My guess is that the signatories of the Treaty of Good Hope recognized the threat of the privateers that summer, began negotiations that would culminate at Cadiz in another New Benthamite treaty called The Peace of the Frontier. I am piecing this together from many informants I had long after Grandfather’s version, and I am aware I could be distorting the history. This is what I have, and I support it with my assumption that the secret war of the privateers must have been a large drain on resources also taxed to feed the wretches. The Peace of the Frontier is said to have worked eventually in warmer climes. It did not in the South. The situation in the Antarctic deteriorated over the next year to the point that when the New Benthamites finally did withdraw their monies from the privateers, the privateers did not necessarily withdraw. No longer bothered by orders and strategies from republican masters, they shed their disguise to become the obvious: pirates. Yes, most of the original pirates had been slain by ice and men, and yes, some of the pirates struck out for the Pacific to find new sponsors. Yet many in the South, and many different kinds of pirates, chose to remain.
It interests me to suggest why. Perhaps, like Grootgibeon, they had accounts to settle. And perhaps the darkness had become so broad that there were no more reasons and no more ends; the means were all. I have explained this thought in Grandfather’s metaphor: that there was no peace, no sanctuary, no refuge, nor even an ark. I want to restate this more suitably here. I declare that the pirates in the South, their ranks first filled from renegades and then swelled by wretches they conscripted as well as preyed upon, were moved to realize that when there is no refuge under the sun, what one calls one’s own place is worth all the will and cruelty one can give it. The South is a white desert, a nothingness. Nothing was all that was left to the pirates, and they would come to fight for it as if it were paradise. It has always been so with New Worlds, and writh the desperadoes, outcasts, and exiles that take them for their own. As in the North, so it would be in the South.
There is a still darker way of saying this. The Treaty of Good Hope had established the ice camps to give charity to the masses of wretches who would not quit, and it had also endowed the strongest of the wretched with weapons and a battleground, the Southern Ocean, to exist upon. Men turned pirate had been moved to taste human blood and had not been reviled. The Norse said, when the wolf tastes your flesh, consume it or be consumed by it. At Anvers Island, the abandoned privateers become bloodlustful pirates, the betrayed Ice Cross disciples, the enslaved conscripts from the exodus, all joined in their hatred for each other and for everyman. They were the wolf pack. They were the antithesis. Their minds were as wasted as the ice. They cursed themselves and the immediate representative of their fall to beastliness—the Ice Cross. What sense of the comedy could have moved the capitanes at Anvers Island the following summer (January 2001), as the Peace of the Frontier was signed at Cadiz, to convene themselves as what they called the Brotherhood of the Ice. In Spanish tongue, the Hielistos were born.
The Death of My Family
I must write of Peregrine’s death. I have known that it was coming these long years I have been making this confession. Now that I am here, it seems the work of a Norse riddle-master. It does not feel believable. I know this means that I have not accepted it, and I also know that setting it down is a move toward understanding what has happened to me. I must kill my father and my family again.
Without Grootgibeon’s protection, and because of Israel’s rashness, Cleopatra lost power to keep my family and hers from the severe changes at Elephant Island. They remained in the oldest section of the base, Elephant Main, and were spared the deprivations suffered by the wretches in the new camps that grew around them. Through that winter, the rations were cut, the discipline disintegrated, medicine and sanitation collapsed. Cleopatra was approached by, or approached, several Ice Cross officers, and did barter herself for privileges. The most powerful of the lot was a Chilean, Fives O’Birne. I knew the man. I killed the man. He was dishonor itself, and small.
Something happened at winter’s end (September 1999) that took Fives O’Birne away, or moved him to desert Cleopatra. He might have sold her to the officer’s brothel at Elephant Main. Cleopatra was pregnant then, very advanced, by Grootgibeon. At least, it is my belief that it was Grootgibeon’s child, and it was his belief. Cleopatra never denied it, and that was ever her way of saying yes. Cleopatra does not seem to have been bothered by her pregnancy at first, and neither were the Ice Cross officers. A peculiarity of life in the camps was that birth was considered the epitome of eroticism. But then, at the end of her term, Cleopatra suffered a breakdown. She might have tried to kill herself. More likely some internal change gave her clarity and permitted her to see her fate. Her joy was canceled absolutely, became rage, and she turned it on herself. She stopped caring, lost weight, became glassy-eyed. The tolerable conditions in the brothel did not help. Soon after, Cleopatra was either returned to her mother, or returned herself.
Cleopatra was dying. To keep her alive, Charity Bentham and Peregrine Ide roused themselves in what was a suicide pact. I have few of the facts, because the only survivor I had to ask other than Cleopatra was Babe, mute witness; Grandfather only heard the details secondhand from Orri before he died. Cleopatra told me, “They fed me.” I suppose that Charity and Peregrine starved themselves, forcing their rations on Cleopatra. Still, that would not have been enough if Cleopatra had determined to die, and I must also suppose that Charity used some motherly power over her daughter. Grandfather said that Thord, Orri, Guy, and Earle also tried to share their food but were prevented by Charity from sacrificing to the extreme. In the end, the magnificent ambition of Charity Bentham raised itself up and directed her own consumption and that of her beloved Peregrine. Theirs was not a quick finish, for they had to keep themselves alive long enough to get Cleopatra and her baby, a boy, through the spring and the deprivations exacerbated by privateer raids against the Ice Cross. Peregrine died first, sometime around my twenty-sixth birthday. He was fifty-one years old.
Charity Bentham lingered into early summer. She was the last restraint on Israel. He had to watch not only Peregrine die but also Molly and his son, Solomon, wither to paralysis. Charity and Molly died in the same week. The camp continued to decay. There was a rebellion about the time of the new year. Orri told Grandfather that Israel was involved peripherally. Cleopatra told Lazarus that Israel was a ringleader.
I do not know what happened. Nor do I know why Israel would have been so foolish to rebel against the Ice Cross. There was said to have been a massacre inside one of the satellite camps. Other than that, the record is silent. Orri could never tell Grandfather more than that Israel and Earle were sent away to the “plague camp.” That was the wretches’ way of saying Clarence West. When did Guy die, and where? And what happened to Thord? Orri loved Thord more than life. He did not speak of him. Cleopatra did not know what happened to the men, because she was separated from them when Fives O’Birne returned to Elephant Main in early summer (January 2000). She was returned to the brothel, or returned herself, soon after Charity’s death, taking with her Israel’s son, Solomon, and her own, Cesare, making their welfare a condition of her obedience. She was also permitted a protector, Babe, who buried his mother and then transferred his heroic allegiance to his sister. Orri survived the rebellion by accident, was transferred to the male aspect of the brothel.
I cannot reach any farther into the darkness and locate the circumstances of my family’s murder. I cannot even suppose. Peregrine and Israel were alive. Then they were dead. I have no more to say. I want to bash something, some source, and force it to tell me Peregrine’s last thoughts, Israel’s reason for rebellion, Guy’s and Thord’s last words—and Earle, how could he be killed? I realize I am not the last to lose everyone he loves to a pit. I also realize that a search for cause can too easily become a justification for revenge. I know that there abound examples in history of when a people, a way of life, was swept from the earth in such a way that nothing was left. I
am insufficient legacy. I want a marker raised, more, an arch of triumph built across the whole of Elephant Island, and on it I want recorded the accusations of the murdered, the defense of the murderers, the verdict of Grandfather’s Lord God. I know hundreds of thousands died on the ice that year, mothers and fathers of children who were never granted the luck I have enjoyed. That is no comfort. I want my family remembered. Consider how pathetic it is to have left only what I have related: Peregrine and Charity starved themselves to death; Israel, Guy, Earle, and Thord were enslaved and made to disappear because they stood up against cruelty; Molly, cheery, poetic Molly, died despite everything Israel could do. This is all I have. Yes, I can wrap myself in Norse fatalism—dead is dead, mourn and keep on. I was not permitted mourning. There are no graves. There are no witnesses to tell the story. Peregrine was fifty-one years old. At that age, his own father, who was also my grandfather, was a well-pleased American, with three sons, my uncles, who were likely well-fed, regretful of the prodigal Peregrine. By accident, by bad luck, Peregrine’s path took him into penury, crime, exile, and abandonment. I am not saying that Peregrine was special—though he was to me—or that he deserved better than the multitude of wretches born into a poverty and hopelessness that I have never known. I am saying that such a man, my father, was born as one of the most fortunate creatures on earth, an American eldest son, and yet it was possible that he came to vanish into a silent, cold nothing, and there is no marking of his passing. He was created in joy, yet consumed in hatred. And why? How was it possible? Who was responsible? Show him, them, it, to me, and I shall make them account. But there is no one to show me, and there is nothing to be shown. I pound at silence.
“The Whore of Babylon”
My family vanished. Cleopatra, Babe, Orri, and the two babies survived. Cleopatra took charge of their fate. Her transformation was far from complete. She was cautious, guarded, a result of her starvation and recovery, knowing that if she did not act effectively, she could lose her will again. She was beginning to build her resources: she understood that in order to survive, she had to become as ruthless as possible, without moral limits on what she could do. As a first step, she made herself the center of a resourceful group of women and men in the brothel, including Orri. Babe made Cleopatra special, her armed might. What gave this clique added authority was that the brothel at Elephant Island was less a slave chamber than a temple of hope—in it, desire was possible, and it came to represent a mystical power to the Ice Cross and the wretches.
I do not understand how Cleopatra managed Fives O’Birne. He was a low, sly, ugly little man who might have been a double agent for one of the South American republics. I puzzle if Cleopatra was his mistress at all, instead a weapon he found and used. He permitted her unusual license in the brothel. He sent her to other Ice Cross officers as a gift. And yet he coveted Cleopatra’s strength, probably assassinated several Ice Cross officers who abused her, unless that was Babe at Fives O’Birne’s direction. Sometime in early 2000, Cleopatra became the consort of one of the new senior commanders at Elephant Island, Jaguaquara, a cagey, able, well-blooded Chilean. I cannot ignore my suspicion that Fives O’Birne directed this turn also. Jaguaquara, who called himself Islas Desolation, was then thought a brilliant butcher, veteran of several campaigns against the pirates in the Atlantic and Pacific. He was also thought one of the most merciful and competent Ice Crossmen, responsible for rebuilding camps destroyed by pirates and for improving conditions at Elephant Island.
Cleopatra’s motives are lost to me, especially since she left Jaguaquara’s quarters and moved back into the brothel that fall, while Grootgibeon and Grandfather were defecting at Anvers. This does not seem to have been a punishment.
Cleopatra only sketched this for Lazarus; knowing we were curious, she rationed her secrets. Cleopatra returned voluntarily to the brothel, because there she and Fives O’Birne had a network of spies, procurers, agents, that required her presence at the center of the web. Cleopatra also had several other Ice Crossmen, whose names are lost to me, and it would seem that from the brothel she was able to dispense herself like a poison, not to kill but to enslave the enslavers. She shaped the brothel consciously into an institution, with many births, many pregnancies, taking in children as servants, granting privileges to some and taking them away from others, including the leadership among the wretched in the camps. There was a powerful priest named Barracuedes who opposed her reach, who tried to turn the Ice Cross commanders against her. He was soon sent to Clarence West and disappeared into charity. I have heard many stories of her machinations, so many that I now understand that to her everything lascivious and voluptuous was attributed, as if she were a goddess. A goddess of what? Fertility, yes, but also dread. She groomed herself for purpose. She was beautiful, educated, merciless, and, I once believed, resolute. I once believed that she was maintaining as many portals as possible because one of them might be her way out. Now I puzzle if she did not waver, if the authority she gained at Elephant Island, the imperial corruption of her power, did not become her cause. Her portals were murderers. Her route was murder. But where did she think she was going? What was she reaching for? She enhanced herself as grandly, as fantastically, as mythologically as possible. She described herself as “the queen of slaves.” Grandfather called her “the whore of Babylon.”
I do not want to overstate her achievements. Cleopatra suffered her prostitution. If it is true that her father’s murder buried her childhood and her faith in goodness, then it is also probably true that her mother’s murder interred her heart. Cleopatra was not heartless. Her grief was frozen in Charity’s grave. It was the loss of that very grave that scarred Cleopatra in some sinister way I could never understand. It happened about a year after Charity’s death. Cleopatra had required Jaguaquara to bury Charity in the graveyard reserved for the Ice Crossmen. A series of eruptions opened a fissure that crawled along the shelf for weeks, then ripped through several barracks and swallowed the graveyard. Cleopatra did not think this an accident. She blamed the Ice Cross. It might have been why she sent a message to the newly constituted Hielistos base at Anvers Island, to Grootgibeon, whom Fives O’Birne had told her had defected. That may be apocryphal, because the timing is not precise. That fissure did seem to cut into Cleopatra’s will. She lost her control for a moment, turning against Jaguaquara, who tried to appease her. The loss of her mother’s grave also explains Cleopatra’s obsessive fear of earthquakes on Anvers Island much later. It cost me dearly once, as she interrupted a campaign to move her household from my hall to one of her own, which she claimed was beyond the grasp of Satan’s Seat. I know this is confusing detail. What is important here is that Cleopatra had a breakdown at Elephant Island when she was at the apex of her power, when she could have used her authority to get out of the South. If I could say that she became mad, then her conduct would be at once excusable and unanalyzable. Instead, she, “queen of slaves,” “whore of Babylon,” became logically and coldly crazed, shrewd in her capriciousness, deadly in her fits.
More crucial to her fate, she was tormented by her bastard son, Cesare; at least, I can suppose so by her conduct with regard to the father, Grootgibeon. It is possible that Grootgibeon did not know of his son when he went over to the Hielistos. It is also possible that Cleopatra’s message (if it happened that way) did shake him, make him reckless. I do not choose to and have learned not to be quick to discount the incredible in the South. Cleopatra’s power has appeared to me to be as unearthly as Antarctica. If anyone could have sent a message from the brothel at Elephant Island more than three hundred miles across ice and ash, it was she. The camps were sieves by then, wretches pouring in and leaking out, the Ice Cross battling the Hielistos, transport ships and merchantmen diverted, pirated, bartered between camps. Whole camps were exterminated by nature, only to be resurrected with new arrivals.
Finally, in the summer of the year 2001, Grootgibeon led a murder raid against the Ice Cross on Elephant Island. He actually captured Ele
phant Main for a few hours. Grandfather credited Grootgibeon with inventing the strategy then that I later perfected, if that is the word: combat by massacre. The victorious is as reduced as the defeated. However, if one commands filthy little creatures, half-men who fight for no gain at all, one can waste them in great number to gain a distinct goal. Grootgibeon’s prize was Cleopatra.
Anvers Island
I must speak of the worst possible, of the third realm in Grim Fiddle’s cosmology. As there was a new and aggrandized Asgard, home of silent gods, as there was a new and reduced Midgard, hovel of wailing wretches, so there was a new Niflheim, realm of the murderous dead. Grootgibeon stole Cleopatra from the edge of Midgard and carried her into the pit of the Hielistos, Anvers Island.
The Norse were inexact about Niflheim, which means Misty Hel, because their sense was that its forbiddenness should remain unspeakable. I emphasize that the Norse did not think of it as a punishment. It was not meant to be an equivalent of the Christian concept of Hell. There was no distinction made between the afterlife of those who died justly and those who died as criminals. Dead was dead, and the corpse was thought to travel to dwell in Niflheim for eternity. Yes, it is true that dead heroes traveled to dwell in Valhalla for eternity; however, that was such a small and elite number that their fate was not meant to condemn those who died by accident, disease, old age, and who abided in Niflheim.
Niflheim was said to be nine days’ ride downward from Midgard into a dessicated cold that extinguished joy. Anvers Island, a forty-mile-by-twenty-mile juggernaut of towering glaciers, thunderous peaks, fume-spitting cones, was four days’ hard sail from Elephant Island, southwestward across the ice-streaked Bransfield Strait, through the ashen fog of the Gerlache Strait, to the fortress originally built by the privateers on the southwestern shore, at Arthur Harbor. Niflheim had a citadel, called Hel for the halfserpent half-woman, black and white, scaly and sad, who ruled there. Hel’s mansion, Eljundir, was built beyond the rock Drop to Destruction. The fortress at Arthur Harbor was blasted into the rockface about the remains of the weather station, was sprawled before the tumultuous motherlode of the eruptions, Satan’s Seat, set back on the peninsula of Graham Land several hundred miles farther southwest. The Norse said Hel’s servants were a man, Ganglati, and a woman, Ganglot, who snaked about so slowly they did not seem to move. Anvers Island’s lava carved steaming cracks in the blackened glaciers. The Norse called Hel’s plate Hunger, and Hel’s knife Famine, and her pallet Sickbed, hung with trappings called Glittering Misfortune. There were many dark names for the Hielistos at Anvers; and the reason so many of them were small was that there were as many women and children as men: the women ate less, weathered the cold as well, were as brutal as the males. And while Anvers Island’s Hielistos had almost endless supplies—not only robbing the Ice Cross and the religious societies but also plundering the merchantmen and, at first, receiving large shipments from the southern republics that sponsored the privateers—it is not an exaggeration to say that the Hielistos’ plate was hunger, their knife was famine, their dwelling in the caves was sickbed. The caves at Anvers Island were certainly hung with glimmering misfortune, the bounty from a hundred raids on the camps.
The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica Page 39