‘You are babbling. Don’t give me any history lessons,” I said.
“I suppose not,” continued Lazarus, black eyes focused again on something very distant, suggestively supernatural. “You do see that Silva and the Brothers think they have established a society of the Sermon on the Mount? The Brothers look to mysticism, to the afterlife in their Heaven, for proof of their conduct. They tell the beggars to wrait for Jesus, and they do, simpleminded millenarianists. See it, Grim, crumbs of bread and oceans of promises. There are elements of dissent. The conditions overwhelm. There are the Hielistos. I wonder if they have government—probably more tribal confederacy. These are the worst of man, subradonal. Beasts, Grim, whipped and whipped. I wonder if the Ice Cross knows there is a point, a discernible moment, when you can’t whip a beast any longer. He attacks, instinct to survive gone. That beast needs a master who loves him, frightens him, can use him.”
I told Lazarus to stop condescending to me. He seemed to me almost hallucinatory—rambling, moving his hands in the air. That was a sign of hypothermia. I should have comforted him, did not. He was pitiless, I returned the same. I told him that I did not require his high learning to know that Golgotha was possible because all those fine republics of his had become mobs without consciences, let alone justice.
“Justice is what one argues it to be,” he said. I relaxed. Lazarus was hysterical. He continued, “The law is human. It has limits and needs continual amendment. I know you, Grim Fiddle. You have absorbed that antirationalism preached by Mord Fiddle. Lutherans! You and your grandfather! Fantastic architects, dividing what is into the Kingdom of Heaven and the Kingdom of Earth, and then applying your double truths, man’s law and God’s law. You Lutherans continue the worst excesses of the Roman church you rejected. You turn your face from the Age of Reason that you helped birth. You do believe that reason is, what, ‘the Devil’s whore’? And your heroic stubbornness, your delirious pigheadedness, leads you to denounce law because it is not infallible, because it can be broken by the men who made it. You crave absolute certainty. Not finding it, you declare yourselves absolute judges. And how do you rationalize—excuse the word—justify your crudity and mistakes and crimes? You reach for the so-called mystery of divine forgiveness of sins, like some alchemist’s trick. Whoosh! The just man is redeemed! And the unjust man? Why, he has always been damned, from before time! And that faith of yours, unshakable, since you declare it is a faith in God Most High, Lord God Almighty, that is beyond demonstration. It is, in fact, faith in your own pigheadedness. You Lutherans are born tyrants. But useful ones, constrained miraculously by your sense of dignity. Not a king of kings, but a tyrant of tyrants. Not even the Gospels you Protestants make a fetish of will make you balk. Admit it! That is why you, Grim, cannot abide the Brothers. You denounce the Sermon on the Mount as inappropriate law for this world, as defeatist, because it gets between you and your idea of your great judge, Lord God. Denounce, and condemn, and decry, and pound, that is your nature. And underneath that martial piety, still the Viking, slashing at civilization because it is not certain enough for you. And if I come to you to ask for a government, a system to preserve justice without need of a tyrant, you sulk, or accuse, or bully. What would you have for us weak children? What would you not scowl at? What is enough for you, Grim?”
“Not this place, and not your republicanism. Lies,” I said. “Grim, Grim, my virtuous brother Grim,” he said, his voice hoarse from the damp and his diatribe, “you know what you are? Grim Fiddle is a good man. Paradox does not shake him, not even the problem of evil. It does not move him. Grim Fiddle speaks the truth he sees and names the lies he sees, and then stands straight and proud. He is not a hypocrite. He is good.”
“None of your tricks, speak plain,” I said.
“I mean what I say. Remember what I say. Grim Fiddle is a good man who is becoming an angry one. You believe injustice, absolute justice—what you call righteousness, or godliness, or truthfulness. And you will enforce that belief, and your faith in yourself, enforce it absolutely. You might understand this: There is no more dangerous animal alive than a human being who is good, who knows what defeat is, and who determines to fight for dignity and then gets angry. Such a man is possessed, a moral monster, and limitless.” Lazarus sighed at his own argument, waved his hands toward the corridors again, added, “This might be a paradise for them. I shall give them a god to fear.”
“Lazarus,” I said, “I am tired of you.”
He did not smile, rubbed his scar, coughed deeply, stood up, and bowed. He bowed. As he did, I could see how badly his clothes hung. He was starving, and shaking from the damp, and beaten, and exhausted, yet he preferred philosophy to melancholy, unless those are the same on the ice.
The first of the great fall storms heaved ice floes up against Aurora Bay. The Ice Cross paid its last visit until spring in order to bring a freighter of goods and three small boats of wretches from Africa, dehydrated beings with cavernous mouths. The Brothers prayed over them, sang those rich hymns—not as dark as disengaged, they prostrate before their giant crucifixes. The Africans knew they were done, still begged charity. Decisions were permitted that were not Christian, were not just, however it is argued. There must be no excuse for our conduct, not even the winter that closed on Golgotha in screams. The winds off the continent can reach immeasurable, unimaginable strength, with the temperatures plunging well below zero, however calibrated, Centigrade or Fahrenheit. There are said to be worse places in the North, long settled by gritty Northmen. The peninsula of Antarctica and the offshore islands are not anathema to man; the temperature in the summer is above freezing, and the worst temperatures midwinter are far short of those in Finland, or the Yukon, or those of Russia north of the Arctic Circle, to give examples I have been given. I declare that the measurement of the severity of offshore Antarctica, the South Shetlands, does not signify; it is what such conditions do to the nature of a trapped and imprisoned human being. The howls get in the mind, the damp makes the heart feel like a lump of ice; and then there is the black of April.
What is the use of detailing that winter at Golgotha? We were daunted by natural and supernatural foes. Hard work and stern character kept the South Georgians sane, even as their rations were cut. My people had more than others; we knew what we were doing, stole shamelessly. We flopped about in the longhouses, told stories, sang with Longfaeroe, withered, began again, waiting, remembering. We also died. I thought I had empded of tears. Now that I write of Golgotha, am again at Golgotha, I find I can still weep. I resist sentimentality; it encloses me. It was so sad. No matter how many plans we made, about repairing King James in the spring, about training more of the wretches as hunters, another meaningless death dragged us down. I doubt that I can communicate what the blackness of the Antarctic winter does to the will. We South Georgians knew what only a glimpse of the sun winter-long does to resolve, and the sealers had experienced the ice continent itself. None of our experiences were enough. We were always tired, always hungry, always afraid. We did not want to die. We each in our own way, and as God-fearing folk, held to what we most desired. I have spoken of high dreams. There is another phenomenon that comes with the long night of the south. One remembers everything one has ever done, seen, heard, dreamed of, tasted, recalls it all with what seems exactitude. The memories come tumbling up while one works, idles, or dozes. One can be conversing with another, and just as one tries to make a point, a memory of a conversation from long before wells up and overwhelms, and one drifts. For me, my memories of Abigail were bliss and torment, the same of Peregrine, Israel—all my confusions, all my failures, tumbled right before me. On the ice, everyone hears ghosts, everyone meets the dead, and to see a man or woman talking to nothingness is not to see madness. That can be a purgative; it can also be extreme peril. We had to tie lines to those displaying excessive perceptual difficulties, in order to keep them from wandering away; had to keep knives and even stones from those who started talking about homicide or suicide. And
those who refused to get up, became lethargic and glassy-eyed, we had to pull to alert, shake them, push and shout, make them care. There is one weapon against such despondency that works as long as one has it to give. One must love. One must hold the afflicted, sing to them, tell them they are needed and blessed. That is what mankind has to fight the ice, to fight abandonment and cruelty and defeat. My mother first said it, and I saw the truth of it. “As long as you are loved,” she said that night of Sly-Eyes’s party, “you are safe from their shame.”
It was awful to live, is awful to relate. I had intended to tell of Jane and Violante and Magda, how they kept the children alert with stories from the Bible and the Apocrypha, especially Daniel, Ruth, and David. I cannot. It hurts to think of their fight, one less child each week, and how we almost lost Jane to her nightmares when one of the smallest children succumbed and she could not believe it. Longfaeroe sang and loved; we all did. How many times must I say that whatever we were or did or hoped for, nothing was enough.
And hatred: it came to that for me, and for many more. There is a point when love seems to fail, and one turns to the shame of hatred. We knew our need of God, could not abide that Heaven was all that was left us; we were sorrowful, found no consolation in grains of rice and frostbite; we tried to be gentle, had only frozen earth to die upon, and were obliged to steal from the weak to survive; we were hungry, could not fill our bellies with hope; we tried to show mercy to those more wretched, knew no mercy for ourselves; we struggled to keep our hearts pure, yet saw nothing but ghosts and corpses and the icicles on the walls; we tried to keep peace among the internees and in our own hearts, had to confront suicide and murder, hangings and strangulations commonplace; we were condemned and persecuted because we had stood for right on South Georgia, and what was the use of knowing the Kingdom of Heaven would be ours when the Kingdom of Ice tortured us because we would not quit?
We stood and fought with human love for eleven months. I am angry now for the remembering of it; I feel as I write that I am reexperiencing the same generation of fury that I suffered then. I should recount more of the courage of my South Georgians and the Brothers, and even the Little Brothers, at Golgotha. I shall not. What would it serve to say that they were brave, that they were good and humble and weak and bitter? Would it give them peace? Would it ease my frustration with my failure to find worth in what happened there? Lazarus meant to mock me when he said that I decried the Sermon on the Mount as inappropriate for this world. Perhaps I did, and do; perhaps he did know my heart, and his own. I confess my blindness to such wisdom then, have not paraphrased it idly. Yes, I know that there is no justification for making war on others; and yes, I know that vengeance is not mine to take or vouchsafe; and yes, I know that the yearning for freedom is common to all men and women, regardless of station, and no specific warrant, no detailed petition for redress, can usurp the majesty of those who preach love, forgiveness, and patience for divine justice. I do not balk, nevertheless, for what I and mine wanted were some food, some warmth, some release. We were slaves. We were less than slaves, rewarded for our perseverance by slow death. No one man, no one group of the nations of men, was murdering us. We died for no reason. Does that have meaning, to say that needful, sorrowful, gentle, hungry, merciful, pure-at-heart, persecuted, righteous, faithful and godly human beings can perish for no reason at all? I will not accept that, will not accept on this earth or in Heaven or in Hell that I was born, my loved ones were born, those wretches were born, to be murdered and buried so that we could find happiness in afterlife. I will also not accept that we should have been content to swallow charity. They, all the unnamable theys, took our decency and hope and forced on us the gruel of charity. In my time, I have learned that a man or woman upon whom such an exchange is forced will fall, and fall most savagely, to revenge.
Longfaeroe did sing, “O praise Jehovah!” If he had been with us at Golgotha, Wild Drumrul would have sung, “Allah is merciful and compassionate!” I believed it, for God created a world where men can know the renaissance of the return of the sun. And with the sun, my remnant at Golgotha was out again on the ice, hunting and planning. Germanicus and Half-Red Harrah threw themselves onto King James, finding her battered but not wrecked by the winter’s ice. The sealers showed us how to shed the winter’s weariness, and but for the shaking of the volcanoes I think Christmas Muir and his mates would have been joyous with the spring. The first supply ship arrived in convoy with Ice Cross cutters near my twenty-ninth birthday. There was green on the slopes; and Germanicus took a whale that was so disoriented by the quaking that it did not run on him. By then, my people had moved to the leadership of Golgotha, not without the jealousy of the Little Brothers, a rift that required Lazarus’s dialectical skills. Lazarus did manage to secure a document from Brother Silva that permitted me to speak for the camp alongside of the Little Brothers’ gang-leaders, Mosquite and Hardava. I was not elaborate to the Ice Cross commander, telling him through my translator so much: “Hosannah!”—save us. The Ice Cross officer was a shrewd, Frenchspeaking African, mixed blood, a black marketeer certainly, named Ariadne, whose replies were always prefaced by “Quel cauchemar!” (“What a nightmare!”). In bad Spanish, Ariadne said that we best save ourselves, and not only from hunger but also from the capitanes de los Hielistos. That was the first I heard of the infamous Jaguaquara, and more, learning enough to guess that the Ice Cross was in jeopardy. So far from a persecutor, the Ice Cross thought itself condemned to combat against the omnipresent outlaw wretches. Ariadne whined, said that the mountains above us were alive with Hielistos, that the white cutters were being overwhelmed in the early battles of the thaw. I have much to say on this, and more accurately; it must suffice here to say that I realized our work on King James could be short-lived. Our ark was an invitation to plunder. Ariadne recommended we burn her.
I shared Ariadne’s fears with Lazarus and Germanicus, and two tough-minded internees we had taken into our confidence, the Brazilian whaler Cavalobranco and a Russian refugee befriended by Otter Ransom, from eastern Africa—a giant called Gleb the Hewer. Lazarus counseled me to order the work on King James continued, and that I should have my sealers formulate a plan to take over one of the supply ships for escape. Germanicus and the other military men were incredulous at the thought of revolt, said it would be suicide: we were mostly unarmed, were starved to where we only had energy to hunt, could not match the Ice Cross’s guns. Yet I was persuaded, and so Lazarus prevailed, to surprising ends. As Lazarus intended, the fantasy of escape did hearten my people and the other wretches at Golgotha who had come to depend upon us. The rumors became wild and ebullient; however, with them, perversely, came conflict over who would go, who would be left behind. Lazarus assured me that it was worth the trouble, that we had to make them stronger than they were. There were fights, suspicious hangings, a sudden conversion of hundreds to the Brothers’ otherworldly futility. This is human nature, I understand now. As contrived and misconceived as our ambitions were, they were hopeful; as with bread, we gorged on them. Also as with bread, some hoarded, others gave away what was not truly theirs, and then succumbed.
My wolves determined my work at Golgotha. I was the best informed at how to handle sled teams, and so organized a transportation system over the glacier to the rookeries where my hunters ventured. It is also true that my wolves determined my fate. This sort of causality is very Norse. It reaches back to that burning cold night at the King’s castle, when Earle Littlejohn placed two pups in my arms, and, in that, seems to present an uninterrupted line over twelve years, leading me from the discovery of my father’s heart’s desire to the discovery of my grandfather’s heart’s desire, and mine.
I had not given up Grandfather. It was that I no longer felt free to desert my people as I would have at Mead’s Kiss. That dynamo of flesh had enclosed me. They gave me power and I feasted on their obedience, and more, since Lazarus saw to it that the whole of Golgotha knew the magical reach of Grim Fiddle. I was doubly captured,
believed I could not turn my back on them.
I did covet a secret program. My guess was that Grandfather, whom I wholeheartedly believed alive, as the albatross had implied, was in one of the camps on Greenwich Island. I had made investigation of the possibility with Mosquite, and challenged Ariadne if there were lists of the camp’s internees. He did not laugh at me, “Quel cauchemar!” He said that he had come to the South Shetlands in search of his brother’s family, had found them, dead. He also astounded me by saying that there actually was a resettlement effort, that Golgotha was scheduled that summer for assessment and transportation. He said that his new commander-in-chief had ordered the resettlement program reinitiated in order to keep the camps in line. I asked him if there was rebellion in the camps. Ariadne shook his head. He said there was the warlord of the Hielistos, Jaguaquara. That was left mysterious. And yes, yes, there was one more revelation. It comes to me now as I think of myself on the quay before that monolithic wall of rock, Ariadne and his men ferrying new wretches ashore. Ariadne was trying to explain in bad Spanish why it was that the resettlement program could be delayed. He gave me the name of the new Ice Cross commander-in-chief; he said, “Lykantropovin first means to bend the Hielistos, and only then turn to the camps.”
(The Norse said, all names are names. I do not challenge the epigram, only addend that some names are warnings: Lykantropovin, the face of the wolf.)
Golgotha had a dozen huskies from the original supply by the Ice Cross. I added Iceberg and her large brood, took on apprentice dog-handlers, notably Gleb the Hewer, who had run dogs in the Ukraine as a boy. We built sleds from ship’s wreckage, fashioned cargo runs up the glacier, north and southwest, to the best rookeries.
The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica Page 35