He looked into my eyes and saw my half-truth. That face, it tightened to stone. “What know ye of my sons?” continued Elephant Frazer. I replied the full truth, fast and certain, then I started to beg forgiveness. He turned away, told the sergeant to get us out.
“No!” I kicked at the sergeant, shouting at Elephant Frazer. “I lost my friends and boat in that raid. I was wrong to lie, and I’m sorry for it. It kept us alive. We did help Germanicus, and might have saved a boy’s life. Germanicus said if my friends were alive, they’d come here. I have to find them. I need a boat, to get back to my family on Mead’s Kiss.”
“Yerr family?” said Elephant Frazer, spinning back to me. “Don’t we each have families? What’s yerrs to me? What’s mine to ye? A thousand families out there I can name, three times that I never knew. What help, what boat, when the Patties come?”
“It’s all I have, sir, please?” I said.
“Get on! Beggar’s fate we’ve not shot ye!”
“Germanicus Frazer told me to thank God I got here, and to help them that need it. I need your help.”
Elephant Frazer relaxed at that. I would learn later that I had quoted him to himself. “God’s truth about the parson? Him praying and the beasties let ye be?” I said it was. “And was it ye said we Volunteers no better than Patties?”
“I said it,” said Lazarus.
“Ye’re no Pattie,” said Elephant Frazer.
“I’m an American citizen,” said Lazarus.
“Ye’re a beasde or ye’re a Volunteer, laddie. What ye said, tell Frazer it ain’t so.”
“You are willing to murder men because they’re brownskinned, and those beasties because they’re hungry. You make them beasts. It’s true, and there’s nothing you can do to me that will change that.”
I liked Lazarus Furore then; I loved him for his words, and especially because he did not care to defend himself. He could be a braggart; he was also daring, and if one listened closely, he meant what he said. I liked Elephant Frazer then also. He too did not defend himself. They challenged each other with bitter silence. Neither relented. Elephant Frazer said, “I can’t hate you, lad,” then he faced me. “Germanicus made ye Volunteers, that’s what keeps ye alive, not me, not yerr talk. If ye find yerr friends, I won’t help ye more than this. Ye’re Volunteers till we’re done, then it’s every man, every family, for it. If ye run before, we’ll shoot ye as beasties. Get on! Ye’re in the fire detail. And if ye see the parson, tell him keep singing till kingdom come.”
We dug out charcoal-like corpses for two brutal weeks—burned hands, bad backs, soot so thick we tasted it and not the rations. Iceberg distinguished us because she was expert at smelling the living from the dead. One of those living, whom we found under a collapsed building, was Christmas Muir, a sealer; he had come to the Falklands to help his brother’s family, had lost his brother to the Patties and the widow and two boys to a fireball. We did not find Black Crane, or a way back to Angel of Death. We had gained the fortress to lose freedom.
I cannot recall if the cholera broke out before the Patties launched their final drive, or if the crush of beasties fleeing before the Pattie scourge brought the cholera, or if it all happened at once. Christmas Muir, who said he could tell an ill wind from a fatal one, said the verdict on Port Stanley was set. Cholera is a middling dying, not as terrifying as the plague that kills like fire, not as slow as scurvy with the cure so simple but impossible at sea or on the ice. Nonetheless, cholera is a finish. People collapse, cannot eat, excrete so it seems their insides are running out, then melt with fever. I came to appreciate why the fear of it had paralyzed and then dismantled the British Commonwealth, contributing to the abandonment of the Falkland Dependencies. There is a vaccine, and we loyalists had it; it is a temporary clemency, and fixed a timetable for the loyalists to quit Port Stanley before the cholera did the work the Patties might not have been able to do before winter.
The evacuation began with several ships out in convoy every night, risking the blockade to run southeast eight hundred miles to South Georgia. The command drew in the defenders as the port burned and emptied. The Patties must have suffered the cholera as well, because their attacks were haphazard. The fall winds brought hail, huge seas, thick black clouds hurtling from the west. And then there were the seaquakes that rumbled increasingly beneath us, which we learned from Christmas Muir were the result of enormous volcanic eruptions way to the south, beyond the Scotia Sea, on the peninsula of Antarctica and off Antarctica’s shore on the South Shetland Islands. I record here the first I ever heard of Satan’s Seat.
“Poachin’ off Coronation isle, I was, that first summer she let go,” said Christmas Muir one night in the shelter, “and ’twere fearsome, sealer’s fate. Bergy bits spun like tops and sea shakes, this ice island to beam crumbled up, like cake. We was in the backwash of this shock wave. We got to lee of shag rock, quick, tell ye, fer that tidal wave picked up floes and flung ’em. Ice down there be black now, sort of kicked up, carved in twists. It’s meltin’ the ice, on Graham Land. That’s how’d they called it. Satan’s Seat. Big as Hell; hot, ye can fix on that. I never seen it, don’t wish it. South Orkney’s close as I been, and that ain’t the same since the shakin’ started. Makes the whales and seals easy, I admit, kind of stunned, don’t run on ye. The black ice islands are fearsome, pieces of Hell ten miles long. Satan’s Seat.”
Otter Ransom listened to my translation, then said he had seen a volcano on Spitzbergen in the 1980s and that though it had closed down the mines and scared the Russians badly, it had not affected the glacier. He supposed that if Satan’s Seat was hot enough to melt ice, it must be part of a chain of eruptions.
“Might be,” said Christmas Muir, grinning, “lot of wee demon seats, a union meetin’ in Hell!” We thought this an excellent jest, which pleased Christmas Muir, a grimy little man, forty years alive and thirty of that a sealer. He liked us because we had saved his life and because the other Volunteers treated him like an outsider too, since he had quit fighting after cutting his brother off a wheel. He liked to spellbind us with sealer talk—broad, imaginary, ten times more than truth—and continued the same next morning about Satan’s Seat.
“The worst of it be this. I didn’t see it myself, heard it, ye take it as sealer’s truth. There’s black fumes gushin’ out of Satan’s Seat, they say, and when the winds—them winds ain’t like this here, them be winds!—get it right, that ice blowin’ off the plateau like white fire, then that black cloud above Satan’s Seat takes shape of a giant figure. Hard to say what. Mate of mine, Norwegian salt, said he seen a man’s face with whiskers, wearin’ iron, same’s them sorts talk of their old god Odin. Odin? He was pretty-headed like that, my mate, couldn’t trust him. Others said they saw what they wanted. Mark me, more than some said they saw a face. What I favored fer myself was them that said they seen a ram’s head. Blunt snout, big horns curled back. There’s more. At night—and night down there be dark, matey, long and dark, six months long and dark, what makes a man sad and filled up with memories, that long and dark night—then that face of that giant black ram glows. He lights up when the sea shakes and the ice islands crack apart—bang! bang!—and the birds filthy with ash scatter off the floes. Big albatross all black and stunned, sink fer swimmin’! That black giant ram’s face glows. They say that face has a smile to it. Get that, he’s happy. I’m no good Christian. No time. I don’t favor it still. What’s damned funny to the Divil?”
The last two weeks at Port Stanley are a single dark episode for me. The attack the first week was from the west, the Patties sending armed beasties at our forward redoubts. The command withdrew us to an inner perimeter, anchored by a shore battery north of the inlet on the cliff’s plateau, two concrete wharves seaward protecting a thin rocky beach on the Atlantic, and the stone-built Presbyterian church guarding the quay road. The Falkland Irregulars formed a rescue team to bring in those cut off in the hills to the south; none came back. The second week began with the Patties m
aking an amphibious landing across from the northern scissor blade of the inlet, cutting off the Volunteers holding the headquarters caves over the harbor. The Patties established fireposts on our abandoned redoubts. We traded nuisance fire the next day, watched as the Patties put up wheels with Volunteers and Irregulars lashed and alive above the jetty at the mouth of the harbor. We three, with Christmas Muir, had been relieved from the fire detail. We were armed and assigned to the graveyard of the Presbyterian church, its high wall topped by jagged glass. Rumors said that Elephant Frazer, the new commander-inchief with the other senior officers dead or wounded in the caves, had rejected a demand to surrender. There was also word that Volunteers were straggling in, that one of the Frazer sons had arrived by boat at the south point of the inlet.
An Irregular officer came at supper to tell us Port Stanley was done. It was our choice to stay or to evacuate in longboats. The six Irregulars chose to fight, took their rations and went back to the wall. We Volunteers counted off by fours, signifying how we would be withdrawn: Otter Ransom and Lazarus counted 2; Christmas Muir and I counted 3.
I do not recall any untoward feelings inside me that night as we waited for a mass attack that did not come. I was hungry, very frightened of dying, very tired, curious if it had been Germanicus or Samson Frazer who had come in. I did think much of how Grandfather would have judged my conduct during my weeks among the Volunteers. I prayed while I huddled from the wind and the rain. I am certain I felt no vengeance, had no more need of killing my enemy than I did of quitting.
The big storm that started during the night slowed the Pattie attack and our retreat the next day. The Atlantic tossed up angrily, belittling any violence we men might do. The number 1’s left us, and early in the afternoon the number 2’s were called. We three did not talk at our parting—Otter Ransom did smile, Lazarus kept his head down. I sat by Christmas Muir, with Iceberg between us, and watched them run for it. Word came to us at the Presbyterian church soon after that the evacuees were pinned down on the embarkation beach more by nature than by the murderous volleys off the mountainside. Elephant Frazer nearly lost control of the Volunteers then—there could not have been two hundred of us left—because the notion of starting an eight hundred-mile voyage in an open boat in such a storm was hardly less frightening than facing the Pattie wheels. Some volunteers did come back to the church. We heard that one was shot for mutiny.
Christmas Muir and I were called at twilight. We dodged sniper fire over the open ground, our way marked by corpses to the crescent-shaped embarkation beach on the Atlantic, east of the settlement. We found Volunteers pressed so close to the cliff face along the shore that they seemed part of the rock, the surf crashing up almost to cover them. There were pools of burning gasoline from the Pattie fireballs floating on the wave crests, and with each new rush of the sea the flames threatened to scorch the men. Out to the left, I could see the evacuation boats being brought up one at a time around the point, risking the Pattie bombardments from the west.
I got down on the beach and was assigned a place in line. I boosted Iceberg up on my shoulders to keep her from the surf. It was then—turning and twisting away from the cold water—that I spied Black Crane. They were bringing her about the far wharf and into the breakers toward the beach. She was manned by Volunteers, no sign of Orlando the Black or the Turks. I pointed her out to Christmas Muir. “It’s my boat!” I screamed.
Christmas Muir looked quickly, said, “Don’t, matey. Stay in line, stay in line. Don’t, it’s mutiny if you go out there.”
I would not control myself. I dropped Iceberg and we ran for Black Crane, out of turn, against all discipline. Just as suddenly, Orlando the Black and Lazarus emerged out of the cliff face ahead of me; they waved and pointed at me. We all were shoved back against the cliff by a wave, and when the sea drew back to expose beach to run on, I struggled again toward Black Crane. Orlando the Black boomed, “Go back. No!” I waded through the water near him. He and Lazarus wrestled me against the rock as a new wave poured upon us. They started to laugh with relief at reunion, but their joy disappeared when they realized my intention.
I said, “I have to get to her. It’s my boat!”
Orlando the Black pleaded, “Germanicus Frazer brought us back, Grim! Don’t do it! Wait your turn! We’re together! Little Dede Gone is dead with fever. But Germanicus Frazer saved me and Wild Drumrul! He’ll kill you if you try it! It’s their boat now!”’
I pushed him aside as the surf took us again. Lazarus tried to hold me, could not, cried, “Think, Grim, it’s no use! It won’t help them now. They’re gone!”
“Grandfather wouldn’t quit me!” I replied. “Never!” I got clear of them and ran before the surf pounded up again, thinking not of my peril as a mutineer, nor of my debt to Germanicus for rescuing Orlando the Black and Wild Drumrul, thinking only of Black Crane and what she represented—my family. I had no plan. I wanted her. Orlando the Black and Lazarus pursued me. And up ahead, coming down the beach to intercept me, were Germanicus and Motherwell.
I got into the water. Germanicus had his pistol out, shouted, Grim Fiddle, don t make me! I order you to get back!”
All their imploring was then drowned out by a new barrage of fireballs that walked across the water toward the beach. Iceberg nipped at my leg. I fought the waves with my being. I saw Black Crane before me, twenty yards, less; I did not see the Volunteers m her at the helm and oars. Rather, I beheld a vision: I saw Peregrine and Israel and Cleopatra; I saw Grandfather standing up and pointing at me. I saw him thunder, “Damn all men who have eyes and ears and hearts but will not see and hear and turn to understand Lord God’s judgment on the sins of the unbelievers!”
I stopped. I turned. I heard Germanicus cry, “Divil take ye!” I saw Orlando the Black throw out his arms in a dive. Iceberg took me down by the neck into a breaker. A fireball plunged directly atop Black Crane.
I remember coming up, choking, watching Black Crane yanked out of the water in two pieces and flung in fragments toward the cliffs. I remember the blast of heat. I remember bodies floating in the surf. I remember Germanicus and Motherwell hauling me out of the burning water. I remember Christmas Muir declaring that I was no mutineer, that I was trying to save the boat, that the “copper head” was badly hurt, that the “nig” was cut up, and the wolf was broken. I remember Wild Drumrul squatting over me, saying, “Fire, be cool to my brother.” I remember feeling my face hot and tight, my beard gone, same for my hair, and a tear on my throat that I could put a finger into. I remember Germanicus telling me he would have shot me. And I remember telling him, “There is no God of Love. It is a lie. No God who loves would do this, make us fight and die because we want to get home. Take everything from us. Abandon us. Kill us. There is no God of Love. Peregrine fought his whole life, just to get home. God broke him, left him to sin and die alone. Sent Charity Bentham to torment him, then took her from him, took what little he had of his own. And when we tried to help him, it made it worse. Peregrine and Israel and Guy and Earle are left to die. Killed by what? There is no God of Love. God is a monster. He’s a God of Hate. I denounce him as no better than Satan, whom he sent down from heaven for pride. What a lie! What is more arrogant than to dangle Charity before Peregrine, to dangle Black Crane before us, then to take it back? It is cruel and hateful and senseless. It is pride and stupidity. I hate Lord God. That is what he understands. Hate and murder and torture. I hate him!”
After that, Grim Fiddle does not remember. There was a black fantasy, a gruesome nightmare, and I was the face inside it, but I cannot recall it keenly enough to record it here. I write flatly that I do not remember what I did. It is a darkness for me. I have been told my conduct. I can record that. I refused evacuation as wounded. I took a weapon and returned to the Presbyterian church. I murdered beasties all night, took one of the heavy automatic weapons and held the graveyard. I led the Irregulars against a firepost and murdered Patties and beasties with my hands.
No one told me how I g
ot from the Presbyterian church to the last barricades on the concrete wharves the next day, because none of the men I fought with in that graveyard survived to tell. I was said to have cursed any man who told me to fall back. I swung at Longfaeroe when he tried to sing psalms over my foul words at the enemy, the sea, at the “God of Hate.” When the last boat was ready and Germanicus begged me to follow him, it was said I grabbed ordnance and charged the quay road again, alone. Germanicus and Motherwell pursued me. We were cut off by beasties. I charged their position, which by accident took me back to the wharves. It was said that I desecrated the corpses with a knife, that Germanicus shot me with a pistol to stop me. I was said to have torn at the dead and dying. I was said to have eaten the dead. Motherwell and half a dozen others finally clubbed me down by trickery after I turned on the Volunteers. They thought me dead, and the reason I was taken off East Falkland was that Germanicus would not leave what he thought was my corpse for the Pattie wheels. And it was said that Longfaeroe prayed over my body in the longboat as we cleared the breakers, asking his Jehovah to forgive me for “the blackest words ever said, a serpent’s mouth.”
The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica Page 20