I reiterate that Diomedes has written in haste, promising another letter soon. This must mean that he has found the crack in Gardiner’s heart’s door. This outpost receives a delivery by ship roughly once a month during the summer, so I cannot hope for more until late January. In the meantime, I must suffer the implications of Diomedes’s brief remarks about how the Reunionists have addressed themselves to the history of what I have called the wretched, what Diomedes and I call the Age of Exile, and in particular the politics of the ice camps, the Ice Cross, the rest of it, including the whole story I have yet to tell of the rise and fall of the Kingdom of Antarctica, the birth and measured infanticide of the People’s Republic of Antarctica. It hurts me that I am obliged to introduce these last matters in this hasty, sloppy way. I have been so cautious. Now I must gloss. I have cause. Diomedes writes that the Reunionists are pressing American and European treaty organizations to reopen the arrest, indictment, trial, condemnation, and imprisonment of me, Grim Fiddle, fallen warlord of Antarctica.
The Reunionists say that I am a victim of lies and collusion, say I am unjustly condemned, made to bear the whole weight of a period that vouchsafed the murder of millions by starvation and hopelessness. I suppose that if the Reunionists knew my mind, they would say they have countercharged Brave New Benthamism and counterindicted the Charity Factor. The Reunionists declare my twenty-nine years of mute confinement to be far in excess of humane penance, inappropriate for any transgression I might have commited as an outlaw, guerrilla, terrible avenger, and warlord. In his letter Diomedes uses the phrase “long-wronged and forgotten hero of the long forgotten and wronged.”
The sum is this: The One World Reunion is maneuvering for the resurrection of what they see as the aged scapegoat Grim Fiddle.
Gardiner finished his presentation without a sigh, abruptly, as if in midsentence. He would not show me the letter. I have hope that he might, for he seemed moved by my reaction. I wept and I shook. Gardiner presumed that I was rejoicing at the hope offered by such an aberration, and ended our exchange with contrived pity. He said that he had not told me of the letter immediately upon receipt, which he seems to have gotten on my birthday last week, because he said he was anxious that my age, my health, might make me too vulnerable to false promise. This was disingenuous, of course, since the chief reason for his delay was that he was assessing what he had to gain in contrast to what he might lose should he violate the letter of the law.
Despite his condescension, I was touched by Gardiner’s pity and defensiveness, am now puzzling what changes might be in the future for our relationship. In one sense, we are closer than lovers, jailer and jailed: he rules me, while I represent his reason for being. He folded Diomedes’s letter, rose, shuffled. He might have been waiting to see if I might descend into a swoon, or worse. The medical officer here suspects my heart, says that it is too large for a healthy man. Gardiner’s pause was appropriate, for my blood raced, I was pallid and sweaty. I got control of my breathing and tried to show him that I would endure by offering him some of my Christmas fruit. I understood then that his reading of the letter was Gardiner’s Christmas present to me. I have his secret now. He is sentimental. We share a chink. The stern, disconsolate commandant of the ice prisoner’s keep has a hidden compassion. Gardiner started to speak in English, mumbled what seemed a prayer, or epigram, in an odd tongue. Was that American Indian? Is this a deeper confidence? He is Canadian, a career naval officer, a professional truce-keeper like Diomedes, and has mentioned to one of the sergeants of the guard—I overheard them—that he likes to hunt on the ice because it reminds him of the Elizabeth Islands. My map, hidden in the Fiddle Bible, the one book I am permitted in my own library, shows me the Elizabeth Islands are part of Canada’s Northwest Territories. Perhaps Gardiner is a halfbreed like me, part Eskimo, or with blood of a remnant of the fabled Iroquois nations. Gardiner has become a new mind for me to explore. Gardiner cleared his rich face and said, “Is all in order?”
Gardiner misunderstands my upset. All is not in order. I am fractured as the faults ripped the South, as New Benthamism ripped God’s children. I am in agony at the thought of a hope that is a curse. I find my strength has gone just now. I shall explain the more tomorrow. I wish myself and Helen a merry Christmas, and shall turn to reading from the Fiddle Bible—the Gospel of Matthew—to an old and patient she-wolf.
This new turn is more and worse than I could have supposed. My fever returned to pull me to bed five days ago, on Christmas night. This triggered nightmares that bathed me in sorrow. I have not mentioned before that it is a phenomenon of Antarctica that when conditions are physically worst, as they were in the ice camps, or on Anvers Island, as they can be for those unaccustomed to the six months of winter’s howling blackness, one does not have nightmares. One dreams grandiosely. An extreme example of this might be the berserker dreaming I re-created this past winter to speak to my ascendancy to kingship, a passage that might represent the last thoughtful work I shall manage on my manuscript. It has been one of my punishments in this prison, where I am physically well cared for, that my nightmares here suffuse my memory—awful fogs that I cannot reproduce when rational. This new threat has called up hideous images of the sleights of the hand of fate. I feel my body pulled inside out, as if a wizard had reached inside my mouth and pulled my soul onto the outside, with handwriting wrapped around and around my being for all to read. Surely this must be some bizarre transformation of Diomedes’s letter, my first letter in twenty-nine years of anathema, the first communication meant just for me since I found Grandfather’s stone marker on Mead’s Kiss thirty-six years ago. Diomedes’s words have seared my thoughts and burned my flesh.
I have promised that I would explain my upset at the news of the Reunionists. It is straightforward. I fear them. I reject them. It is the same. I have buried so many of my loved ones as well as my enemies; all my love may be in the coldest ground. I held myself also safely done, in the frozen ground, buried. Now these strangers, who do not love me, whom I can never know, intend to disinter a corpse. Yes, my heart races and my mind makes this confession. Yet I am dead to all that apostasy on “planet Earth.” I am exiled by law. I am condemned by mankind. A justly convened tribunal sent me into infamy. I accept my sentence by them as an act of genius. I deserve what has been done to me. I am guilty of crimes against humanity. I did make war, did murder countless numbers of God’s children. I can see and hear them die again and again. This is my due penance. I have served my time here without once looking toward or praying for release. This is meant to be, must be, my end.
What right have these strangers, the One World Reunion, to scratch an ice grave and bring forth the decay of a man wracked by his own guilt and haunted by his own ghosts? What right have they to drag a tormented soul back into a world that had no place for him in 2009, might not even have had a place for him at his birth in 1973? What right can they possibly claim to increase my punishment? This seems manifold jeopardy. They are trying me again. Mankind has done of me. Let mankind’s verdict stand. Let me be.
I do not want to mislead. I do not think the Reunionists do demon’s work, or angel’s work. They are men and women. What men have done wrong, men can do right. That is a certainty to embrace relentlessly, a vigilant philosophy. In this case, though, it would seem that what men have done—wrong or right—they in their overweening pride presume they can do again, wrong or right. Who are these Reunionists? Their philosophy, expanding from the scraps fed me by Diomedes, seems as smug and superficial as that of the New Benthamites. They seem opportunists more than revisionists. Grim Fiddle smells the stink of sanctimoniousness.
I exhaust myself. It feels fine, though, to sweat out my bile. And my fear. I have found the wherewithal for this outburst. Perhaps I have resources I have long underestimated. This does not mean that I do not trust my own measure. I have made a profound decision. Its finality gives me calm for now, though I know it will not last. I have paused to explain my contempt for the Reunionists
, and their hollow campaign to resurrect Grim Fiddle, because I spy them clearly from the vantage of a set course. Such disgusts me, yet less so than the thought of being plucked from my grave to be carried on the shoulders of opportunism as a hero. I hate the lie as I love the truth. It is my torment that I am confronted now by two lies, neither more terrible than the other. I have chosen.
I shall take my own life. I cannot say when. Before, that is enough. Gardiner has not returned since Christmas morning. I do not expect him until the reading of my sentence after the new year. Then there is the onus of the next supply ship, which might, no, certainly will, bring another letter from Diomedes about the Reunionists. This gives me at least a fortnight to press my flesh smooth, to make peace in my mind, to get my heart’s prison all in order. I shall make more specific arrangements then, how to do it, at what moment—sunrise and sunset being impossible in the land of the midnight sun. I am sure now of this one thing: I will not let them have me. I have nothing left but this, my life. I want to keep it. I do not want to die. Yet I shall not bargain with fate. It is my life my way or not whatsoever. I shall not surrender myself to my deathless enemy, the lies of tyrants, the politics of falsehood. It is a lie to take one’s own life, I know, and suicide will undoubtedly prejudice my final judgment. That is understatement. I shall risk this prejudice rather than give comfort to my enemies. This smacks of self-sacrifice. That might be part of it. I am primarily thinking of myself. Either I take me, or they will.
I am in panic, I can feel that. I can also see that I might have transformed Diomedes’s letter into a phantasm of persecution. Yet I have no time for patient reconsideration. I must anticipate. Diomedes has been gone four years. There is no knowing how long he delayed writing me about the Reunionists, or how long the Reunionists have been conspiring against me. It is good tactic in conflict to presume the very worst. Therefore, though I have just learned of my peril, I presume the Reunionists are poised as I write. There must be no delay. I learned long ago to trust my luck. As Peregrine said, without misfortune there is no fortune at all. I trust now that my twenty-nine years here in solitude and reflection have been good luck. I trust now that my luck will go bad unless I act decisively.
It does not interest me to defend my decision further. There is a maddening sidebar. I cannot and should not now expect that anyone will ever read this manuscript. I must prepare myself to destroy it before I destroy myself, for fear the Reunionists, deprived of a false scapegoat by me, can take my confession and twist it to hold up their pious robes. What bitterness, and yet perhaps such a comedy as this deserves the jest of remaining untold.
I can do what I will, then, a freed prisoner. I could choose fear and self-pity and sleep. I shall not. I shall rush to complete my story as well as I can. I shall write pell-mell. I have the time to Diomedes’s next letter.
CHAPTER THE LAST
THE PEOPLE’S
REPUBLIC OF
ANTARCTICA
My Crimes
I RULED Anvers Island absolutely for six years. The length of my reign over what I call the Kingdom of Ice is more in question. In my construction as self-elected regent, the Kingdom of Ice was seeded by the exodus of several hundred thousand wretches into the Antarctic over the decade of epic ruin that closed the twentieth century; was given life by me and my company one black winter of corruption and murder on Anvers Island; was given shape and strength over five years of piracy, murder-raiding, and all-out war against the Ice Cross; was elevated to youthful grandeur over another black, hallucinatory winter marked by madness in the camps, colossal eruptions through the South Shetlands chain, and the collapse and capitulation of the Ice Cross; and was finally cut down and dismembered at the close of its sixth year, early summer, not by a blade wielded by its enemies but by the tongues of its counselors, and particularly its queen.
I should give voice to my defamers, who were finally the tribunal that condemned me. Some said that the idea of my Kingdom of Ice, and the kingdom itself, was a ruse, said that I was never a king, as my archipelago state was never sovereign. Instead, I was said to be a warlord, a guerrilla chieftain who gathered to himself the title of king in order to aggrandize his outlaw horde and to chain to his throne the people of the ice camps. I was said to be a sham king who deliberately promoted himself as regent over a geography that was no land, rather an accident of weather, and over masses that were no people, rather refugees en route to new worlds. I was said to have stolen peace, to have murdered truth, to have buried decency beneath ice and chaos.
I have no heart to answer my defamers, which is why I list their accusations bluntly. It is for others, safely in the future, to ask, when is a state not a conceit? When is a king not a pretender? When is war not a crime? I could point to the birth of so many kingdoms in the North as models of the events acted out yet again on the ice of the Bransfield Strait. A fortified tower becomes a duchy; a duchy becomes an oligarchy of warriors; a gang of chieftains becomes a kingship born of necessity in battle against another oligarchy; and then the kingdom becomes a ruin after long struggle to justify itself by conquest and theft as empire. The evolution rolls along as easily as it rolls from my pen. What an old, tired, splendiferous tale. Yes, I simplify. I ask, however, is not there crude simplicity in whatever mankind does when it begins and ends in murder?
The Kingdom of Antarctica, then, my black kingdom on the black ice—whether one recognizes it as my illusion or as a genuine catastrophe—was ever a twice-told tale. I believe this profoundly true, because what I have called the Age of Exile does appear to me, abandoned here in my timeless ice prison to ponder and to muse, to be a cruel repetition of the Norse Age of Migration. That is what the book writers called the close of the first millennium anno Domini, without irony. All I ought to know of the Age of Migration, ten, eleven, twelve centuries back and half the circumference of the world to the north, ought to be fog, screams, and the transcendant language of the document that shines through that darkness: the holy book of the Age of Migration, Beowulf, King of the Weather-Geats, slayer of Grendel and mother, hero of heroes. Instead, I can convince myself that I have lived through that same darkness at the close of the second millennium anno Domini. The fleet of the damned has raised sails over the oceans of time.
The joy is gone for me now in the poetry of Beowulf’s evil-battling days. And I believe it no coincidence that my berserker dreaming can resemble the book of Beowulf. As to why, I have two minds. Either one can argue some Norse virus was awakened in my blood, like an infection of ideas, when I thrust myself from Golgotha into the terror of Anvers Island, so that the language of Beowulf spilled up across a millennium to flood my mind with ghastly images; or else one can argue that the mind of Grim Fiddle was overwhelmed by the loss of his grandfather, father, family, and reason for being, and thereby Grim Fiddle was hurtled back into a language that he had studied more closely than his heartbeat when he was warm and secure with his loved ones.
I do not choose. Both are revealing. And my dreaming was not a fleeting nightmare. I lived it. Yes, Mother’s portent, her theft of the future, was fulfilled in the most bizarre way—in my dream. But not only there. How shrewd of Lamba Time-Thief not to have mentioned that Skallagrim Ice-Waster, Wolfman and Rune-Carver, king of the black and hurt half-men of the wall of blizzards and behemoths, heeder of the ghost of a thousand-year-dead outlaw, would also, and at the same time, become the warlord of Antarctica. How humbling of my luck to discover that when a prophecy becomes a history it does not salve the sting of truth. Murder is still murder, crime is still crime, and no matter how fancifully one has envisioned it—the head of a hero, or the Bulwark of the South—there is no going back. It is a fate in a dream from which one awakens covered in genuine infamy.
My crimes were legion. The worst was pride. I pretended to be greater than those wretched people. In my vanity, I pretended to lead the meek to glory. I did not see at the time that when a fallible man takes upon himself the work that belongs only and finally to God, he must
fail, and fail in the worst way possible. I did not try to be God. I tried to do his work. This is still prideful, and ruinous, and damning.
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