Grootgibeon was not the leader of the Hielistos. It seems to have been at first an oligarchical structure, what Lazarus called tribal confederalism. The Spanish-speaking predominated. Grootgibeon’s well-armed cutter, and his flotilla’s commanders, made him a leading capitan. His murder raid on Elephant Island propelled him to the fore of the ranks. Afterward he established himself and his men, along with Cleopatra and her courtlike brothel, in the best-built sections of the fortress. They had slaves as they were slaves. Grandfather said that the fortress then, before I rebuilt it, faced seaward, cut between the sheer rock walls vulnerable to bombardment from cutters laying off Bonaparte Point. It was thought to be impregnable. It was not. However, it seemed so for the Ice Cross that summer. Either the Ice Cross was completely on the defensive, or else the answer to why Grootgibeon and Cleopatra were able to establish themselves securely and to begin to gather the diverse warlords of the South into their control was that Anvers Island for the Ice Cross, like Niflheim for the Norse, was thought to be magical—bad magic, cursed magic, supernatural. It was a sulfurous waste. It was a realm of pirates. This combined with the madness there to transform it for the Hielistos and the Ice Cross into a place of depravity. They seemed monstrous, so they acted monstrously. This last should not shock now. I have prepared the way.
As the Norse spoke of the immortal dragon, Nidhogg, who dwelled in Fiflheim, gnawing the roots of the eternal tree Yggdrasil and sucking the blood from men and then eating their corpses, so at Anvers Island there was the spirit of Nidhogg: cannibalism. Grandfather said Grootgibeon tried to contain the worst of it, more by shifting command from the worst privateers to the Ice Cross defectors than by forbidding the Hielistos from eating the dead. This does not explain the phenomenon for me, for when I ruled, Nidhogg remained unkillable. I found that no amount of food, no guarantee of continued supplies through the black winters, could keep some men and women from cannibalism. It would seem to be part of the beastliness that remains in men from antediluvian times; when famine and hopelessness and rage take hold, slumbering Nidhogg awakens, hungry.
Barbablanca
In such a place, it was the cruel-minded and hardhearted who gained. I speak here of Mord Fiddle. Grandfather would interrupt his story with a defense of his conduct that was actually a self-serving justification. He said he believed since leaving Stockholm that Lord God was punishing him for his great sin of abandoning me at birth, was testing his resolve to make amends. He believed that when he lost me at Mead’s Kiss, Lord God tested him by casting him among “Satan’s Own.” Grandfather believed that no matter what he encountered, it was a test of his will not to abandon me again to suffer the evil in order to find me and release me from the darkness. His righteousness in seeking me was what he believed was his armor against his Satan.
I think it telling that Grandfather wrould not actually join in the butchery. He would stand by; he would countenance anything; he would not actually kill. The capitanes de los Hielistos did not resent Grandfather’s passivity, regarded him with awe. His manner was ghostly. He thought he was in Hell and moved like it, with the aura of the damned. Grootgibeon would defer to him, and none of the others dared challenge him. More importantly, Cleopatra continued to honor her bargain and gave Grandfather the protection of her corruption. After the raid on Elephant Island, Grandfather refitted Angel of Death, captured in the attack, and entered into his mission. He became a seeker. The Hielistos thought of Barbablanca as a charm. From what he described to me of the battles, he would hang back in Angel of Death until the carnage was complete, and then he and his attendants would move over the landscape, praying and prying, looking “into their hearts.” And what was he seeking? The obvious answer is Grim Fiddle. I think there was more to it. I suggest he was also looking for a sign, a message from his Lord God, that would confirm for him that what Mord Fiddle was doing, and seeing, was as wrong as the Minister of Fire must have known it was. He permitted his search to blind him. How else to explain how a man who had seen the darkness long before any reasonable man had known what was coming could then have let himself become lost in that darkness?
The proof of what I say is that when Grandfather found me, the scales lifted from his eyes. His self-deceit began to kill him. Kuressaare said that Barbablanca had collapsed before. The profound distinction at Golgotha was that while telling me what he had done and seen those seven years in the darkness, he reconsidered his conduct, and it shriveled him. I suppose now that such wasting away had begun before our meeting on the beach, had begun when word of the capture of a man who was Wild Drumrul reached Grandfather at Anvers. When he finally got Wild Drumrul (captured in the attack of the Hielistos on King James) before him at Anvers Island, Wild Drumrul could only tell Grandfather that I was last seen offshore Greenwich Island, but this had been sufficient for Grandfather to press his reconnaissance in the camps. When his men had taken Ugly Leghorn on the glacier, Grandfather had known exactly where I was. I was not wholly right about that day on the glacier; he had not been up there, only skuas and his Hielistos. He was too reduced by then to climb, had lain offshore in Angel of Death while the capitanes de los Hielistos closed their trap on the Ice Cross. All had been for Grandfather’s purpose: to blunt the Ice Cross in the neighborhood while he reached into Golgotha to find me. I was also not right about why there had been no Hielistos raids. From the moment Grandfather had heard I was in the South, Golgotha and several other camps on Roberts, Greenwich, and Livingston had been under the absolute protection of Barbablanca.
Cleopatra’s Luck
Grootgibeon’s murder raid on Elephant Island wrecked the infrastructure of the Ice Cross. Out of the carnage the Hielistos established bases on Deception, Smith, and Livingston islands. By March 2001, Jaguaquara was made acting commander-in-chief of the Ice Cross in the South Shetlands, more because he was the remnant than because of merit. He grew cautious, had the measure of the chaos, rebuilt Elephant Island as best he could, directed the Ice Cross to help the camps and to avoid the Hielistos’ cutters. His masters, the signatories of the Treaty of Good Hope and the Peace of the Frontier, disapproved completely, ordered him to obliterate the fortress at Anvers. Jaguaquara knew this was futile, and not just because of the worsening fall weather. The Hielistos were all-powerful, and Jaguaquara urged his masters to negotiate with Grootgibeon and the capitanes at Anvers.
It was nature that called the next tune. In early fall (April 2001), the volcanoes erupted with colossal explosions, burying many camps, poisoning the Bransfield Strait, pinning both sides in their caves. So much ash was heaved into the sky that it was said to be black. This blocked off the sunlight preternaturally early, which seems to have increased the reach of the pack. That was the winter the pack enwrapped South Georgia. In Antarctica the pack leveled everything, especially the success of the Hielistos. Nature had done what the Ice Cross could not have; the Hielistos ate themselves.
The following spring (November 2001), as me and mine were sent from South Georgia, a new commander-in-chief superseded Jaguaquara at Elephant Island, K. H. Lykantropovin. No one knew his real name; I still do not: Lykantropovin was said to be his selfchosen nom de guerre. There were many capitanes de los Hielistos who venerated Lykantropovin, some even defected to him; it was his reputation of limitless cruelty, so much that he could seem more a curse than a man. He was said to be the grandson of a Russian general deported once by the Soviets for suspicion of loyalty to Russia and not the revolution, who had been resurrected to fight the German blasphemers, then again sent into exile, north of the Arctic Circle, to the mines at Vorkuta. This might be fanciful; it is true that Vorkuta means “the people of the underworld.” The grandson, Lykantropovin, was no Russian devil, was no Russian saint. I think now he might have been the face of war. He certainly was a hired mass-murderer. I have learned that by the time he came to the South he was a veteran of murder campaigns against wretches in Africa and the Far East. He is best understood as an imperial errand boy, dutiful, ingenious, incorruptible t
hough seemingly corrupted completely by envy and ambition. Also, I think Lykantropovin was a sincere and even tormented fanatic. No man could have served so faithfully in such abysmal conditions if he lacked self-conviction. His god seemed order. His fist was iron. His face was said to be awful—a wound of the cold. He was physically pale, willowy, a fish-eater and insomniac. I never heard him talk. He remained to his end an indomitable Northman with a ghastly name and simple quest, to subdue his enemy. If even I seem admiring here, it is because I was, and remain; I shall have much more to say in course, for between us we slaughtered multitudes. For now, I declare my sympathy because he is in my face, Lykantropovin, as all men are, said the Norse, whom one has murdered.
Lykantropovin realized that his opportunity lay in going to the attack immediately. He first launched a campaign against nature, renovating the largest camps for heat and supplies, blasting away the glaciers that threatened the deep-water harbors at Elephant, King George, and Livingston. Lykantropovin knew that he had to provide the wretches security, not because he pitied them, but because he had to turn their sympathies, their hearts, from the Hielistos and to the charity of the Ice Cross. He also rebuilt Elephant Island into a fortress that dwarfed the one at Anvers. He then launched an armada of new ice-cutters and retook the South Shetlands from Clarence Island to Deception Island. The East German Ice Cross officer Dietjagger must have been part of that sweep. And while we South Georgians huddled at Golgotha, Lykantropovin sent a fleet against Anvers Island.
It was Cleopatra’s luck that now turned the hem side out, as the Norse said. It could not have been accident that Jaguaquara, relieved of his command and shunned as a lesser butcher, led the main assault at Anvers. Lykantropovin might not have known how crucial it is that a commander accompany his forces on the ice—loyalties can change as suddenly as the weather. His quick victories along the South Shetlands may have left him overconfident. From the fortress at Elephant Island, Lykantropovin directed Jaguaquara, by undependable courier and radio, against what he presumed to be the heart of the Brotherhood of the Ice, Grootgibeon and the Ice Cross defectors at Arthur Harbor.
Jaguaquara’s bombardment was expert, ripped the cliff face of the caves, drove the Hielistos into the deep fells. The pirate fleet was also blasted, and Jaguaquara closed the net with beach landings. The capitanes de los Hielistos, led by one called Hector the Fat, were ready to quit and pleaded with Grootgibeon to ask for terms. Jaguaquara sent Fives O’Birne into the fortress under a truce flag with Lykantropovin’s demand for unconditional surrender. Fives O’Birne told the capitanes they must accept chains, and insulted Grootgibeon, meaning to separate him from the pirates. At this, the capitanes recognized that Lykantropovin meant to slaughter them all. They also knew they could not break the siege. Grootgibeon made an honorable gesture, too late, too naive, and offered to travel to Elephant Island to negotiate a surrender. Fives O’Birne boasted that the only part of Grootgibeon he would take to Lykantropovin would be his head.
What was required to break the impasse was a heart that could tolerate any treachery. I suppose that Cleopatra’s namesake might have clasped her lover and her asp to her breast and sunk into glorious defeat. A name is a name, true, but some names, say I, are warning. Surrender was not Cleopatra Furore’s temperament. She rose to intervene in the Hielistos’ counsel. She descended from the fortress with Fives O’Birne, Babe, and her hall-guard, and went aboard Jaguaquara’s flagship.
Some said she stayed there a day, some said a gale blew from Graham Land and buried the siege in a tomb of ice. Nothing moved but the skuas in the sky and the tongues in the liars. Grandfather was not in the fortress, was trapped on Graham Land, and was not a reliable witness. He said that every capitan in the fortress knew that Cleopatra meant to sell everyone to everyone, the “whore of Babylon” forging a Babylonian treaty. Cleopatra was never helpful on the particulars. It was said that she directed Jaguaquara to inform Lykantropovin by radio that she would negotiate only with him, and not before he returned her mother’s corpse. If this was so, she must have known it was a mad demand. And did she actually, as I was told later, kiss Grootgibeon when she rose from the counsel table?
The end was metamorphic, all were melted and thrashed. Cleopatra, daughter of Brave New Benthamism, revealed the pagan root of the Charity Factor; in Christian terms, it is called Judas-talk. Jaguaquara surrendered himself and his fleet to Cleopatra. Cleopatra made Jaguaquara the warlord of Anvers Island. And as a taunt to the impotence of the Ice Cross to best the self-named queen of slaves, Cleopatra was said to have ordered a cutter sent to Lykantropovin, manned by the Ice Cross officers who had originally defected with Grootgibeon, each with his fingers cut off. Peter Grootgibeon’s corpse was nailed to the boom spar.
At Golgotha, the South Georgians shuddered before my translation of Grandfather’s story. After all, it was not of some distant country Grandfather spoke, but our world—Grootgibeon was dead less than a year. And Lazarus was so outraged at Cleopatra’s debasement that he tried to reject what he learned. He said Grandfather offered two distorted and farfetched portraits of Cleopatra: Either she was a conspirator rivaling a mythical empress, or else she was a pirate’s treasure. He said it was the most obvious slander Grandfather could tell to paint Cleopatra a prostitute who had raised herself up by seduction to rule through the tempted. He said Grandfather lied. He said Grandfather was insane.
After two weeks of confession, Grandfather started to repeat himself, and to rant and babble. I do not think his mind was gone, more his concentration. I thought to put specific strategic questions to him about the Hielistos, for myself and my sealers. The answers made our plight look worse. My sealers grew resigned; they embraced their morbid fatalism. Our escape plans were set aside as folly. The sealers said the South was a tomb for those who would not fight and that whatever course was taken next, it must be decisive. Germanicus spoke forthrightly, said it would be better to die a pirate like the Hielistos than to wait for starvation or slaughter at Golgotha. I could not disagree, fell to silence as Grandfather retold his story with ever wilder images, heaped murder upon treachery, described the torture and slaughter and hopelessness of the camps, and in general fashioned the landscape of the South into a fantastic and fantastically black struggle between Lykantropovin and his Ice Cross and Jaguaquara, his Hielistos, and his dark-haired queen.
Longfaeroe recognized my burden, and worked to insert himself between me and the woes of my sealers. He must have responded to a kindred heart in Grandfather, and seemed to enjoy his opportunity to solace the soul of a failed warrior of the Word. This might be overmuch. Who can say what those ministers of Christianity see when they confront each other? I do believe Longfaeroe found in Grandfather the extremes he had pretended to on South Georgia, in Africa and Asia, and fallen short of. They could not converse, lacking a common language, and whenever I was present Longfaeroe avoided meeting Grandfather’s gaze, moving gingerly around the room as I translated Grandfather’s words for him and whomever else was present. Yes, there might have been envy there—the sort of longing those holy men have for one who has faced their Satan, perhaps even beaten their Satan for one moment. But also there was great respect. Longfaeroe sang psalms that not only reinforced Grandfather’s illusionary architecture of the world, but also celebrated a victory of the spirit over the flesh. Longfaeroe sang, “Even though I walk through the valley as dark as death, I fear no evil, for thou art with me . . .”
Longfaeroe also worked to contain my sorrow. He feared that I would again wander from his vision of me. Longfaeroe realized that what troubled me most deeply was not the world of darkness but the world without Grandfather. He sang to me, “What is more grievous than the passing of a good shepherd? Who among his flock will not cry? Who will survive if he does not put his faith in the shepherd’s shepherd, O Jehovah?”
I was not comforted, sent Longfaeroe from me when he became too insistent. If I was shepherd to the South Georgians, then Grandfather was my shepherd. And there
was nothing that could shield me from the fact that my grandfather, whom I thought a beacon only slightly less brilliant than God, was dying.
Grandfather understood my face. He had lost me. He had found me. He realized that it was Grim Fiddle who must now lose Mord Fiddle, forever. And so he provided for my welfare. He must have rehearsed himself for years. Yet he could not have been certain until he had me before him if his Lord God would grant him the time to cover me with the only defense that is impregnable. Grandfather dressed me in the cowl of fantasy, one that he had stitched, one that he believed would protect me from the darkness that had consumed him. This explains why, as he lay dying, he told such a deliberately metaphorical tale of the struggles in Antarctica. He knew my heart, because it was his; he knew my strength, because it was his. He was not sure of my will, because he believed it could be weakened by doubt, as Peregrine’s once had been.
The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica Page 40