must mean that the only born child of a sibyl inherits nothing practical of her gift. The first I considered fire as a foe was with Israel’s letter at summer’s end.

  “They outdid themselves last night,” he wrote, referring to the Loyalist League for Swedish Homelife. “Me, Guy, and Earle hiked up along the canal after curfew, across from gooktown. We couldn’t believe those sad little creatures on the other side were human. Whole families were huddled along the canal bank. Guy figures they are the ones who keep moving all day to avoid the roundups. We were walking up toward the smoke when we heard these insane screams. Some of those poor bastards take their own dogs and hang them and set them on fire. Guy says it’s because they think the screams will scare away evil spirits. Behind the dogs an entire block was on fire, a real monster. Within half an hour, sparks lit up the shacks along the canal. It was one of the so-called safe fires, since it couldn’t jump the canal. But there were firemen on our side in case a gust launched some cinders. There were Loyalist lackies, too, passing out handbills that said the fires were a ‘blessing’ because they ‘rid the city of filth and infestation.’ Guy read it to me, and when he saw my face, he got so angry he made a move on the Loyalist. Earle kept him in control but not by much. I can’t let this upset me again. You should know that bit about ‘filth and infestation’ is what the Nazis said about us chosen people.

  “We got home about dawn. We figured we’d seen forty tenements go in three hours. I was too upset to sleep, so I went down for the paper. There was talk at the shop of a Loyalist rally later that morning. They wouldn’t tell me details, but I got that some of the boys were planning to hijack the van transferring the suspected arsonists, all gooks, from the north of the city to the prison island. They kept talking ‘Norse justice.’ I did what could have been a stupid thing on the way out. I asked them what century it was, since I’d lost my watch in the swamp. They didn’t get it.” Israel continued in this exhausted tone. I was so drained that I had to read the last paragraph three times before I understood he was telling me a secret, in a colloquial code of sorts, in case the King’s Spies were reading Thord’s outgoing mail.

  “And take special care with your rehabilitation of her. The surf is up that time of year. We don’t want any sickly passengers to catch their death. Get plenty of sleep yourself. Be good to strangers with long legs. Peace and Love, I.”

  I puzzled out that this could only be referring to a rescue of Peregrine with our ketch from the King’s prison island. I raced from the post office, down the harbor walk and over the fences into shantytown. I was on the boat immediately, measuring, inspecting, estimating. She was in bad shape, without serviceable engines, with rotting bulkhead and mainmast, with tattered lines and sails. I might have given up if I had been anything but a dreamer. She was still afloat, I told myself, and with hard work, a fair wind, abundance of luck, she could make Stockholm harbor, and from there, perhaps cross the Baltic to Poland. There was a new rebellion there, and anything was possible for homeless outlaws in a land turned from extremism to anarchy.

  Over the next few weeks Israel’s letters continued to encourage me, with cryptic asides and buoyant double-talk. I invested the money Israel sent me in ill-fitting sails, in used lines, in a new boom for the mainsail. I used my savings as well, abandoning my longtime fantasy to steal up to Stockholm, bribe my way in to Father, and, if he agreed, to save him from his pain by killing him.

  I do not hesitate to confess this, because the question remains if it might not have spared Peregrine and so many more of my loved ones—all of them—of far worse than whatever I would have had to endure as a father-murderer. I was too young, too angry, too romantic, and in that state life seems easy because it seems clear-cut. Could I have put a knife in my father’s heart? Could Peregrine have found the strength to resist suicide so offered? There is no end to this speculation; I defer. Yes, I imagined Peregrine’s death; yes, I imagined my release from his crime.

  The possibility of Peregrine’s rescue gave me great joy. It seemed a gift. I worked tirelessly. Yet there was never enough time for what had to be done. Fate was not patient. September in Vexbeggar ended with labor troubles at the casinos and hotels. Soon there were pickets, scabs, thuggery, and strike committees. The news from the rest of the coast was more of the same turmoil. The government overreacted and stationed troops near Vexbeggar. There was a crucifixion of a striker in one of the inland villages. The strikers, who were mostly foreign workers, formed a secret militia. There was strutting and cruelty on both sides. I watched it from afar, hearing stories from my neighbors in shantytown. We all sensed something bad coming. By All Saint’s Eve, which the Lutheran Norse ignored but which the mostly Roman Catholic alien population celebrated with processions, Vexbeggar was prepared for the worst.

  I was just returning from a trial run on the ketch. I had a volunteer crew of Dede Gone, a now unemployed dishwasher and militant striker, and his three younger brothers: Wild Drumrul, Little Dede Gone, and Kazur Gone, called Goggle-Eye for his wandering left eye. They were gritty Turks from Cyprus via a Greek labor camp and an American intervention in a massacre on Rhodes. They had grown up in fishing villages ignorant of the industrial age. This meant they were superb inland-sea sailors. They taught me how to navigate a leaky, sluggish ketch with bad sails and a useless motor. How pathetic my ambition seems now. Yet, filled with boyish hope, I aimed for glory.

  Dede Gone spied smoke as we wore around the shoals. We heard the alarms as we tied up below my shack. The one-legged fisherman, Gino, who survived in a tent at the end of the pier, called to us that there was rioting in town. Dede Gone started off immediately to join his strike committee. I called to him that he was no good to us as another martyred soldier of Islam. He stopped to wave. Wild Drumrul, then fifteen, understood his brother’s risk and asked him not to go. Dede Gone ordered him to stay with me. He called to me in English, “Love my brothers like your brothers.”

  The fire started near the school. Soon enough, the flames spread along the edge of shantytown toward the well. The smoke thickened with the nightfall. The boys and I, with Goldberg, Iceberg, and the
three of their male pups that I had kept, climbed atop my shack to watch. We could see the burned-out in flight. It pleased me to see one of the large hotels catch fire. Wild Drumrul prayed, “Fire, be cool to my brother, and keep him safe.”

  We heard sirens, roars, and gunfire soon after, which signaled the assertion of martial law and order. The first refugee column started south. We discussed Dede Gone in sad voices—they had no Swedish or English, I no sensible Turk, so we communicated in poor German. The three brothers looked so forlorn there, skinny and shaking with grief, that I considered something rash. I might have done it if not for a great surprise. A covered carriage just then emerged from shantytown. It paused at the camp entrance, then swung around quickly to bear down, six run-to-ground horses afore, three men and a driver atop, on my shack.

  One man leaped down before the carriage stopped rolling. He was medium-sized, with tight, copper skin and wire-like reddish hair; he was dressed in common, nondescript clothes, but his steel-frame eyeglasses made him appear an arch intellectual. He jumped to my door and pounded, calling in American English, “Grim Fiddle! We have messages from friends!”

  I called, “Get back!”

  I had my dogs snarl. He dropped his hands, stepped back defensively to the window of the carriage. I noticed the door of the carriage was ornamented with a coat of arms—an aristocrat’s coach. I would learn that it had been stolen by some of Thord’s colleagues, and had been provided at the roadblock north of Vexbeggar. It had served to convince the troops that its passengers belonged in the area.

  Another man swung down to confer with the first man. This one was large, all black, with long dreadlocks and a full beard. A cloaked female figure then appeared from the coach, tall, nimble, and with an aggressive bearing. She slapped the carriage door shut, looked up toward me, shielded her eyes from the drifting smoke, and called in sharp American English, “Come down, Grim Fiddle. We come direct from Israel Elfers and Thord Horshead.” I had the Turks stay hidden in the attic with the pups. I went down with Goldberg and Iceberg. I lit the lamp and let them in, first the copper, then the black, finally the woman. The driver stayed atop the carriage, being watched by a third man, a squat, South American type with an automatic firearm cradled in his arms. The woman strode up to me and stood with an ostentatious curiosity. I recognized the swanlike neck immediately, even though she was older now, full grown and unqualified—broad shoulders, short waist, very long legs, with black, rich hair.