It was on one of those sled runs, after the new year, that I should have discovered a clue to my heart’s desire, did not. There had been odd happenstance the day before on the route to the sea leopards on the southern shore. One of our men was missing. I told Germanicus to increase sentries on the near shore of Aurora Bay. Gleb the Hewer went up, sent back word that I should come for a look. I mistakenly let Mosquite know I was going out. He had come both to despise and rely upon my authority over the internees, and insisted one of his thugs accompany me as bodyguard. He sent the little one we called Pistole, a murderer and suspected torturer, who was frightened of me and did not concern me. I took one sled and four men, and after some delays due to slides, located Gleb the Hewer, sent his team back, and continued toward the rookery, where there was a gang of my sealers under Ugly Leghorn scrambling the beach of a nearly-played-out hunting ground.
It was a turbulent, ashen day, the sunlight turning the sea fog orange, the wind offshore, white caps covering the Bransfield Strait. My lead dog kept veering from the track, disturbed by the quaking. Iceberg stayed ahead with her huge son, Beow, as scouts. The mountain above us was ice-barren from the slides to about three hundred feet, was also dotted with blue-eyed cormorants and Cape pigeons, an occasional fulamar, nesting there out of the wind. Ahead of us and up were circling skuas—the vultures of Antarctica, for they are predatory hawks, will attack men, in my experience are associated with battles on the ice. The Ice Cross said when one saw a skua, one saw the eyes of the Hielistos.
We were just a mile short of the beach, at the edge of the glacier, when we heard Iceberg let out a howl. We had poor visibility, went to the defensive. My men were armed with harpoons and knives. Pistole had an automatic weapon. Gleb the Hewer and I ran up, Pistole followed at a distance. We found Iceberg and Beow standing legs firm in the gravel, heads back, yapping like talking, eyes searching the face of the mountain. Before them, nearly buried in a small crevasse of an ice formation, were two corpses—or what was left, arms and legs hacked off. I shall explain later, but that was the way Hielistos—some Hielistos—killed. The dead were not from our camp. Pistole panicked, “Mother of God! They come! Mother of God!” And then he fled.
“Ya nee guveroo, comrade, no ploka, ochen ploka,” said Gleb the Hewer, meaning that he knew this was bad. Beow started up the mountain; Iceberg barked him to halt, then snapped at me purposefully. I stood in the direction of a shelf overhead, took my harpoon and drove it into the ice. I had some notion I could bargain with them. I listened, heard the wind, the sea, the squawking skuas, and nothing else. Gleb the Hewer breathed hard. It is true that one can smell men in the Antarctica; one’s own smell is impossible, but a gang of men is a wrenching odor. He shook his head, pointed down to the rookery, meaning we had to get our men in. I waved him to wait, squinted as hard as I could up the pass. The Ice Cross also said if you can see them, they are not Hielistos.
Iceberg growled at me. I was wrong not to obey her. I had followed less tangible premonitions. I knew my error when I got back to the team and Pistole commanded us at gunpoint to return to the camps. We left the hunters to their ends.
That evening, Golgotha was awash with the frenzy of doom. Pistole had told Mosquite he had seen Hielistos, a lie that sent the Little Brothers into their nightmares. They clattered on the radio for the Ice Cross. I held my own council, and decided for caution. We pleaded with Mosquite for firearms. There was a riot in the most desperate part of the camp—the new arrivals and a party of Brazilians—and the Little Brothers fired into the barracks. Golgotha’s population was reduced to less than three thousand after the winter’s losses, and two thirds of these were children and the dying. At most, I had two hundred able-bodied men and women as fighters. Mosquite sent a message to me to get my best people away from the camp and not to return until after the attack. He said the Hielistos wanted food, weapons, recruits, and would not pursue us once they got what they wanted from the camp. Then he and his brethren retreated within the camp, to caves where I presumed they had always retreated when the Hielistos came. Germanicus and Motherwell, with Cavalobranco’s men, did what they could to set our defenses. There were so many approaches, we decided to defend the axis of the camp and risk sorties on our flanks. Germanicus took care to hide Jane and the children within as best he could. We pulled in our sentries from King James. It was a long night of defeated decisions. I remained aloof from the particulars, felt increasingly that I was making, had made, a profound miscalculation—that out there on the glacier I had missed my opportunity. I believed myself responsible for our peril. When I had looked up the face of the mountain, I had felt eyes on me, my own eyes.
The Ice Cross did not answer our pleas; but then, this was not of itself significant, because radio transmission in the Antarctic is haphazard. The weather worsened as the sun moved toward the horizon, long blue shadows across Aurora Bay. We prayed for a gusting snowstorm to pick up the sea and provide us a natural redoubt. The wind did increase, not enough, and as I made my rounds along the trench, I heard the sealers giving instructions to each other like eulogies. There was one rumor about the Hielistos that racked even them: that they ate the dead.
The waiting was of course the worst of it. I did not want to talk with Lazarus, or Longfaeroe, and felt too black to try to bolster Germanicus in his vigilance. I walked away from all of them, my two bodyguards trailing me, and made my way down through the tunnels to the service hut. I wanted to be with my friends, my wolves.
I meant to sit with Iceberg and her brood until the alarm was sounded. The kennel was a long, low-slung structure, with no more than a four-foot clearance, located a quarter mile down the peninsula from the camp entrance. There were wretches hiding even there, and I had my bodyguards clear the place, told them to wait outside for me. Grim Fiddle was absolute at Golgotha. He showed no mercy. He gave no charity except for self-interest. My face was fit for my audience, wolves with their blood up, howling and snapping. They were arranged in crisscrossing lines, tethered on short ropes to stakes in order to keep them from each other. I moved in a crouch along the empty stakes. I waved my harpoon at them, inciting them to wilder fits. I yelled nonsense at them. Grim Fiddle preached fury to his wolves. Then I tired of my taunting sport and turned to Iceberg, demanded to know if she remembered her sister. I did ask, was Goldberg on the ice? Was Goldberg with Mord Fiddle? She snapped, yanked at her chain, unsentimental. I thought, the last living thing to link me with my childhood, my blood kin, and it was an animal slipped to the beast. She wanted release; they all did, maddened at being chained from their instinct to run. We men might be confounded by threat, might grasp at vainglory. My wolves knew murder was at the door.
The alarm came in course, with distant cannon-fire. A runner came down to me, and my guards alerted me that Germanicus needed me up top, that King James was cut adrift and afire. In my disgust I shouted at them, “There is no ark, no ark either, no ark! Grandfather, hear me now, no ark to be had!” It is difficult to recreate the inanity of my self-pity. One might think that after so many instances of danger in twelve years in darkness, Grim Fiddle would have been girded before such catastrophe, would have achieved some tolerance of the comedy. He was, in fact, flat weary with bitterness, pressed flat by the weight of his pretension to rule, not serve, to rule the wretched. I looked at those three men, wasted, bent, taking their power from mine. I thought, I despise you hopeless creatures. I realize now my feeling was worse, selfhatred. I told them to get on, that I would follow. I turned to issue some pompous last testimony to my wolves, thought again. I pried open the outside hatch with my harpoon, moved down the lines with my knife, and cut them free. They sprinted for the ice. When I came to Iceberg, I thought upon killing her—all the sort of mercy there seemed left to me—instead cut her line and said good-bye.
Iceberg had more heart than Grim Fiddle—part beast, yes, but also part of my luck. It so happened that her instinct to survive was in league with her desire to regain her own blood kin; and it s
o happened that her high dreams were coincident with mine. She went to the hatch with Beow, halted, came back at me, snapping and pleading. That was a Norse wolf with purpose. She commanded me. I studied the hatch, also the tunnel back to Germanicus. It is truth that my bloodlust was up with hers, so was my self-serving fear, and that when I should have most held to my responsibility to my people, I quit them, and reason, for inspiration, or portent, or plain egotism. Grim Fiddle was cursed at Port Stanley; Grim Fiddle was reluctant on South Georgia; Grim Fiddle was rash on King James; Grim Fiddle was cowed at Golgotha.
And what use is there to explore my cowardice? I ran with the pack. I fled to my destiny in my own way. Did I hear Goldberg? I did not. Did I have a plan to get to Greenwich Island and find Grandfather? I did not. I was a low-minded coward, and nothing more. I got outside on the escarpment and fled down to the windward shore of the peninsula. The wind from the north off the Scotia Sea was whipping ice into the air; it was like a snowstorm with overlarge flakes swirling into the crevasses and into my eyes. The wolves had scattered right and left, some silhouetted atop high ground. The barking and screams told me the Hielistos were discovered, though I could not see them. I made my way deliberately up the closest ridgeback to look down upon the waterline on the Bransfield Strait. There were several small cutters beached in concert, fires lit before them, small figures scampering in concert. This gave me cause to reconsider the assumption that the Hielistos were disorganized pirates without tactics or discipline. Out in the Strait there was an imminent sea battle. Two white cutters were running through the fogbank, coming about to avoid a jade-colored berg. Our rescuers had come after all, and what awaited them was a squadron of open boats filled with Hielistos, the sunrise and snow-gale at their backs. Golgotha had been bait. This was the jaw closing. Was there rebellion? There was Jaguaquara.
I wanted to see the face of my enemy. I screamed down at them, taunted them in all my languages—polylingual blasphemer. I pranced along the ridgeback, cursing the wretched of the earth. I found a suiting hollow, my back against a boulder formation, the ground slick with lichens and bird droppings. The ground mist made my landscape seem a cloud. I thundered and howled, and when my voice cracked with strain, I leaned back and waited. I did not want to die. Why had I come out here? The answer was sad—because I thought myself special and was rewarded for my election with meaninglessness. I was undone by my own pride, had little strength to lift my harpoon. I thought—how queer it is that one thinks one sees clearly when in such hysteria—that it was fitting judgment upon Grim Fiddle that he would not end as either hero or berserker, instead as weakling, weeper, deserter, betrayer. They started throwing rocks, tumbled from their holes, filthy creatures without firearms, come to stone a deceived man. I saw the humor, did not laugh. Nothing was to be left me, not even the boast that I had freed slavish beasts, for then a wolf flung itself off an incline and bounded to my side. It was Beow, the tip of a spear in his flank—brave Beow come to stand with a shirker. And when they finally closed, from all sides, Beow fought hero-well and died for it, and I fought miserably and did not. I lost my harpoon in one, my knife in another, my dignity with my terror. I have the memory that before I went down, I had one before me, and ripped at its face, to find the eyes of a child, or woman. I saw my enemy and was shamed as I was pummeled still.
I did not lose my wits, or perhaps I did and only have the delusion of being dragged down to the beach, helpless, not unlike the sensation I had the night at the King’s castle. I believed that I deserved whatever end imaginable. I believed Golgotha overrun.
I was thrown facedown in a heap before one of the bonfires. They did not bind me, kept me down by holding harpoons against my back, at the nape of my neck. I could taste my blood, was restrained from wiping clear my vision. There were Hielistos very close by, excited muttering either in celebration or anticipation. I vomited soon after, could not breathe well with cracked ribs. The fire baked one arm, the wind threw icy spray up to numb my legs. What I try to convey is that I felt adrift in a sea of endings, in shock certainly, also in pity. I pitied Grim Fiddle, not because he had dishonored himself, but because he was stupid. The harpoon was pushed farther into my nape, and the pain cleared my thoughts. I could not recall a single prayer of forgiveness. I heard men and authority. It felt endless waiting, might have only been moments since I was captured. There was a command in Spanish, and another in German. The circle about me opened. From the end of the earth I heard that voice, like far thunder, much reduced, wavering. He told them to get me up. They could not, only rolled me over. I could not see him clearly. I said, “Is it true, Grandfather?” At least, that is my memory. I might have thought this, and I am not sure now what I meant by it. He made no reply, though there was one, the yelping of a white wolf and a gold wolf spinning in aged play amid attendants and beside an elaborately fashioned sled, upon which, in the splendor of a Norse outlaw, lay Mord Fiddle, white beard, too white face, blue eyes.
My Queen
THE Hielistos called Grandfather Barbablanca—White-beard.
They spoke in fear. Grandfather was not in command of the Hielistos’ attack at Golgotha, was nevertheless a powerful supernumerary. The capitan de los Hielistos was a South American named Iacovella, an able soldier despite his reputation as the Butcher of Deception Island, a man I would later enlist in my leap to warlord at Anvers Island, and would still later abandon to his enemies among the Hielistos. That day at Golgotha, Iacovella spared me and my South Georgians. He had come this time neither for food nor recruits, rather to slaughter the Ice Cross, and once that was accomplished—two white cutters in flames, their crews cut up for skuas, fish, men—Iacovella withdrew his forces under the cover of a big storm from the north. Grandfather remained at Golgotha with his four-dozen bodyguards, and with a surprise—Wild Drumrul (several toes and fingers gone, but sound for his year in captivity), now promoted to second officer on the rebuilt and heavily armed Angel of Death, Grandfather’s stout wave-cutter on the ice.
There was no peace for me in the delivery of Golgotha. Grandfather was dying. We carried him inside the camp, laid him out in one of the barracks. The Little Brothers were no more threat; with the Hielistos’ help I had them disarmed and chained. Grandfather’s Hielistos were eager to obey me. They regarded me with an awe that derived from their veneration of Grandfather; also, they were very afraid for the life of their protector, Barbablanca. Their first officer, a Russian whaler who called himself Kuressaare, begged us to save Grandfather. He explained in exaggerated detail what peril awaited Angel of Death if it were to return without Barbablanca to the Hielistos fortress at Anvers Island, which I knew roughly to be in the Palmer archipelago, several days sail across the Bransfield Strait. His men echoed his woes to my sealers, groaned of Jaguaquara and figures unknown to me such as Fives O’Birne, Hector the Fat.
Grandfather spoke briefly before he collapsed from exhaustion. He assured me there would be time later for that worry. He said Lord God had returned me to him, and he must pray his thanksgiving in solitude. He said it was his time to die: I was not to leave him; I was not to disagree; I was not to let them keep him alive with medicines. He was very reduced, a waste of a man, bones broken and badly healed, lips, ears, nose, and eyelids all scar tissue. He could not walk, and we were never able to feed him more than broth. Annabel Donne studied him as he slept and said he was a miracle. Kuressaare stood guard with Goldberg; he told me Barbablanca s appearance should not fool us: Barbablanca always got up to take his revenge.
That first night, I sat by Grandfather as he slept, held his hand, knew that Kuressaare was wrong: Mord Fiddle would never get up. Germanicus and some of the other senior sealers came in, more to get a close look at Grandfather than to consult with me. The whole camp soon learned that a legend was among us—Lazarus’s doing, probably, though Grandfather’s Hielistos were quick to boast. Later, Longfaeroe approached, asking if he might offer his thanks for our survival. As he sang his psalms, Grandfather appeared to smile in
his sleep. With his eyes closed, he was a corpse. By morning, however, almost as Kuressaare had said, Grandfather was awake, and if not sanguine, certainly returned to an extraordinary measure of resolve. He waited for my lead. I took it, asking one question, “Are they all dead?”
At that, he began to talk, of Heaven and Hell, of the war of shadows and the “whore of Babylon,” and most completely of Satan’s Seat and “Satan’s Own.” He was half a month talking and dying. In that time, Grandfather’s metaphors fell upon me, and I suffered their burden, first the confusion of them and finally the revelation in them. In pursuit of Grim Fiddle, Grandfather had walked through the darkness, and he survived just long enough to tell the tale.
And yet, if I were to report straight out what Grandfather told me at Golgotha—and I remember it as acutely as the cold—it would undermine my purpose. I do not want this account to become so heaped with mystery that the truth is lost. I must first speak clearly of the ice camps. And so I defer briefly from Grandfather’s tale. Grim Fiddle has his own mind.
I cannot conceive how, at this late date, any decent man or woman cannot know something of the ice camps. I also worry that such selective ignorance might still be possible, even fashionable, as I was told was the case of crimes against humanity in both my father’s and grandfather’s times. Israel once told me that the larger the crime, the more likely it is to be argued to have been an inevitability, the more readily it is to be recalled and recorded not as outrage but as fate. I remember how Israel said it, speaking of his people, the Jews, “Kill ten, it’s murder. Make ten thousand vanish in the night, it’s a phenomenon. Obliterate a million, it’s the Devil’s work. Remind them of what’s been done, you’re called a conspirator, or worse, a storyteller.”
The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica Page 36