Abigail helped me fight off both Longfaeroe’s twists and my own dream life. She told me it was natural to reject asleep what I had not yet been able to accept awake—that I was cheated, purposeless, abandoned. She said it was simple melancholy and I should not try to explain fantasies. “I whisper to you when we sleep,” she said, smiling, “and that’s not for you to hear now, sweet Grim. What you dream is yours. Don’t be telling me it’s some brute dead a thousand years. Don’t give them to Dad. Spare your breath to cool your porridge. What of it if your mum was heartless and cold? My granny was a proper crag of feeling. My great-granny would have been human for being a witch. Your mum was a wee girl when she had you. Take her side in it. She was scared of that father of hers and made up stories to hide her fright. A king of what, she said? Black and hurt half-men? Begod, she might have tried fairy princes and slimy ogres. What is that inside you? You keep mind of what’s inside me. You’re special to me, not to any dead Viking. I have my high dreams. You have yours. Keep shut about them.”
My dreams came from the part of me that frightens me, the shape-changed berserker who cannot be vanquished, the relentless and vengeful murderer. I do not mean to suggest that I blame my paganism for my crimes, as I do not attribute what truth I have done to godliness. It was all never so clearly served up. What fed me also poisoned me. It was brewed together, the pot stirred by Lamba, Peregrine, Israel, Grandfather, and luck. Pagan luck, holy luck, who is to say and what would it matter? Grim Fiddle feasted, and was consumed. The metaphor gets it done as well as any: Spare my breath to cool my porridge indeed, Abigail, sweet Abigail.
I was lucky. It was luck that the Frazers took me into their family. Germanicus treated me like a lifelong friend, more, made me feel like his older brother, which I took as a kindness and a sadness as I watched him forget himself sometimes and call me Samson. Elephant Frazer, who assumed the governor-generalship of South Georgia in the absence of British colonialism and with the death of Luff Gaunt Senior, gave me his far-reaching protection and a job. Abigail Longfaeroe Frazer gave me everything except her secrets. The other Frazers—they were a large, marrying and breeding family of first, second, and third cousins—gave my brothers from Black Crane both help and ambition. It was luck that Lazarus, who was badly burned by the explosion of Black Crane, healed over time, was taken in by the Gaunts (Frazer inlaws), and was rewarded for his learning with a teaching post at the island’s school and eventually with the hand of one of the widowed Gaunt daughters-in-law, Violante—who gave Lazarus a daughter, Cleo, soon enough. Christmas Muir and his best mate, Martin Peggs, watched over Wild Drumrul and Otter Ransom, taught them sealing and whale-poaching, sent me shark’s teeth for my rune-carving, my hobby after my darkness lifted. Orlando the Black did the best of all of us, recovering from his wounds quickly, marrying one of the evacuated Spanish-English women from West Falkland, having three daughters in three years, being appointed an officer in the reorganized South Georgia Volunteers, being given responsibility for the small settlement on the northeast shore, Shagrock.
And it was certainly luck that in late spring of my fourth year on South Georgia (December 1999), Abigail bore me a son. There were very few hard words over this, considering that the child was a bastard and that Abigail had risked her authority on the island by refusing to marry me when everyone knew I was the father. Longfaeroe pondered what his response should be, delivered the news that since I had never been baptized, and since this child needed baptism, he would hold a joint ceremony, just after Christmas. It was the first time he got me into his church, and I realized then the deviousness of the man. Because of the possibility of scandal and scolding, he also got a full house that Sunday, everyone of any authority was present or well represented: Frazers, Gaunts, Roses, Brackenburys, even the Hospidar. Longfaeroe preached on the sins of the flesh, on the mysterious ways of the spirit, on the necessity for men to keep themselves ready for revelation and miracle. Then he baptized me Grim Fiddle, and my son Sam. Sam was also Longfaeroe’s grandson; that was not sufficient for Longfaeroe to oblige Sam with a last name. Should he have been Fiddle? Longfaeroe? Frazer? It was left undecided, Sam for Samson, and that pleased most.
I sat in the first pew with Christmas Muir and Otter Ransom, while Abigail sat on the other side with her mother-in-law and two sons by Samson. It could have been testy, became difficult only once for me, when Longfaeroe looked down at me and said, “Jehovah watches over the way of the righteous, but the way of the wicked is endless stumbling.” Abigail sat right up, called over the baby’s whimpering, “That’s more for some than him, Dad.”
Afterward, Abigail pushed through the tongue-clatterers to me and said, weepy, still puffy from giving birth, “We have this day. We have a son. They’ll not take it or him from us, ever.” Then we went arm-in-arm to the party in the adjacent parsonage, a grand affair, Frazer-style, the men in their Volunteer uniforms, the women in control. There were signs of the feuding at the time, and I saw the Harrahs and Lindfirs maneuver with the Hospidar, and Trip Gaunt snub Longfaeroe; I shall speak of this soon. It was primarily a day for Abbie, and she gave it her joy. Orlando the Black sent a note congratulating me, Christmas Muir and Peggs gave Sam a miniature harpoon, and Lazarus made a speech, sentimental, hopeful, surprising me with his buoyant contentment:
“You have heard that I come from America, and that Grim Fiddle, now baptized Grim Fiddle, is mostly American. I want you to know that this is not a curse. Among you here, I have discovered there are just ways to love, and they come to any man who is hard enough to accept his place. I count myself happy to be your schoolmaster, and Grim Fiddle, he just counts Frazer sheep. It’s a good life, while we have it, and if there are disagreements now and then, that is all to the good. Now with my Cleo, and Grim’s Sam, America has landed on South Georgia to stay.”
I remember the toasts, the men saying that Sam would become a champion like his father, since I had become legend to the Volunteers for what I had done at the Presbyterian church at Port Stanley. I remember Lazarus dancing with his tall wife, Violante, and then with Abigail, and with the young woman promised to Germanicus, Jane Gaunt. I remember Elephant Frazer gathering me around the waist, making the photographer stand back to get my head in the shot, and then Dolly Frazer pulling me aside to assure me in a quiet voice that she would not rest until she convinced Abigail to marry me. I remember the Volunteers gathered around a map of the Falkland Dependencies, tracing the route Germanicus was supposed to be following in his second reconnaissance of the Falklands. I remember Lazarus saying good night to me. “Do you miss them? I think of her. I thought naming my baby for her would make it better. It has, I guess. I want you to understand that I was wrong about you. You did what had to be done. There was nothing more you could have tried. Orlando and I talked about you last Christmas when he was down. You were still sick. They couldn’t have made it. It happened, and I don’t see what we could have done. We want you to know, whatever you decide, we’re with you. Stay here now. These are good people. To hell with that world out there.” And I remember crying that night, apart from Abigail while we cleaned up after the party, until she caught me, made me confess: “For the first time, I begin to see what has happened to me. It hurts.”
I speak of my luck. The ancient Norse had wisdom that applied to me on South Georgia, and I make it suit here by paraphrasing: Both good and bad luck, and plenty of both, must be endured in a life time spent in this troubled world. My baptism seemed the line I crossed from good luck to bad once again, and at everyone’s peril. Germanicus returned with dire news soon after. That was his second voyage around the Falklands. During my third summer, he had made his first, sailing the Frazer sealing schooner, King James, in a great arc across the southern Atlantic, bringing back sketchy news of a forbidding quiet on the mainland of South America and observed news that the beasties had taken over West Falkland from the Patties. After his return, in the early fall ending my third year on the island, a ship had foundered off the northeast shor
e, off Orlando the Black’s Shagrock, and the wreckage that floated ashore hinted that it was from Africa and that it either had been fleeing plague or had been a plague ship blockaded out of a South African port. This threat was kept a secret by the leadership on South Georgia. Germanicus was ordered to make a more military reconnaissance in my fourth summer, which was why he was away for the baptism party. His mission was manifold: mostly to investigate the possibility of plague, since any such threat would likely come on us from the west; partly to assess the state of the Falklands; partly to search for news of or the remains of Samson; and partly to look over Mead’s Kiss. This last he did not tell me about at the time, at Abigail’s anxious request, because she feared it would cause me a relapse. Germanicus did make a reckless landing on West Falkland, and a march to 2 de Diciembre. Otter Ransom, a mate on King James by then, and Wild Drumrul, a seaman, went along on that march, and the two of them visited me in my hut in the early fall.
“The Patties have divided the islands into zones,” said Otter Ransom, nervous, distracted. He was thought a fine figure in town, and I had assumed him happy. He continued, “More beasties on the northern shores, and that’s where they are sick. I’ve never seen it. I’ve heard of it. We found bodies in a ditch outside the village. Half buried, two or three. They were blue-black, chewed up by birds. I saw these boil things. I knew what it was. We took care coming back. Searched her top to bottom. None of us got it.”
I asked him if he was sure it was plague; it could have been a dozen diseases, including plain infection.
“How can we know, unless we get it?” he said angrily.
I asked Wild Drumrul if Germanicus knew, or the leadership was guessing, where it came from.
“Die Ratten!” said Wild Drumrul, gesturing in a Moslem way, cursing the earth. That was his way of saying that plague came from everywhere. He had grown to a cautious, faithful man—beautifully bearded, catlike. He said he had seen the plague in Asia as a boy. He said it was always the same. The rats died. Then the people died. Everyone died, because those that did not perish from boils or fever or dehydration, turning blue-black and sinking flat from hopelessness, were then killed by outsiders afraid of contamination. We argued the matter and concluded miserably. It might be the plague. It might not be. And I note here that we were never to be sure. What was crucial then was that if it was out there, it was at the seaports where they—the beasties, the outcasts, the exiles, the self-named damned—crowded and scratched for food in competition with the chief predator of human detritus, the rat, the rat that carried the flea that carried the bacterium that was the plague. Bubonic to pneumonic or septicemic, I know the difference now and it does not signify, as it did not then; plague was plague, horrible and sure, the end result of a breakdown in civilization, what Grandfather called the darkness. If it was out there, it was Otter Ransom’s bitter opinion, it would be only time and accident until it reached South Georgia.
The leadership could not keep Germanicus’s discovery secret. Precaution and panic at the rumor of plague damaged the life of the island over the following year. The South Georgians had endured defeat, massacre, starvation, increasingly brutal winters as the ice pack seemed to creep north each year, even the cholera that drove the Volunteers from Port Stanley. The plague was profoundly different for them. It was an antediluvian foe, merciless, sudden. It was also a biblical curse. The South Georgians were a seafaring people, enjoying the bounty of and the crash of the weather and sea, a volatile mixture of God-fearing stoics and blasphemous doubters. They did know their Bible. They were at elemental extremes. The plague, the rumor of plague, was for them less to be explained by Lazarus’s talk of the results of political tyranny in overcrowded lands torn apart by racial and religious and economic fears than it was to be explained simply and dreadfully as a judgment of Longfaeroe’s Jehovah. Even the doubters like the sealers, like Christmas Muir, who said they had no time to be Christian, were touched by the shadow of plague. There was a terror and completeness to it that they could not block out with their hard-mindedness. The Patties they could fight with blood. The cholera they could fight with sanitation. The cold they could fight with expertise. The starvation they could fight with rationing and summer dashes to Africa for grain, vegetables, fruit. But the plague, the rumor of plague, it rocked them. They knew it could be fought, but it was in their minds long before it could have been in their bodies, and there it wrecked more havoc to reason than it might ever have done to their health, there it made the defiant feel doomed in their stand, there it made them abandon decency for cruel decisions. I am not saying they were the toughest people who ever gripped the earth or sailed the seas, but they were heirs of that lot, and it was not enough.
South Georgia is a one-hundred-and-forty-mile-long aquamarine rock, mountainous, heath-mantled, treeless, wind-scourged, battered by the stone-gray seas of what the sealers called the “filthy fifties.” This might sound desolate. It is, but also astonishing, haunting—misty blue peaks capped year-long with snow, naked heath laced with green fingers of fresh water. It is never more than ten miles wide except at its fat southern end, Cape Disappointment. It lies in a sailing arc between Cape Horn, a thousand miles upwind, and the Cape of Good Hope, twenty-five hundred miles downwind. In summer, it is gale-tossed, drenched, humid, at once sun-touched and cloud-tipped. In winter, it is deadly cold, dark gray, usually several hundred miles beyond the limit of the pack ice. In spring and fall, it enjoys violent changes of weather, is scraped by the passing of bergy bits and, in the spring, an occasional passing of an enormous ice island calved from the Antarctic ice shelf. At least that was the case for my first five years there. South Georgia’s weather is usually determined by the fact that it sits atop the Scotia Ridge that surrounds the Scotia Sea, a bottomless, ice-clogged cauldron suited for whales and storms and little else. As Christmas Muir said, it is the sort of sea one could understand God granting the Scots.
The spine of South Georgia is a sharp-peaked hornstone mountain range cut intermittently by craggy ravines pitted with caves through which the wind rushes year-long. That island could sing; it could also scream. The main settlement, Grytviken, was on the lee shore, on the vast Cumberland Bay, and consisted of stone and sod and imported wood-built houses tumbled atop each other, a smooth plateau that was the marketplace, several wharfs and many warehouses surrounding the sprawling whaling factory that was the primary industry of the island, and a half-built submarine pen down the bay left over from the Second World War.
Grytviken grew quickly and out of proportion after the defeat in the Falklands brought several thousand exiles to the island. The new town was renamed Gaunttown for the dead Luff Gaunt Senior, who had been the patriarch of the island. It was surrounded with gunposts and a series of watchtowers on the cliffsides. The Frazer camp was south of Gaunttown, and up. My shepherd’s hut was a few miles farther along a trail, in a natural amphitheater opening to the buffeted mountains of the western shoreline. The other settlements were on the southern shore at Cape Disappointment, mostly sour fisherman and old whalers and sealers, and on the northeastern shore, Shagrock, where Orlando the Black commanded a small group of sealers and evacuees from the Falklands.
After the rumor of plague, the leadership divided the island into precincts, arranging them according to priority for defense and for carrying on fishing and shepherding. All able-bodied men and boys were conscripted Volunteers. After my baptism, I was presumed recovered from my malady, and I was made an officer in the Volunteers, as supposedly befitted my status as a Frazer orphan, as Longfaeroe’s Davidic candidate, as Abigail’s lover, and especially as what they called “the hero of the Presbyterian church.” I was assigned responsibility for a part of the southwestern shore, an important area because if any plague ships were coming, they would likely ride the westerlies from South America. Again, I do not want this to sound like grand militarism. The Volunteers and Falkland Irregulars in exile never numbered more than several hundred men and boys, committed to defend an
island of two thousand mostly uninhabitable square miles from all sides, from nature.
It should be without excuse that I report that the leadership determined to stop any group wanting to land on South Georgia henceforth. There are excuses, however, worthy of my attention. The most profound might be that survivors, as we all were on South Georgia, are forever condemned by the fate that has permitted them to survive. This seems abstract, needs detail.
I learned gradually, once I was out of my hut and down to mix with the South Georgians, what had happened out there in the Atlantic since I had fallen sick. The so-called fleet of the damned had grown apace for a few years; the beasties had come to South Georgia as they had to the Falklands, not in great numbers, because the Atlantic was vast and violent and the African ports were downwind. What beasties that had made it were either dead soon after or were taken into Gaunttown, some at Shagrock, a few at Cape Disappointment. Then, without explanation, the fleet had disappeared in our part of the ocean. The news we could get on the radio (a most unreliable machine that far at sea) mentioned a “refugee crisis,” said that potent councils of nations were struggling to solve the dilemma. A British warship called at Gaunttown my second summer on the island. The captain explained little, said he was on a “fact-finding mission” for special commissions established in Europe to resolve the “refugee crisis.” I am using his slang purposely, to demonstrate that whatever was going oh out there was treated like a secret by the very people, in Europe and the Americas, who should have known most. We on South Georgia, without resources, seemed to know more than they did. The British captain had not challenged Elephant Frazer when he had introduced himself as governor-general of South Georgia (before the war there had been only one governor-general for the whole of the Dependencies, based in Port Stanley), and had introduced Simon Brackenbury, a fierce Pattie-hater, as the governor-general of the Falklands government-in-exile. The commander of the Volunteers, a hard, devious, and enigmatic man named Gordon Hospidar whom everyone called “the Hospidar,” made demands on the captain’s stores and armory, and was obliged without comment. The captain acted as if he despised his compassionless task, hated what his government had made him, an emissary to charnel houses. The captain said he could do nothing to help the Falklander evacuees, could promise neither foodstuffs nor a British squadron for South Georgia. The message was clear: South Georgia was on its own. The captain did make one angry remark that became the focus of bitter jesting on the island. The captain said, promising to return, which he did not, “There’s been no war. There’s been one bloody shuffle.”
The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica Page 23