I explained that what Otter Ransom was recalling was the Althing, the legislative and judicial assembly for medieval Iceland. I talked slowly, because it was my discovery, listening to my closest friends on South Georgia, that they were better at fighting than at thinking about their fight. I knew myself a weak intellectual in comparison to Lazarus, but I saw then that what little I had absorbed from listening to Israel and Peregrine argue politics, and reading Charity Bentham’s works, and studying Longfaeroe’s notions about kingship and just government in the books of Samuel, made me their master in terms of political science, of reasonable government. I did know the difference between authority and tyranny. Therefore I described the Althing carefully, telling them it was a once-a-year assembly meant to adjudicate feuds among families. Thirty-nine priests presided over the Althing, men drawn from the major families from early in Iceland’s history and whose offices then became hereditary. The priests were considered to be above bribery and blood influence. It was as close to democracy as the medieval North ever came, and I think it fair to say that the Althing was no less broad-minded than the much celebrated Greek assemblies that were responsible for words like democracy, despotism. I told them the Althing was created because Iceland was a refuge for outcasts from the North Sea kingdoms, men who hated kingship yet had to agree on how to live in harmony. I concluded, “The decisions of the Althing were final. Any man who dissented was banished. And that was the Althing’s worst punishment for a crime—exile. Since Iceland was already an outlaw haven, exile from Iceland was the same as a death sentence.”
“That’s your Skallagrim Strider, isn’t it?” said Abigail.
“From what you say,” said Jane, “Lazarus’d be wrong for the presidency, because he’s married a Gaunt. We need someone from outside the big families, but who could please the families and the Volunteers and Reverend Longfaeroe and Lazarus, also the Zulemas, the beasties. The Hospidar wouldn’t dare against such a president. He’d be free of all, including Elephant Frazer. A people’s spokesman.”
“Lazarus’s tongue, that be,” said Germanicus.
“It’s fine learning. It’d do some no harm,” said Jane.
“I have my ways,” said Germanicus.
“The Frazers have their ways,” said Jane. “No use to us if there’s a plague coming, or more beasties. Lazarus says a tyranny has less chance than an oligarchy, and an oligarchy less chance than a democracy. We need a constitutional assembly.”
“If Lazarus says my dad’s a tyrant, he’s a liar!” We all talked at once, trying to calm Germanicus, trying to make peace between those two stubborn lovers. Jane loved Germanicus—who did not?—yet she also loved learning and was also a Gaunt. She would not let Germanicus’s temper distract her summary.
“If we can propose a candidate to unite the families, a union candidate,” said Jane, “your dad would see the sense of an election. Then we can get us a constitution. Lazarus says a government of men is lawless, a government of law is a rock.”
“What’re you saying, girl?” said Abigail hesitantly.
“You’d be a fine candidate, Abbie,” said Jane.
“I’m a Longfaeroe and a Frazer and mother of a bastard,” said Abigail. For their own reasons, Jane and Abigail laughed.
“There be a man,” said Germanicus heavily.
“No! Hold your tongue, you Germanicus Frazer,” said Abigail.
“Grim Fiddle,” said Jane.
I had not thought Wild Drumrul understood what was said, but he then stood up and said in English, “In the name of Allah the Compassionate, the Merciful, Grim Fiddle!” I knew it the preface to his Moslem prayers, a way of announcing the profound. He put his hands on my shoulders, met me eye to eye. It made me recall the promise I had made to his dead brother, Dede Gone, in Vexbeggar. How had I been my brothers’ keeper? Goggle-Eye was dead at Port Praia. Little Dede Gone was dead trying to get Black Crane back to me. Wild Drumrul was on an island that was spiritually farther from his heritage than it was physically. And he was still game, a seaman on King James, a Volunteer for people he barely understood. What right did I have for further exemption from struggle because I was orphaned, was sad, was ashamed for my berserker nature? What did Wild Drumrul have, and yet he engaged fate. And now he asked for my help.
I made a rambling attempt to protest their scheme. I could hear myself talk—a sign, Israel once said, that a man does not believe himself. I was not wise; I was healthy. I was not well-spoken; I could speak my heart. I was not humble; I knew some of my limits. I was not a good Christian; I loved and knew love. I was unqualified for anyone’s trust; I was a young, earnest man who respected the truth. And now they called me to be a problem-solver by being a truth-teller. It did please me, my vanity and my courage. I imagined that it would have pleased Peregrine, and Grandfather. I imagined that Skallagrim Strider too had felt shame for his life wasted on his own concerns yet had met the call of his men when they were banished from Iceland forever. I watched Abigail as I debated my qualifications with Germanicus and Jane. Abigail’s eyes were wet; she did not smile, she did not frown. I gathered her face and their words and felt stronger. To them I was an idea.
They carried the idea of Grim Fiddle, peacemaker, union candidate, back to Gaunttown, to Elephant Frazer and the Hospidar, to Lazarus and the Zulemas, most importantly to Dolly Frazer, Violante Furore, Frances Gaunt, Amanda Rose, Beatrice Harrah, Victoria Hospidar, and Bonnie Moog. Longfaeroe took up the idea as if it were a gift from Jehovah. The debate was quick, too quick for it to have been constructive, more as if conciliation were desired, not compromise. On the first Sunday in the new year, 2001, the first Sunday in a new century and new millennium Longfaeroe was happy to proclaim, Longfaeroe preached and sang on the rise of David from the flocks of Bethlehem to the throne of the Hebrews, a sermon—I was told, because Lazarus advised me to stay clear of the campaigning—that left the women of Gaunttown in tears and the men scarlet and resolute. The rumor was spread by my supporters that the mutton supper in my hut had brought together the noblest spirits on South Georgia, a Frazer and Gaunt and Longfaeroe and beastie and outlaw, calling to Jehovah for Guidance. Jehovah had sent a message, in that storm that broke over my hut as we ate and talked: Grim Fiddle was South Georgia’s found hope. Did they call me a savior? Some did. Others said, usurper.
The debate flowed and ebbed through the summer. The original issue of the beasties enslaved seemed forgotten. Lazarus said the issue became: devotion with or without representation? Concessions were required and made by all sides. The assumed verdict was that no popular vote for the president of the Gaunttown Assembly would be permitted; instead, the president would be chosen by a ballot of the elders of the families. Also, the president would be the convener of and spokesman for the Gaunttown Assembly, nothing more, and the Assembly’s power would remain undefined pending further debate. The hopes for a constitution and popular democracy were, as Lazarus mused, left on the tables of the taverns.
The South Georgians were dominated by Scots Presbyterians, a people who suspect kingship but who are equally distrustful of permitting commoners—just everyman—a voice in matters of property and blood-kin authority. Lazarus counseled himself and the young people to remain patient. He explained to me that South Georgia fascinated him as a political phenomenon where, because of its isolation physically and now economically, time had seemingly stopped, or regressed, to something very close to what America had been at its birth as a nation. Liberty was the desire, to be fought for at any cost; however, and paradoxically, that liberty was seen to be as threatened by universal suffrage as it was by despotism. The South Georgians wanted to live free, yet knew they must have some government, and so they concluded the less government they had, the better they would be. Lazarus concluded they were immature, and smiled in that expectant, selfconfident, secretive way of his. He accepted, in late summer, the proposition of the elders to permit a qualified election of a constrained president of an ambiguously defined Assembly. Then he immedi
ately set about campaigning for what he called a true republic for South Georgia—written laws, universal suffrage, elected officials, coexistent executive, legislative, judicial branches of government—which he said he would “harvest” (he also used the word forge) as soon as he had me, as the president, to convene the Gaunttown Assembly not only as a “people’s voice” but also as a “constitutional assembly.”
Lazarus saw his challenge as I did not, and prepared himself, with book learning and rhetoric, for the battle ahead.
Abigail came by herself to tell me the results of the elders’ vote. It was late summer, coolish, misty. The election was not unanimous. The Hospidar’s candidate, Christian Rose, and the Gaunt’s candidate, Kevin Gaunt, took more than half the vote together. I was president by plurality, not majority, a result that I did not then perceive as auguring contrariness. The immediate result was that I was free of one flock, woolly heads, and promised to another kind, woolly-headed, hardheaded; I was also relieved of my duties as a Volunteer, required to move into the upstairs rooms of the Assembly Hall.
Abigail was heartsick. She stayed by the door as she told me how her father had hugged her after the vote, had thanked her for helping me gain my “divine role.” She said it was the first her father had touched her since childhood. That was not the cause of her melancholy. Lazarus had told her she should be careful with me for a while, lest the other factions use a charge of profligacy against me, and she exaggerated his advice. She said we must stop our affair, that she had come to say good-bye. I knew she was testing my devotion.
“You belong to them,” she said. “Lazarus says you’re changed. You’re the only elected official on the island. You’re no more the man I’ve loved, no more Sam’s dad, my man. They did this to Samson. They made him their bloody captain, and he was changed too. Even if he’d come back to me, I’d lost him to them. Lord forgive me, I loved you’ before when you were a bonnie sad boy, and I love you still. I can’t help you do this thing. I mark them. They’ve taken you from me. I can’t save you no more. Save yourself.”
“What can happen?” I protested. “Lazarus says I’m a figurehead.”
“Like the bow of a ship, what they shoot at,” she said.
“Abbie, I’m not Samson,” I tried, softly, “not David either.”
I meant it to lighten her heart. It was our joke. She smiled, but if ever there was a smile of unhappiness, that was it. She said, “Oh, it’s daft we are, the pair of us. Darling Grim, trust me, save yourself.” And then she came over and kissed me, and took me. I was theirs, she said; she took me as hers. I cannot sharply recall her scent, or her touch; I can still hear her cry in passion. She was loud. I liked that. Afterward, I tried to convince her our lives would improve, that as soon as the troubles passed, we could live together, could marry, give her sons and our Sam a proper home. I tried to persuade her with my wishes, and Lazarus’s ideas, and Germanicus’s strength. I tried to prove to her we were not changed, just wiser. She said she wanted to believe me, said she was afraid to marry another to lose. She put her head on my breast, did not weep. I realized then, embracing sweet, sturdy, haunted Abigail, that we were changed, that I was changed. In her eyes, I was a man to lose. I pushed it away, that shadow, and pulled her closer to protect her from her doubts. In the weeks that followed, I continued my seduction of Abigail even as my new status took me from her. As the fall closed on us, however, all my eager words, all our high dreams, all that we as free men and women could do, were undone by a natural catastrophe.
Exodus
I HAVE mentioned the fury of the Scotia Sea, raked by the westerlies and churned by the Falkland Current, what the sealers said was the home of the mothers of freak waves, as massive as rolling mountains, frequently dwarfing even that behemoth that tossed Angel of Death mid-Atlantic and more frequently draped in a dense fog that smeared the boundary between sea and sky. The sealers told another story of the Scotia Sea, one that overshadowed the dread of those saltwater ranges. They told of the thirteen consecutive winters when the ice pack that spread each winter from the Antarctic actually pushed out to wrap South Georgia in a howling white desert. That was said to have been in the nineteenth century, when only whalers and sealers sailed farther south than the fifty-fifth parallel, when only crazed sealers dared cross the sixtieth parallel for the wealth of the rookeries on the South Orkneys and South Shetlands. It was a broad account, sealer talk, what Christmas Muir told me was “banker’s bait,” meaning it was likely more an excuse for poor catches—passed on to the banking houses that funded the sealing expedition—than it was reliable oceanology. The notion that the Weddell Sea, which cups Antarctica from Queen Maud Land to Graham Land, could extend its ice sheet more than seven hundred miles beyond the Antarctic circle is fantastic.
I watched it happen May and June of my sixth year on South Georgia. Each clear morning, one in four that time of year, I would leave my rooms in the Assembly Hall and climb to the high heath to stand transfixed as the southeastern horizon brightened with what is called an ice blink. The vanguard of the pack approached in a line across the face of the earth. It was a military operation. Tabular icebergs calved from Antarctica’s permanent ice sheet preceded the pack like shock troops, some a mile long and a few hundred yards wide, turning over suddenly as the tide tossed them, others tens of miles long and wide, drifting ice islands several hundred feet high, craggy, multicolored. The sea was also laced with bergy bits broken from the ice islands and with brash ice, sheets of ice independent of the main pack. The pack itself advanced both under the glare of the ice blink and under the astounding optical phenomenon of mirages of ice islands projected upside down against the steel-blue sky. At times, it could look as if a monstrous gray mouth yawned toward South Georgia, jagged white teeth of ice islands below and above—shimmering, bloodred at sunset, angry.
Christmas Muir and Peggs and Wild Drumrul would climb up with me. Peggs, a man who, no braggart, could reminisce about the seven seas of the world and the ice of both poles, did describe for us the gathering of the pack. After all this time, I still take satisfaction in knowing the natural process that has entombed me and mine. Sea water freezes at twenty-eight and a half degrees Fahrenheit. He was not precise about the science, and from what I recall, the air temperature is independent of the temperature at sea level. First, frazil ice forms on the water, like slush with oily water atop. Then, as the temperature drops with the wind and current, the frazil ice transforms into a sludgy layer called grease ice. Finally, the temperature plunging, independent sheets, called pancake ice, congeal into new ice that, when it thickens to nine feet, loses its salt content and bobs free of the water. This new ice crumbles and stratifies as the sea beneath, or a storm above, throws one floe against another, a process called hummocking or, in the case of one floe thrusting over another, rafting. Hummocking and rafting combine new ice into ragged, heaving walls that can grow to barriers forty feet high, the forward redoubts of millions of square miles of a tireless crystal army.
I enjoy how placid the process can seem. To watch it the first time was awful. I felt as if the sea were dying, all life slowing to an omnipresent nothingness. As the pack gathers strength, cooling the air temperature before it, it sends out new ice like claws that bend back into the pack, then dart out again to grab new sea or to anchor onto the ice islands that serve as advance guard. The pack was ever moving, ever violent. It had no plan, rather it was a condition; yet because the pack grew hourly, it seemed sublimely alive. It was actually the antithesis of life.
Have I communicated the noise? South Georgia was wind and rain, the sea smashing the cliffs, seafoam arching over the crags, elemental chaos building to endless howls. That same ceaseless wind rushing across the ice pack was transformed into an omnipresent scream. The pack rippled with the tides, which, ever changing, sent crackling explosions across a line, the pack shivering as a wave ran beneath the mass. Pressure ridges formed when one gigantic floe crushed against another, huge pieces of ice, whole bergs, fi
red into the air like cannon salvos. The ice islands were continually disintegrating in the sun’s heat, and they whined as they twisted against themselves, roaring as a crack ran lengthwise, sludgy rivers cascading from their faces. Whenever the open sea broke through the field, it would catch up brash ice and throw it against the ice fronts with rattling, knocking, scratching sounds. And the fast ice, that which attaches to land masses, would rub up against South Georgia and the outlying rocks, screeching when the pack heaved north, ever north, to replace the vanguard melted off in the warm currents of the horse latitudes.
The pack swept over South Georgia. I am not sure if it was more frightening to sit on the ridge with the sea covered in a fog and listen to the pack rumble and whine, or to stand on the ridge under clear gray skies and watch the pack grow, a hundred hundred tongues of ice licking the gray waves. The contrasts were hypnotizing, and I came to anticipate them: one noon, the sun pushing through in the low northeastern sky like torchlight, not warm but reassuringly there, the pack would be solid to the west, but to the east there would be open sea pocked with wave crests, dotted with brash ice, some giant bergs bashing one another. The next day the pack would be everywhere, flat, glistening, wind-scourged, ice islands in the sky; then again in several hours the floes would part to shape a seamlike channel, the sea breaking through to shape a lake in the ice, perhaps a storm rolling black clouds and fog over the field. For beneath the pack was the cauldron of the Scotia Sea, thrusting untold billions of tons of water up against the ice.
“It’s beauty to me,” said Christmas Muir. “I been icebound more’n once out there. Peggs, he walked the pack once, no place to no place, to launch a boat. Out there, man forgets things. Until she moves on ye, or she squeezes yerr ship to splinters. And them killers come sniffin’, those pig eyes looks at ye for supper.”
The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica Page 25