All this I learned much later, and incompletely; there are some things done by me there that no one would ever tell me. It is not for me now to declare what was true, what was sealer’s talk. It is for me to declare that the w eight of my shameful, wicked conduct was something I bore hard in the years of remorse that followed.
I became afraid of myself. I came to understand that there was a part of me that was fury without sense of proportion or limits. At Port Stanley’s finish, I learned that I was that most reviled of men by Christian Norse, that most revered of men by pagan Norse, a shape-changer. In this peculiar way, Mother’s magic had passed to me. I cannot now say how much of my nature was also derived from the anger in Peregrine that was revealed when he murdered Cesare Furore, nor how much was the cruelty in Grandfather that was revealed when he vouchsafed the razing of the North. I now declare this; Grim Fiddle met abandonment with pitiless abandon. The simple truth was that Grim Fiddle was no simple Christian soul. In battle, in deepest distress, in exile without hope, Grim Fiddle was cursed with the strength of a dozen dozen men, with the relentlessness and ravenousness of a wolfpack, with the fact that he cannot be killed by ordinary and mortal means. Grim Fiddle was a berserker. I am a berserker.
CHAPTER THE THIRD
THE KINGDOM
OF ICE
Shepherds and Their Calls and Mine
THE God of Love is fine talk. I was not rational when I denied him at Port Stanley. It is a rational theme. I feel compelled here to respond to the Grim Fiddle who boasted of, as he cursed, a “God of Hate.” Pagan Grim Fiddle welled up to drown out Christian Grim Fiddle, had to lie to cover his shame for doubt and murder. I feel that shame now for what he—I—said and must show that I understand now that the dark was in my mouth, I was wrong, wrong.
The God of Love is the Christian God. He was Jesus’ Father. As I read the Fiddle Bible, Jesus spoke of a Father who provided in famine, weakness, doubt, who welcomed the repentant and especially the meek into the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus’ Father was kind, patient, fair-minded, sweet, forgiving. He negotiated more than he judged. He loved his children so much that he permitted a profoundly costly deal, that the unjust should arrest his son, persecute him, execute him, so that by this example, and by believing in the wisdom of Jesus, the mortal son of a loving father, the children of the earth could come to revelation and redemption. This is a sublime tale, full of tricks and mysteries, which have been made that much more confounding by later apologists whose motives seem to me suspect—creeds for power, heresy trials for aggrandizement, orthodoxy for contrived unanimity. I cannot comprehend much of Christian theology because of sloth of mind and ill education. The idea of the Holy Trinity eludes me. What I do get from Jesus’ story is joy, for as Molly once told me, “the good guys win, sort of.” It is wonderful to consider that into the breach the God of Love sent his son to save not the strong but the weak, not the pious but the most impious. It is also grand to think that Jesus scoffed at the notion of his being a warlord king, took a crown of thorns rather than of gold, and suffered his humiliation without thought of vengeance. He was a brave man; his courage was forgiveness. I also find in the Gospel tale a nagging tableau: that somehow, through hunger or lust or doubt (the very temptations that Jesus took courage against in the wilderness), God’s children had fallen from the salvation they enjoyed by the grace of God, who brought them out of Egypt and into the promised land of milk and honey, and that it was required for the God of Love to sacrifice a human being to preserve and advance his plan. What nags at me is this: What happens once, reign to ruin, happens easier and worse when it occurs again—fall, salvation, exodus, fall.
Why have I opened this? I do not mean this question rhetorically. I demand it of myself. I know I say that my blasphemy at Port Stanley obliges me to demonstrate my reading and understanding of the God of Love, the true God, who was Jesus’ Father. I sense now there is more to my introduction. I feel arrested in my narrative by a presentiment of something sinister that has haunted me many years. I feel I am compelled here to declare my understanding of Jesus in order to show that I am certain that Grim Fiddle was not a savior.
This declaration reaches ahead again, too far ahead to make sense of my frustration here. I must first relate my six years on South Georgia before I can begin to speak of the lost and the saved. Nevertheless I am crushed with a need to interrupt the continuity in my story to pronounce that I know Grim Fiddle’s God of Hate was a lie, that I know that the talk of Grim Fiddle as a savior was a lie. When they talked of me at my trial as a Jesus-like champion of the fallen, lost, exiled, unrepentant, they talked self-serving distortion and the politics of falsehood.
What trial? I realize I hint at matters that I have not prepared. This bewilders me. I must be deeply upset by the recounting of the loss of Black Crane, of the abandonment of Angel of Death, and of my darkness. I must wait, and specify, and explore the meaning of the events of my life, before I can speak of my trial. Let it be sufficient here to say that certain men who did not know me, who were from the enemy camp, who said they were speaking in my defense, whom I cannot know whereof, they made much of my so-called virgin birth, my so-called invasion of a temple, my so-called assembly of disciples at Anvers Island. What distortions and nonsense they heaped, and for their own purposes, not in my defense at all, sneakily confusing the dark story of Grim Fiddle—bastard, fugitive, warlord—with the compassionate story of Jesus, son of the God of Love, disputatious preacher, king of the meek. Those distorters used a timeworn trick that has been used by many apologists for many outlaws who have fallen to crime, yet then enjoyed undue reward in myth as revolutionary heroes. I shall not give those odd-tongues any more weight by speaking of the ruin caused by all those false messiahs. My trial was the same sort of falsehood. When I get to it, it will be clear that my time at Anvers Island was no saving work, was the vengeance of a furious, criminal, fallen, pagan fool. I have already recorded enough to give the lie to those first two twisted claims. I have confessed the facts of Grim Fiddle to bury what could have become another deceptive myth—Grim Fiddle was like Jesus. I write no, completely no. Lamba was a virgin; mine was not virgin birth; there was blood. My father was not a spirit, was Peregrine Ide, in a telephone booth, a weepy, drunken, angry man. I did get inside a king’s palace at seventeen, not grandly and righteously, rather as a servant’s servant, and not to dispute men and women of worldly learning, rather to aid my family. I shall not pursue this further. I am probably overdoing. I do have a foreboding of what the politics of falsehood might have done with the lie that Grim was messiah of the abandoned on the ice. It has been such a long time, lies can seem as fertile as truth, bring forth rotten harvest certainly—food for glib men with bad motives regardless. I cannot know what that sort might have done, have done, after my trial and imprisonment, and I cannot get this confession out to show they were false witnesses. It likely came to nothing. I deserve, infamy deserves, forgetting. I read the stories of the infamous in the Fiddle Bible however, and there seem other ends: what they did was long-remembered in poetic lamentations. No more of this. I have been foundered by the rage and loss at Port Stanley. I have drifted from my time line. I have grasped at woe, shall now withdraw my hand, let it pass, for fear that contrived worry might become self-fulfilling. There is magic in the world; the bad magic can work like that. I am nagged by so many voices, all dead, all urgent and worthy, that I shall take my own advice and keep going. I stress, though it seems pretension, necessary only because in my Norse way I see the worst possible as most probable, that I am a man, my Hielistos at Anvers were human, we erred and failed and came to ruin as prideful fools, as victims who fell to crime, as false disciples of false gods, as wretches elected by no one for nothing but murder.
On South Georgia, for six years, there was a more immediately troubling distortion for me than the much later savior talk. It was said that I was a new David. Longfaeroe said it. Longfaeroe claimed that I was a new David for his flock on South Georgia and for
those lost to the Patties on the Falklands. Longfaeroe would visit me, as my pastor, in my shepherd’s hut high in the wind-gouged pastures above the main settlement on Cumberland Bay. There I had been settled by the Frazers, who took pity on poor, mad, orphaned Grim Fiddle. Longfaeroe would come up to me, would sing psalms to me, would tell me that he knew me, had known me when I crawled from beneath the cart to his side during the massacre on East Falkland’s heath, had known me when he watched me fight the Patties and beasties, and that what he knew was that I was sent by Jehovah to him as a “wee David.” Longfaeroe meant David the Hebrew, youngest son of Jesse of Bethlehem, who was called to King Saul as a harpist, who rose, by bravura and luck, to become himself King of Israel and Judah. Longfaeroe’s prodigy requires brief explanation of the Reverend Learned Sharon Longfaeroe. He was born in the Highlands of Scotland, brought up in the Wee Kirk of Scotland, a literal-minded group of Calvinists, also hard-minded, high-minded, vigilant, hungry for inspiration. He was the youngest son of a sergeant major, eventually killed in an imperial debacle in Egypt, and of an orphaned Jewess raised by nuns in Palestine, where she converted to Christianity and where she married the sergeant major. She was a second wife, produced a second family as soon as she removed to the sergeant major’s mother in Scotland. Longfaeroe’s upbringing was as confession-laden as mine. As the “bairn” of an intractable clan and an independent Jewess, Longfaeroe made his way by contrary trial and error to university, where he took a degree in divinity. He would have needed high learning to sort out the feuding between his mother and grandmother. After, he answered a call not unlike his father’s, to be a soldier, this time for Christ. As a missionary of the Wee Kirk, he endured refugee camps in Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia until he was invalided back to Scotland with malaria and what he said was “coldness of soul.” He had married in the Middle East, a beauty, an Armenian Christian, and tried to settle her and his two infant daughters in a Highlands community with sour patience for outsiders. There was trouble; one daughter was drowned in an accident that Longfaeroe blamed on himself, as is the way with hard-set Calvinists—what goes wrong is their fault, what goes right is God’s handiwork. Longfaeroe saw to it that he was called away, far away, to South Georgia, with the help of one of his father’s comrades-in-arms, Sergeant Major Balthazar Frazer, Elephant Frazer’s oldest brother. That was the early 1980s. Longfaeroe brought with him his wife and surviving daughter and a sense of mission that was farfetched: to bring the Scots-Irish and Norse of the Falkland Dependencies, rude fisherman, misanthropic shepherds and sealers, to Christ. First he had to gather them to church. The war in the Falklands elevated him from the butt of derision to one of the strengths of the resistance. I have mentioned his notion of himself as a strong tower. He lost his wife in a drowning in the early days of the war, another accident. I was told it did not touch him as had the loss of his daughter. He was a passionate man; there were many widows on South Georgia. And what they, and everyone, came to respond to was a man who was a book. Longfaeroe’s mind was the Psalter. He was a fickle, aloof minister, a garbled and not very fetching preacher. His gift was that beautifully rugged singing voice. When he lifted his head above his bent body to sing a psalm, he was inspirational and sublime. The rush of the sea was his choir, he was the soloist. And Longfaeroe did not make the psalms sound as Grandfather did—full of dread, dark warnings, last screams. Longfaeroe made them seem thanksgivings, full of hope and promise. It was the promise of the psalms that seemed to have led him to a visionary conclusion. His psalms were said to have first been sung by King David. Longfaeroe came to believe that his flock on South Georgia, spread over half a million square miles of violent ocean in their vocation of killing whales and seals, would come to Christ and their redemption if they were brought together by a single inspired leader, as David had brought together Israel and Judah.
Longfaeroe had encouraged another as “wee David” since his arrival on South Georgia and the explosion of the hate in the Dependencies that had brought the war. Longfaeroe had chosen Samson Frazer, eldest son of Elephant and Dolly Frazer, heir to the large Frazer holdings in sheep and sealing. Samson was said to have been the quickest eye and surest hand on South Georgia—the stuff of faultless heroes. He had been a hero in a large battle on West Falkland early in the war, and was made legend for his rescue of Luff Gaunt’s crew after the senior commander of the Volunteers failed to break the Pattie blockade on Port Stanley and died for his cause. Samson must have been a good man, strong, fierce, bold. Samson had also been the husband of Longfaeroe’s daughter, Abigail, and the father of Longfaeroe’s dearest possessions after his Psalter, two grandsons.
I have told the story of Samson’s death, presumed death. He was gone from Longfaeroe, and South Georgia, almost as I arrived. Longfaeroe said that he was reawakened by his grief for Samson, that he was more convinced of his vision than ever before. He said Samson had served to prepare the way for me, that Samson had found me, leading those four longboats across Falkland Sound. This sort of justification for accident and tragic turn can become heartless. It did hurt Abigail when she heard it. Longfaeroe persisted, told everyone who I was, told them he had known me when he first saw me. This was disingenous: he had questioned me at length before he settled on me as his new candidate. That was not an easy task; I was badly wounded when I was landed on South Georgia, babbled madly as I mended, and spent my first two years there either speechless or mumbling garbled nonsense to sheep and misty shadows. I was a long while recovering from my first episode of darkness, and looked dire—shrunken, hairless, unwashed, and barely fit for Iceberg’s company. Longfaeroe’s notion of me was reinforced by my appearance and woozy conduct, however; my repulsiveness attracted him, as harmony to harp.
Longfaeroe was not Grandfather, far short; not that cruel, or full of himself, or limitless, furious, inspired. Longfaeroe was weaker and, I suppose, stronger for it. It might help to think that Longfaeroe played the minor prophet to Grandfather’s Jeremiah. He was a man who demonstrated peculiar and extravagant resolve nonetheless. He could bend a will, even a wandering one like mine. The craftiest trick he used on me—when I could barely talk in full sentences on my own—was to teach me long passages of the books of Samuel (which contain the David story), substituting rote for reason in my mind. I can still do much of it without consulting the Fiddle Bible, like the words of the Lord of Hosts reminding David of his call: “I took you from the pastures and from following the sheep to be the prince of Israel,” said God to King David. “I have been with you wherever you have gone, and have destroyed all the enemies in your path. I shall make you a great name among the great ones of the earth.” I recall now how David thought to reply to the Lord of Hosts, asking him in effect, “You do keep your promises?” David was concerned with guarantees between parties with unequal enfranchisement, and wisely so. It is my experience that the always dangerous relationship between master and subject usually goes wrong—makes one a tyrant and the other a slave—because there is no guarantee of reason and decency mutually exchanged that can survive natural disaster and human crime: Lazarus had his written constitution; I had my faith in Grandfather. Neither was enough guarantee, but more of this later.
Over three years, I regained most of my faculties, also regained my weight and strength and demeanor, though my hair never did grow back properly—I was mostly bald, with long locks over my eyes. Nature also returned to me my acuity, which joined with my Norse skepticism to resist Longfaeroe’s hammering at my identity. I argued that me being Davidic made no sense, that such proceeded from something wild-eyed in Longfaeroe, some sad foolishness to retreat from the world by cramming it into a familiar illusion that seemingly had authority because it was based on the biblical canon. I did not say it that way, since I did not then have the wherewithal; that was what I thought, however inarticulately. Longfaeroe made the mistake of cultists, investing a found object with magical powers that seem tangible because they are actually the longing of the investor for recognizable
truth. I do not mean to defame him. He was good to me, if he also confused me; in his way he trained my mind by attacking it. Longfaeroe was manipulative, fervent, long-winded, cunning, playful, pouty. I listened to him, because he was my friend and I wanted him to like me. I defended myself, because I had to spend most of my time alone and wanted to know whom I was with.
I objected to Longfaeroe that the one similarity I would admit between me and David was shepherding. I said that I was a shoddy shepherd. I suffered lapses, talked to the mountainsides when I should have been counting spring lambs, was inept at shearing despite Germanicus’s patient lessons. If not for Iceberg (she was pregnant by one of Goldberg’s pups when we landed, recovered from her wound to deliver five wolves) I would have lost my herds in the winter storms; she, the wolf, trained herself and her pups, and the litters of half-breed collie-wolves that followed, to go against nature and to tend the sheep, did so out of loyalty to and love for me, and I took it then and still do as a profound example of what faith and kindness can do—civilize the beast.
The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica Page 21