The worst of it for me was Orlando the Black. He came to me and Lazarus in our cells to confess that he had spoken against me and the Frazers, that he had begged the Hospidar he be permitted to continue as commander of Shagrock. He said he had humiliated himself before the Hospidar for a purpose: to protect his family. He said he hoped we understood and would forgive him, but if not, he would not alter his course. He did not weep before Lazarus, his brother, and Lazarus sat blank-faced. Then we spoke of my Sam, who could never have survived a sea voyage. It hurt me, perhaps not as much as it should have. We decided quickly. Was I wrong? I cannot pause here. Orlando the Black took my hand. He was a quiet, sober, undramatic man. It was his nature to take what he was given and make the best with it; his grasp was his reach. He gripped my hand and said, “One of us is here. None of them will outlive me. They’re rid of the Frazers. Now they have Roses and Lindfirs. Don’t forget me. Go with God. I’ll have Sam. He’ll know. He’ll live and he’ll know. I swear it.”
Why do I insist on the human comedy of it? It was the poetry. There we were, men and women who had been abandoned by the twentieth century, and who, because of the slaughter of the meek, were condemned as some of the first victims of the twenty-first century; and yet we were struggling with problems set by the Greeks twenty-five centuries before on islands washed by a profoundly different sort of cauldron than the Scotia Sea. The problems have names: tyranny and democracy, despotism and draconism, tragedy and comedy. Those are Greek words. I repeat what Israel told me, that the Greeks thought comedy more profound than tragedy. Aristotle said it. Mankind proved it. Tragedy was history. Comedy was art. Comedy could humble the gods. I have been told that the Greeks laughed at plays about tyrants, thought it hilarious when a beggar called out for justice and was slapped down for his impudence. Those Greeks must have had strong minds, and stronger stomachs. I have laughed at chaos, have smiled at murder; it is not the sort of humor that fills me with joy.
I once shared Israel’s opinion with Longfaeroe; he nodded, then shook his head, not in disagreement, more to turn over the thought in his mind. Later, Jane told me that Longfaeroe had preached the strangest sermon, using as his text the third book of Genesis, the temptation and fall of Adam and Eve. Longfaeroe had told his congregation that when Jehovah punished man for his pride by banishing Adam and Eve from their garden island to slave and to perish in exile, he had created the first comedy out of tragic history. Longfaeroe added that Jehovah had underscored his artful judgment by constraining and cursing Adam and Eve with the knowledge of all opposites—man and woman, love and hate, good and evil, comedy and tragedy. Jane had said that she had no idea what had gotten into Longfaeroe, did I make sense of it? I sighed then, I do now. If Israel was right about the Greeks, if Longfaeroe was right about Eden, where is progress?
The most difficult part of the comedy for me came the day of departure. I stood upon the quarterdeck of King James watching the wrenching scenes on the quays, families in torment, the flavor of civil war never stronger, the smell of brine and insoluble melancholy in the air. I did not laugh. Young Grim Fiddle did not have the stomach he had later, has now. There was no humor that day, if there was comedy. There was also revelation. Standing there, watching Jane Gaunt kiss her mother good-bye, no tears, anger in her eyes, hatred mixed with impossible remorse, I came to understand at long last what it was that we on board Angel of Death had discovered in the Baltic, the North Sea, the Atlantic. I came to understand that this was how the outrage had begun in every port, on every archipelago, on every continent. Catastrophe and fear and feud had delivered up peoples who could no longer live together. The solution, the sophists might say, is to learn to live together. That is fancy optimism, I say, worthy but not rigorous, because there are times and places when and where it cannot be. On South Georgia that day, I saw that the Hospidar was keen and bold and correct. He could not permit me and mine to remain on South Georgia. We had to be sent away. I saw the nakedness of it. I saw what it is to be right and wrong all at once. I saw the risk and the penalty, for, while I and mine were free to try not to be consumed with hatred, the Hospidar and his people would forever bear the burden of their cruelty toward us. To us, the Hospidar was a monster, but was not he also a dupe? To his people, the Hospidar was a savior, but was not he also a liar? We might disappear from their sight, but would not the memory of us, our ghosts, visit curses upon them generation upon generation? We weighed anchor and set our course northeast for Africa. Who could ever lift the weight of us from them on that shore? And one more thing I saw that day. I saw what it was to become what we were, sails full, bows pointed toward the sunrise: new members of the fleet of the damned.
My Albatross
I MUST pause for my Sam. He would be well over thirty, older than I was when I left him. I cannot know if he survived the fire and his abandonment. It pleases me to suppose that he did. He had red hair at birth, and chestnut eyes, same as Abigail’s. What I could know of what was Grim Fiddle in him I determined by comparing him to Gabe and Adam, Abigail’s two sons by Samson. My Sam was longer-limbed, not lean, more barrel-like, with heart-shaped ears. Those were Peregrine’s ears. And that bushy red hair—my guess was that Sam had reached back to Peregrine’s mother, Jane. Sam was nearly two years old when I last saw him, the day before Germanicus’s wedding. He was large, aggressive, ran as much as walked, had a passing peculiar vocabulary, Scots-English, Swedish, a few Hebrew words Longfaeroe slipped in when he had visited the Frazer camp knowing Abigail was in town visiting me. I should have more detail of him, and that I do not should indicate what an inattentive father I was—much away at the Assembly Hall, or fretting with Germanicus, or hiking the high heath with Christmas Muir and Wild Drumrul. At the time, I justified my absences by thinking they were caused by the strained affairs between me and Abigail; I told myself I would be a better father as soon as Abigail married me. That was delusion. Of consequence, it is not credible that Sam, if he lived, could have much memory of me. He would have the stories of Dolly Frazer, if she lived; about Abigail and Frazers; and he would have the stories of Orlando the Black, if he lived; about America, Sweden, the Falklands. At most, he would have pieces of the puzzle of his father, not enough to understand why I left him to his fate. I did abandon him, no fancy argument shall remove my shame. If I could talk with him, I might be able to explain. That is impossible. There is this work of confession; if I could get it to him—but then, not even I can know its end. There is one hope. It is nonrational. I record it for comfort. As I inherited some of Lamba’s magic, perhaps Sam also inherited an extraordinary sense. Perhaps my ghost, when it comes to that, can seek him out and whisper to him. Or perhaps he can see into the past, can separate history from myth, and know what I was and what he should be. And one more thing, though I should hesitate to mention it because it seems wild and desperate. I shall not balk, because that same thing became crucial to my own story as King James and Candlemas Packet rode the westerlies toward the Cape of Good Hope. My Sam, if you ever read this confession, which is more for you than any human being I can name, is it possible that once upon a time you too chatted with a pale albatross who can dance on icy gray gusts?
We were running slow under topsail through berg)’ bits, Candlemas Packet well away to our stern, our second or third day out of Gaunttown. Germanicus was an able captain, struggled to organize the crew and passengers straightaway (with Motherwell commanding our Volunteers) in order to keep the conditions belowdecks tolerable, the rationing sensible. We calculated we had food and water to make the Pacific Ocean. We supposed we could scout Africa for landfall, and if turned away could make a run for Australia. If that too failed, we had no better plan. We commended our fate to the wind and current. King James was a sturdy ice schooner built for a crew of twenty-four; we had more than one hundred and fifty people onboard, including children.
The weather came up threatening from the northwest, the ocean turning from green to slate gray, signals back and forth with Candlemas Packet to clos
e up for heavy seas. We had ship-to-ship radios; we carried one receiver for international radio traffic. The looming storm worried us daylong, seemed to hold back. Germanicus came to me on the quarterdeck to report all was ready. He seemed resolved, and very, very tired; our imprisonment, and his failure to avenge his father, had worn down his pride. Germanicus was not a complicated man; he acknowledged one direction, ahead, and did not welcome irony. He surprised me then, standing arms crossed, for he spoke defeatedly, harshly: “We won’t last that blow. I want ye to know it. Janey, she been on me for makin’ square between us, ye and me. I’ve been no good friend. Ye’ve been as true a brother as a man can have.”
I did not know what bothered him, offered sympathy and apology for my self-concern since Robby’s execution.
“Hear me out. That’d be the day I faulted a man for keepin’ his own way. Begod, we’ll likely all be drowned afore midnight. I want ye to have my apology. I’ve kept a hard thing from ye. I had call. I were afeared ye’d leave us, when we could not’ve stood it. Mark me, t’were not mine to hold back from ye. It be plain. When I landed on the Falklands two years back, I came through the Sound and touched on yerr Mead’s Kiss.”
“Were there any graves?” I said.
“No man nor beast nor grave. T’were a marker, a great stone marker. Words on it. Said ‘Fiddle,’ with a date. Summer of ninety-eight.”
I turned from Germanicus and went to the rail. I remained there through the night, old Iceberg my stalwart nursemaid, as that storm did break over us, huge seas and howling winds. I had seen it before, on Angel of Death, and was not moved. Germanicus and Half-Red Harrah yelled, climbed, and dared, did everything men can do in the face of unbounded nature; and I knew then it would not have mattered had not God spared us. That storm was an encore for me, a tempest heralding another time in the wilderness, and when it weakened two full days later, I realized that the tempest in me for six years was what made me indifferent to that blow. Grim Fiddle himself was a whirlwind. Why was I unable to set a course? Why did I wait for men and catastrophe to direct me? I was the unchallenged commander of that flotilla of discarded ships. I knew that those people would obey me, by right and by choice. I had acknowledged that the Hospidar was correct, that he had taken control and then concerned himself with right conduct. Why could not I do the same? What more charge would I require than that Grandfather had fixed a marker for me four years before, two years after I had left him on Mead’s Kiss?
The storm broke. Violante brought me food on the quarterdeck. She said Lazarus was badly seasick below, as were many. She asked me what chance we had to make Africa or Australia if a storm days out of Gaunttown had nearly finished us. I would not answer her. She demanded attention, a quick woman with heavily accented English, full of challenge. She said, “If you are afraid, keep it to yourself. There are too many afraid. You are not allowed fear or anger, or, like Lazarus, apologies. Be brave, for us, not for yourself. If I were a man, I would take your place. I would be brave.”
I remained at the rail. Violante had hailed me there. I was afraid and furious and apologetic. And it did not seem to matter that I admitted to it. It still kept me from taking charge. I had seen nothing but reversal, failure, hope abandoned, human outrage—and what had it mattered whether men or women were brave or cowardly or indifferent? Do nothing and perish; fight like a wolf pack and perish. Once I had wondered when I should stand and fight. Then I had stood and fought, and it had come to this, another defeat, more ambiguity. I could blame it on my luck, or on the darkness, or on my own darkness—those first blank years on South Georgia—yet no finding of fault could release me. If I had been born to purpose, I was as ignorant of it as I was frightened of it. Voices! Did I hear voices when I slept? I heard them continually, and there was no single sense to them. I needed an interpreter.
Germanicus and his crew kept clear of me. Longfaeroe tried to approach me, and Iceberg growled him away. I stood there for several days after the storm, talking to myself, cursing the sky and Grandfather’s Lord God, taunting the storm clouds that trailed us. I cannot provide a moment by moment account of what happened in my mind. I do have this memory. I record it expecting it to fall short as an explanation of my future conduct. It is what I have.
Out of that swirling gray sky, out of the flocks of storm petrels and diving petrels and wandering albatrosses, there emerged a single pale albatross that caught my attention. I knew what Germanicus had told me of the wandering albatross, when we had spied their breeding nests on our marches on South Georgia. For sealers, they are laden with superstition, and I think Germanicus told me the science of them as another way to exemplify the difference between sealer talk and plain talk. The albatross makes landfall once a year, to breed; the rest of its life is devoted to circling the Southern Ocean alone or in flocks. It seems an animal designed by God for one thing, magnificent flight in all weathers, now skimming the waves, now swinging high and around, rarely needing to flap its wings as it banks this way and that to catch a gust and soar. It appears a lord of the ocean of air. The narrow bill is pink, the stubby torso is white, the long wings are black with gray feathers, the webbed feet are kept tucked except when it lands in the water to fish. More, the wandering albatross seems not of this world, either a refugee of another sort of creation or else a truly free creature who should pity us stumbling and graceless men.
This particular pale albatross swooped down over Candlemas Packet—running close to our beam after the ravages of the storm—and then followed a sinking straight line across the wave caps toward me at the rail, veering up with one tuck of a wing to circle and come down again below me, hovering, sailing. The bird repeated this neat maneuver several times, adding innovations, such as a spin over the wavelets. I watched the performance unfold and was gradually and haphazardly reminded of another sort of performance—also a dance—that I had watched from a distance long before. Keeping apace, twirling and gliding, the albatross seemed magic. Iceberg cocked her ears, did not go to the alert, was complacent. I laughed, started, laughed again, then called down to the bird as it came even with me, perhaps ten feet below eye level.
“Who are you?” I said.
“You know who I am,” said the albatross, a woman’s voice. I do not apologize for this. That bird talked to me.
“You remind me of the sibyl,” I said.
“I am what you make of me,” she said.
“If you are the sibyl, I figured it out. I guessed. Reverend Longfaeroe helped, but I did it. I guessed a long time ago. I tried to tell Israel. Grandfather wouldn’t talk about you. He said you were a witch. Abigail believed me. She said you were cold and heartless, and afraid of Grandfather. Am I right? You did club me at Sly-Eyes’s party. I know. You are Lamba Fiddle. You’re my mother.”
“A very disappointed mother,” she said.
“Peregrine’s dead. Grandfather’s probably dead too. And Cleopatra and Abigail, do you know about them, and Sam?”
“Who are you?” she said.
“I’m your son, Grim Fiddle.”
“No son of mine. My son had a true name,” she said.
“You mean that talk about Skallagrim Ice-Waster?”
“Do I? Ice-Waster, Rune-Carver, Wolfman, King of the South. Do I?”
“The closest I got was president on South Georgia. Thrown me out. I am bald, mostly. You should be disappointed.”
“A king is first king to himself,” she said.
“I don’t know what I want to be, if that’s what you mean. You talk a lot like Israel. He said he was motherly. They want me to save them. I don’t care.”
“Is there anything you care about?” she said.
“No. Why should I? Who cares about me now?”
“Your mother cares about you. Nothing you care about?” “Yes, there is. Grandfather. Your father,” I said.
“He is a trial for both of us,” she said.
“Is he alive? You must know he is!”
“I know more than that. What do you
know?” she said.
“I suppose that I know that you are my mother, and that Peregrine is dead, and that if I could have my heart’s desire, I’d want Grandfather back.”
“Then you know what to do,” she said.
“Wait!” I called, for the pale albatross then pirouetted on a wave cap and swooped up above King James’s mainmast, circumnavigated Candlemas Packet, and veered away, to the west, until it was a dash in the gray sky, was one with the curvature of earth. I took special note, because that albatross had flown into the wind.
Some time must have passed between my confrontation with the albatross and my conference with Germanicus, Motherwell, Lazarus, Longfaeroe, Wild Drumrul, Half-Red Harrah, Otter Ransom, Jane and Violante and Annabel Donne and Toro Zulema, leader of the beasties on board. My memory is that it was hours; it might have been days. They came to me as men at arms might have come to their lord and master. They seemed cautious, anticipatory, looked at me as if intimidated, expecting the worst, defenseless before my temperament. I had seen that look before, addressed not to me but rather to Grandfather, Elephant Frazer, the Hospidar. It was the look of discipleship. They hung back, hung on my nuance. I no longer was required to explain or justify myself to them. They wanted something more perilous. They wanted kingship.
Germanicus, their spokesman, explained to me in a strong, contrite voice that he had spoken rashly about King James. His panic had been exhaustion. It would not happen again. Sean Malody had reported low morale but no major problems on board Candlemas Packet. Germanicus said he had solved his staffing problems, that King James was overcrowded but sure, and that he and Sean Malody had crews who would continue able. He said we could ride out a dozen blows like that one, if not one tempest a dozen times harder. I told him there was no tempest that powerful, that nature had limits, same as men. He smiled, moving in a way new for him toward me—deference. He was not afraid of me. He was • a proud man, gave me his pride while keeping enough for himself. It was the same for the others; together they stood there on the quarterdeck as my court, each with a posture turned to me. Lazarus was the least formal, the most manipulative. He was still queasy, did not look around, approached me in conversation with gasps and sighs. He managed to ask me what I was doing up here, alone, wailing like a dog. Was I discomfited? He phrased himself carefully, and it was a crucial change, as if my health were their well-being; I could be uneasy, could not be ill. Lazarus said people were despondent and anguished. Motherwell and Half-Red Harrah (a round, sturdy man, fat fingers, good hands) said Lazarus talked like a woman. Toro Zulema called me padrone and said his men were not afraid, took their strength from mine. They chattered among themselves about how confident they were, awaited my approval. Longfaeroe finally waved them to silence and became somber. He seemed the most certain of what he had to do, and of me. He asked me what decisions I had reached in my solitude, for surely I had been talking with the Almighty.
The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica Page 30