The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica

by John Calvin Batchelor

  “Behold Hard-Fisherman’s Heart’s Heart,” spoke Brother Murder to his eleven Cain-brothers. “He is no fool. He is a warrior deprived of the knowledge of who is a prisoner and who is a warden. He has spoken that he comes to set free our queen, Hard-Heart, chained here by our cruel direction.”

  I spoke with unblunted anger, son of Dragon-Worrier, “Hold your twisted words and show your murder-dulled battle-shafts. I shall cut your numbers one throat at a throw unless you deliver me the dark-haired queen, whom you torture for your pleasure!”

  Brother Murder stood among the eleven other behemoths. They hissed and choked at my words, the mirth of shades and fiends. I would not await more false invitation. I waved my sure battle-shaft over my head, faster and faster, so that the dark air of the hall swirled in a wind that lifted the shadows. At the head of the feasting table sat that fettered fawn, Hard-Heart.

  “I am here all the while, Hard-Fisherman’s Oath-Taker,” she spoke, the dark-haired queen.

  Brother Murder spoke up, First of the Last, “Tell our queen, Hard-Heart, how you, mistaken warrior, have come to cut the binds that we have wrapped round her soft flesh.” So great was his enjoyment of my doubt, he could not complete his taunting request.

  I spoke to the dark-haired queen, “These stabbing thoughts cannot stain my mission. I am Hard-Fisherman’s Tail-Hero. I was born to rule the black and hurt half-men of the wall of blizzards and behemoths. This assembly does not blunt my might forged by wonder-smiths. I am not moved to loose my strength on these shades until I keep my pyre-oath. I am come to rescue you, Copper-Croumed’s sister, from your dolorous fate, lost child. ”

  The dark-haired queen spoke, Brother Murder’s Pleasure, “You have come to rescue? And how would you accomplish this tardy work? Can you rescue my life, that was glad-hearted and full of promise in golden kingdoms, that has been taken from me and exchanged for a hag’s end of regrets? What is it that you have come to rescue, slow-footed inheritor? My flesh that cannot be cleansed, my mind that cannot be emptied of fright, my heart that has become as hard as the land of ice? This is my home and this is my prison and this is my inheritance. What keeps me here is not these gluttons who give me pleasure as I give them pleasure. What chains me to my high-seat in this fen of despair is my loathing for those who have abandoned me and corrupted me. What holds me here, misguided thane, is that my pain is my purpose is my pleasure is my pain.”

  I looked into the words of the dark-haired queen, and a fresh sorrow came to me, victory-blest man. I saw that it was not full measure to swing my battle-shaft through the dozen behemoths. To free her, lost love, from the chains she pulled close in her pain, I must break the bonds of her thoughts tied to long-lost and long-remembered days. My compassionate war-band and I knelt before her and wept for her struggles in the ice-wasted land. Our true tears became a torrent that crashed against the walls so that a flood rose higher and higher, immersing the dark-haired queen’s loathing for past wrongs, washing the hatred from her flesh.

  I told the dark-haired queen, Hard-Fisherman’s Heart’s Heart, “Quest of my quest, Hard-Heart, rise from this table stained by faults of a wickedness alien to your true-ways, and stand free of your memories of long-lost and long-remembered days. Rise free, queen of my love, and accept your true name, Glad-Heart.”

  I have the head of a hero. My hearth-companions call me Bulwark of the South. I am sharp-witted and have the clue to war-success. I enjoy the weather of rainbows. I take the high-seat in my ice-carved hall and share meat with my long-eared hounds. My retinue gathers at my drinking tables to hear my bards make hall-songs of my contests.

  My bards finish their song of my quest to free the dark-haired queen. My companions cheer for the hard-won victories that thrust me forward as king of ice-clogged salt-trails even as my love won a soft-victory over the dark-haired queen. I accept the hails of my strong and numerous war-band. I turn in my high-seat to touch the hem of the flashing gown of my queen, Glad-Heart. There is no pleasure on her face for the songs of my bards. I ask her if she is not made glad to hear again of the long past days when I came to rescue her as Hard-Fisherman’s Ghost’s Heeder. I ask her if she does not love me, proud-headed prince, as I love her, proudheaded princess.

  My dark-haired queen, Glad-Heart, speaks thickly, “It is not I who am troubled. It is you who have the pallor of the sick and the fever of the dying. It is you who appears to have fought his last battle in your wave-skimming ship, Glad-Hunter. It is you who seems as a man come to his sad ending-day.”

  And it is true. Though I enjoy the weather of rainbows, gray clouds course across my vision, death-knells sound in my ears, and I taste my blood on my lips. I sink at the feet of the dark-haired queen. My brave shieldsmen rush to my side and weep at the sight of their bold king helpless on his hall floor. Elephant Son and Copper-Crowned lay their hands on my brow. I shout to them. I make no brave sound.

  At last, my sight gone, my breath unable to stir a feather, I smell the love fragrance of my dark-haired, queen, Glad-Heart, and I cry out like a child, Time-Thief s Portent-Carrier, “Forgive me, Glad-Heart, for not loving you as you merited at my side, and for permitting my thoughts to wander to Poor-Patience in her grave and the son we made in the Land of the Whale-Killers.”

  I feel my body fall from a craggy cliff and tumble end over fore into a rain that blows warm and soft. I heat Glad-Heart above me, and she is angry. I hear Glad-Heart call to me in a hard voice that does not suit the soft-armed consort that I thought gladdened by love, and this new voice that is an old voice tells me, “I shall come to Hell to get you back. Death’s door cannot keep me out. I shall come, for your work at my vengeance is unfinished, and there is no other like Skallagrim Ice-Waster, Rune-Carver and Wolfman, King of the South.”

  Christmas A.D. 2037

  I MUST interrupt this unhappy work. I have been ill for a long time, coughing some blood again. That is not my dilemma. My life is not in jeopardy, not that way. My purpose is threatened. My worst worries seem realized. There is a sudden spectre of manipulation, degradation, new lies where I had sought old truths. This is much to ask. I feel I should shout to God, “Test me, test me!” I cannot. I can only set these words down, and this does make me feel stronger. Confined like this, alone save for my wolf, all conversation with my keepers proscribed except once a month with the commandant, my writing has become my intimacy. I have been too long away from my paper and pen. I do feel firmer. I shall continue as long as my concentration at this sitting.

  I see now how simpleminded I have been to believe that I could complete my work before my luck changed again, and these years of effort were strangled. Grim Fiddle is a lucky man. I should have anticipated that what began in contretemps, continued in serendipity, would come to failure. I intended years more of autobiography, greedy and lonely man. I had hope for a manuscript thrice this size, more, since I have had no need to finish before my own end. There is intervention. My work is arrested unfinished, and what I have managed to remember and to confess could be for nothing if I do not gain the time to explain completely.

  I should not have kept my circumstances apart from my confession. Now I must confuse my undone work with details at odd angle to my narrative. I suppose that I thought when I began that anyone who read this might know some of Grim Fiddle, and those who did not would not care to be confused by the author’s day-to-day endeavor. This supposition was itself complicated by the fact that there was no single point that began this work, no first page, first chapter, instead stories that tumbled in my mind, that required drafting and redrafting until I was able to teach myself what little I know of how to tell a story. I am embarrassed to admit that even these few hundred pages have taken all my strength, and how long? I cannot say accurately, twelve years, more, for I started, stopped, paused for years, began again.

  I also suppose that I kept secret my place in this world because I was and am ashamed of what I am, did not want to taint the honest spirit of my work. I write as much for companions
hip as for other cause, like my Sam. This manuscript has been my dearest friend, filled with the voices of my loved ones, and what would it have served to cut it up with the diary voice of Grim Fiddle, author and convict.

  The answer is that it would have served the truth: Grim Fiddle is a prisoner convicted of crimes against humanity. I stand condemned of conspiracy to make war, and of making war, against governments and peoples. They referred to me variously as “this remorseless mass-murderer” and “the twenty-first century’s first unspeakable monster.” Their verdict of guilty was less interesting than the justification not to execute me. My tribunal ruled that the best lesson to be achieved by the condemnation of a man like me was to refuse to take my life. My judges said, “Too many are dead. Let this mercy put all who murder to shame.” More, my judges opined that the most fitting punishment they could conceive for me was not to release me from the weight of my guilt, rather to keep me imprisoned for the remainder of my life that I might consider what I had done. I am meant to live as long as humanly possible in infamy.

  That is nearly three decades past. Now Grim Fiddle has grown old. That is what he is, an old man, sickly now and again, still extraordinarily game, with no evidence death will soon release him from his punishment. My judges are dust. Their just wrath lives on in this place, my prison. My guards call it the ice prison, over the objection of the new commandant, who has replaced Joannes Diomedes Nestoraxes, the old soldier. Diomedes was my jailer for nearly fourteen years. He regarded his work as seriously as his prayers and books. He obeyed the letter of the laws verdict on Grim Fiddle. Nevertheless he was my friend, granted me my she-wolf, Helen, a pup when the guards found her on the glacier. It was Diomedes who named this place the ice prison, and me the ice prisoner. It and I are man-made complexes, located above the quay, beneath the towering southern lip of the jade glacier. This is Elephant Island, the southeast shore. The Ice Cross’s headquarters, where Lykantropovin ruled and died, was a mile to the west, under what is now a fresh mountain of volcanic rock. That is also where Peregrine and Charity and Molly are buried, somewhere under a mountain that was my ally in my victory over Lykantropovin nearly thirty years ago. I celebrated what would have been Charity’s ninetieth birthday this past winter, and have looked forward to Peregrine’s same next winter. Not that I would be permitted to get over there. I have not left this prison for nearly twenty-nine years.

  My ice prison is administered by an organization that changes its acronym frequently. I think of how Diomedes would joke, when he read me my charge and sentence once a month as dictated by law, by scrambling the words of the sponsoring body into anagrams for me to decipher. The present commandant, a Canadian national named Gardiner, whom I think of as new though he has been here four years, does not care to keep me informed of affairs back in the place that four of the guards, Germans, call among themselves, so I overhear them, “planet Earth.” They do not laugh when they say it. This post is no honor. Gardiner seems to believe he is banished here, for unexplained cause, and has brought with him a niggardliness that has worn on morale. He has none of the poet’s blood that made this an austere pleasure for Diomedes. Towards me, Gardiner is terse, stiff, moody. My guess is that Gardiner was a man of action who momentarily lost his self-confidence, or his nerve. At first, Gardiner was hostile, suspicious of me, but that has disappeared. My present person does not fit the legend I suppose he has of me. After his caution passed, there was curiosity, prying, about how I pass my time. He would come in here while I was up top exercising or taking the sunlight, and he would handle my rune-carved blocks and stones, would turn through my papers, and once went so far as to take parts of this manuscript from me. I worried he might destroy it, or confiscate the whole of it, or forbid me more paper. When he returned it and showed no inclination either to take more or to make comment, I worried about what he thought. My poverty includes a dearth of critics. My readers and not my characters are imaginary. Gardiner has never responded to my inquiries, though he must face me once a month to read the text of my sentence. I try to interrupt him by asking about my manuscript, “What do you make of Israel?” He stiffens and reads on. I once knew that piece of paper he reads so well that I could sing it. Oddly, I lost that trick, and the whole of it. It dances in my mind, yet when I try to write it down, I lose focus. Diomedes memorized it and came to dramatizing it in English, French, and, my favorite, in Greek Homeric couplets. Gardiner seems to have no need for burlesque. After four years, not including the months he is granted leave (when he travels to Cape Town), he has not changed a note, has made no casual remark afterward, has always ended, “Is all in order?” My answer is my cheeriest “All is in order!”

  Perhaps now my shock this morning is more understandable, when Gardiner appeared with the cook bringing me my Christmas dinner. I am granted extra fruit on my birthday, and on Eastern and Western Christianity’s Christmas, a legacy of Diomedes’s devoutness that Gardiner has not altered, though he is cynic and not Christian. Helen does not like him, and growled when he sat down on the bench. I have worried he would take her from me also, and quieted her quickly. He had taken a seat, a first in my presence. He had an envelope in his hand, a letter. He seemed annoyed and anxious. He knew he should not have been here, a week early, out of the ordinary, a break in regulation. I was as flustered as he, flopped about to get him a chair. He told me to calm myself, to get back in bed, and to listen.

  “Within the week,” he said, “I have received a communication, by letter, from my predecessor, Lieutenant Commander Nestoraxes of the United Greek Republic Navy, and, after studying my position, and weighing the implications of this confidence in terms of your sentence, have come to tell you of the parts of Commander Nestoraxes’s letter that concern you.”

  Diomedes has retired to the Aegean island of Naxos. He decided at the last not to enter the Church, instead to settle on his pension in the village at the foot of the monastery. I can see it all, the azure Aegean, the bright beige beach, the dusty white town arranged in geometric acuity, the green and brown ridges rising to the stone and wood monastery pirouetting above that meditative seascape. For me, the image is voluptuous. Diomedes described it so well in the notes he put in the margins of the books he lent me—our secret dialogue—that I feel I can smell the olives and taste the goat’s cheese. I imagine Diomedes passes his days not too dissimilar to mine, excepting the profound differences of climate and food. He reads his philosophers, works he passed me from his library here, and he writes his memoirs—from a young recruit in battle against the Turk to a naval officer assigned to international treaty organizations charged with maintaining the law across the face of the earth. Diomedes called himself a professional truce-keeper, and only incidentally a warrior. I called him the old soldier. He was a student, and a poet, and a keeper, ever watchful with words and men. It was he who encouraged me to make a manuscript of my confession. I suppose his work is now as demanding as mine, for his adventures were no less sweeping and sad than mine; he was one of those who were ordered into the Pacific basin during those times we called, between us, the Age of Exile.

  Diomedes believes that he, as a Greek, understands completely the ideas of banishment, redress, and revenge. He said that his ancestors invented exile. He said that God had granted the Greeks all those islands so that they might grasp, all at once, what it is to be surrounded by the unknown. Also, Diomedes said that the Greek thinkers could be as rash and antagonistic as they were because the island culture provided a way for despots to dispose of present dissent without disposing of dissent’s uncanny quality to transform itself, as with magic, into future dogma. Diomedes said that a Greek was a heaven-sent keeper for problems such as Grim Fiddle. He thought of Elephant Island as a challenge worthy of his blood. I think he is more comfortable on rock surrounded by ocean. It matches his mind, a keeper surrounded by forgetfulness.

  Diomedes writes me, through Gardiner, that he misses me, and our secret talk, and feels ill-used without the ice and wind to combat. He asks a
fter Satan’s Seat, which was silent all the while he was here, which he resented for depriving him of an experience approximating the great volcanoes that periodically tore apart and then reawakened the history of the Aegean. It was his favorite story of mine, the eruptions of Satan’s Seat. I think he was envious of my memory, even jealous of my relationship with past catastrophes. Naxos, he writes, baked white waste of the Cyclades Islands, is in comparison to the Antarctic an infant’s crib, or an old-age pen.

  Most importantly, Diomedes writes that he set aside his own writing to investigate some of the history that I touch upon with ignorance in my work. He knows that the many holes I have left weaken my project, and it is a great kindness that he has determined to educate himself in my favor. I realize that he must have been planning to write at length to help me, and I can guess that the obstacle he saw he had to overcome was how to reach me. It is one of the crudest terms of my sentence that I am not permitted to correspond, nor am I permitted mail. I suppose then that his delay in writing these last four years has involved his effort to discover some way to pry open Gardiner.

  In the course of his researches, Diomedes has not only consulted records entombed in the vaults of whatever treaty organization that now represents the remains of the Ice Cross, but also has written letters of inquiry to Sweden and America. I do not believe he has contacted Cleopatra. He does not mention her. This may mean she is dead, most likely means nothing. He races over these matters to the crux of my crisis. Diomedes says his surprise was unbounded when he received word (not a letter, some sort of communique from a technology of which I am ignorant) from an American journalist who spoke of me, Grim Fiddle, as the center of a political controversy in the Americas and Europe—in the North.

  It seems that a clique of uncertain persuasion has seized upon the history of the Age of Exile as an issue they can exploit for their own aggrandizement. I am supposing. I am intrinsically antagonistic. They call themselves the One World Reunion, also the One World Society, also the Reunionists. They have cells in every major northern city. Their platform is vast and monolithic, with a unifying theme that seems to be opposition to the political-science fashion of the last one hundred years, since the Second World War, which they say has been characterized by extremism, separatism, chauvinism, liberationism, and ever more divisive polemic supporting racial, geographic, and religious purity. The Reunionists are rabid heterogenes. They are savvy revisionists. They claim—and I translate this into my terms because I am not sure of their language—that politics is not a science but a curse of the Tower of Babylon, so much babble at cross-purposes. The Reunionists have launched themselves against the hypothesis that there are legitimate concepts such as the first world, second world, third world, nonaligned world, developed and underdeveloped world, Christian and Moslem world, the East, West, North, and South. They decry what I have called fantastic architecture. They call the assumption of separate self-authentication to be nonsense, claim that a house divided is no house at all, assert that there is no man or woman on earth today who belongs to just one country, ancestry, religion, or race, and therefore the idea that people of color, or people of a holy book, or people of industry should gather separately is folly. They claim that the fracturing of the world into a series of silent confederacies has silenced reason, and that the reunion of mankind is the call of the future. Their enemy is what they call liberationist separatism. Their aim is conflation, synthesis, and metamorphosis. They say they are the champions of the mongrel.