The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica

by John Calvin Batchelor

  Grim Fiddle caused the death of Jane Gaunt, Violante Furore, Cleo Furore, Annabel Donne, Magda Zulema, who were innocent of murder, who were murdered by the Ice Cross; in revenge, Grim Fiddle murdered the Ice Cross, slaughtered it without mercy. Grim Fiddle put his blade to the officers and crew of the Ice Cross frigates Repulse, and Coronation Mercy, and Good Hope, and Nightingale, and Ursula, and Cape Agassiz, and more, many more. Grim Fiddle was also the murderer of Jaguaquara, who had murdered Grootgibeon, who had murdered Xavier Grumpa. Grim Fiddle was the murderer of Hector the Fat, who had murdered Lalo the Butcher of Port Stanley, who had murdered Iacovella the Butcher of Deception Island. Grim Fiddle was the murderer of Fives O’Birne, who had murdered Cuellar Alcanfores, who had murdered Gumic Blades the Liberator. And Grim Fiddle was the murderer of the Little Brothers at Golgotha, was the murderer of the Fathers in Agony, the Dominican Relief Mission to the South Orkneys, the Holy Father’s Mercy Commission at Elephant Island. Grim Fiddle murdered the ice camps on Livingston Island, King George Island, Smith Island, Elephant Island, Clarence Island.

  Three generations of mankind were murdered by me, grandfathers and fathers and sons, grandmothers and mothers and daughters. Grim Fiddle murdered them with his own hand. Grim Fiddle murdered them with his rank. Grim Fiddle murdered by depriving them of food and permitting the ice to close over them. Grim Fiddle murdered them for revenge, for hatred, for conquest, for strategy, and for power—always for power, to increase his reach and to justify his reach and to gain grandeur from his reach. I did it. I gave the orders. I watched them die. I, me, Grim Fiddle, Butcher of Anvers Island, murdered Lykantropovin, Butcher of Elephant Island.

  There are so many dark stories in just these crimes, and I am prevented by time from relating them properly. Each of my victims deserves my attention. I cannot give it. There is no room in my future now. There might not ever have been paper enough for me to explain what I did, and permitted, and am guilty of. Perhaps there is telling justice in this turn. Perhaps only my silence before what I remember can convey adequately the monstrosity of my crimes. So many dead, killed by me—not by starvation, or the ice, or the Charity Factor—by me. Cleo Furore. I loved her. I would not permit Germanicus to get back to her and the South Georgians my first winter on Anvers Island. I held him to my side. The Ice Cross killed her when they obliterated Golgotha in 2004 in revenge for my attack as the new warlord of Anvers Island, on their blockade at Arthur Harbor. I do not even know how she died, because Cleo was accidentally left behind when Jane and Violante led the remnant of my South Georgians out on the glacier, where Germanicus rescued them before the storms closed on them. Was it exposure, gunshot, drowning? Did they grab Cleo up and condemn her to Elephant Main or Clarence West? We looked for her there. We always looked for her. She disappeared as if she had never been, like my family, but with this distinction: I murdered her just as surely as if I cut her down.

  This must not become false witness. I sense how confession has in it the hallucinogen of self-pity. I am revolted by the possibility that in my haste to denounce myself I could be distorting my guilt. My depravity was not total. That would be like none at all. My depravity was selective. I knew goodness and did the worst.

  I understood truth and lied. I had the power of mercy and more often than not withheld it. I knew in my heart what was right and wrong, even when my mind was drowned by the darkness. To this point I must clarify something about the berserker dreaming that swept me from Golgotha to Anvers Island. It is a fact that I was gripped by a madness, that I sailed Angel of Death into Arthur Harbor and then pushed into the fortress at Anvers in a fantasy.

  I was not Grim Fiddle, mourner; I was Grim Fiddle, Hard-Fisherman’s Debt-Payer and avenger—a berserker who cannot be killed, with the strength of a dozen men, without the conscience or limits of any man. I was wrapped inside a bloody delusion, and continued that way for more than a year, in which time I ascended to the rule of the Hielistos at Anvers Island.

  This berserker dreaming might suggest that I might not have been responsible for what I did. What nonsense. The lie that Grim Fiddle might not have been guilty by reason of momentary unreason. I recall that same sort of sly talk was used at Peregrine’s trial for the murder of Cesare Furore. As broken and ill as Peregrine was, he scoffed before his tribunal. I did the same, do the same. I report that when my tribunal asked me why I had done it, all of it, war-making, mass-murdering, I spoke out more clearly than at any time in the proceedings. I quoted my father: “Because I wanted to.”

  That is correct witness. I testified against myself. If I was not of sound mind when I murdered Jaguaquara that first summer at Anvers and set the slaughter in motion that spun me like a fleshly whirlpool to el capitan de los capitanes de los Hielistos, the King of the South, I was still Grim Fiddle. Who else was Grim Fiddle but Grim Fiddle? If I was not of sound mind when I slew the capitanes, whom I call behemoths in my berserker dreaming, and gathered Cleopatra to me, and took her, physically took her, ravaged her, cut her body and violated her body and beat her body, I was still Grim Fiddle. Who else? I stole her from herself. She did not agree, she did not resist. I did not ask. I am not sure now of what she filled my berserker mind with in that long black winter on Anvers Island. I can guess, “Revenge us!” I concurred. Grim Fiddle said, yes, get back at them; mad as I was, I still did it. And the following summer (January 2004), after my first victory over the Ice Cross blockade at Anvers, and after the Hielistos celebrated me as their butcher of butchers—because I was angrier and crueler and beyond even their ghoulish sense of what was murder—after all that, when I collapsed at Cleopatra’s side and emerged from my berserker dreaming as if I were dying, I was still Grim Fiddle. I awoke from that dreaming weakened, disoriented, sickly for a while, appalled at the news of what I had done, the dungeons, the decapitations, the flesh-eating, the scars on Cleopatra’s flesh. But then, when I was certainly of sound mind, I did not run from my criminal authority. I enhanced it as I used my counselors, Lazarus, Germanicus, Cleopatra, to raise me up over the wretched. I did not then give a serious thought to quitting my vengeance. What I had begun in mad blood lust, I carried on in measured cruelty. And why did Grim Fiddle do it? Not because of that sleek epigram “When want is crime, I am outlaw.” No, not that, no. I did it because I wanted to.

  I must hurry. I have figured that I could abridge my year of treacherous assent and my years of bloody rule in this scratchy fashion so that I could have the pause to relate one totally revealing crime. This gives Grim Fiddle his terrible due. It took place three years after my berserker dreaming. I was in rough strategic command of the Hielistos from Adelaide Island to Joinville Island; Lazarus was my prime minister; Cleopatra was my queen; and Germanicus and the sealers were my hall-guard. I was acute and hard and locked in combat with Lykantropovin. There can be no possible claim that what I did was because I was not of right mind. Grandfather told me at our first meeting, “Make right by doing right. All their talk, it does not matter. You shall be judged swiftly and finally by Lord God.” Here is proof that not only did Grim Fiddle make wrong by being wrong, but also that what I have done can only be forgiven by a God whose compassion is ineffable. For this alone, Grim Fiddle condemns himself.

  It was late in the summer, the ice heaving onto the South Shetlands, the volcanoes pouring a sulfurous cloud that was so swollen in places there seemed new ice islands where there were only ash-heaped Hoes. The skuas screamed, and the sky and the sea were one wash of imminent oblivion. To sail into that thunderous and putrescent panorama was wild risk. It was also bright strategy. No ship, large or small, armed or crammed with filthy little creatures, was more able than another if the real adversary, Antarctica, was not battled effectively. That climate crushed the quick and the doomed. That climate was my ally, the reason why my small, ill-led, poorly armed guerrilla force could best the superior strength and discipline of Lykantropovin’s Ice Cross. We did not care if we lived or died; we cared only for revenge.

  I was escap
ing a sorry defeat off Gibbs Island, southwest of Elephant Island. My capitanes de los Hielistos had overreached themselves, been caught by Lykantropovin’s in-home flotilla. My flagship went down under me. I got off in an open boat with Davey Gaunt and twenty others. We fell in with one of our small cutters. We came about in an effort to get free of the tide that ripped us seaward. The wind stripped our sail. The cutter, captained by Coquito Blades, brother of a man I had executed for betrayal, gave us a line. We made for the closest landfall, Clarence Island. By late in the day, the sun a small torch at the horizon, we were at anchor in the inlet, shaped by a glacier and a natural bulkhead of rock slabs. A huge ice island—green and blue, carved by the wind to contain deep caves where seals and penguins hid—had hooked on the underwater rocks and swung around to push against the beach, bashing the Ice Cross boats at anchor against the bulkhead. The sea shivered about us, a big blow coming from the west. A large freighter had foundered in the harbor and was slowly being capsized by the aground ice island. I ordered most everyone off both cutter and longboat; I chose the men who would stay aboard the cutter to ride out the storm. We thrashed ashore, using a grotto in the ice island as an entry ramp. There is no way to describe what it feels like inside an ice island. We were so tired and desperate there were men who wanted to stay in there rather than risk the beach. We expected to be overrun immediately by the Ice Cross detachment at the camp on the bluff above, the notorious Clarence West.

  The attack did not come. A white flag was raised on the redoubt that fronted the camp’s main entrance on the bluff. That was not a fortified position, more a large barn, half-crushed by a rockslide, situated at the mouth of the elaborate cavelike network that led into the camp’s barracks. We were too cold to care about the possibility of a trap, or the other, infection. We hurried up the escarpment. Coquito Blades led the assault at the gate. It should have meant our massacre. Instead, the Ice Cross commandant surrendered, begged for mercy for himself and his men. By the time I got inside, my Hielistos had done their duty, leaving the commandant for my decision. I had him interrogated and then nailed up over the camp entrance. Within the hour, I was in command of the whole of the camp, with the auxiliary staff—more than two hundred of the Fathers in Agony—lined up for questioning. What I learned was not all that unusual. There had been a revolt four days prior to our arrival, triggered by the advance of my fleet, and the wretches were in control of the main part of the camp. The Ice Cross had surrendered to me rather than to the inmates and their diseases.

  We cared only for ourselves, got on dry clothes, ate, and rested in preparation for departure as soon as the blow lifted. Davey Gaunt woke me to tell me that the barracks leaders had gathered in the tunnel, pleading to meet with me. It was not sane to go down there. I went because I felt that I had become invulnerable by the freak of our escape from the sea. The Fathers of Agony formed a cordon between me and the barracks leaders. The Fathers were another of those rogue orders I have mentioned, with the important difference that they took their initiates from the camps. We had real priests on Anvers Island, who denounced them as gravediggers. I grant them their worth, for no other order—not even the Dominicans—would go into Clarence West. Coquito Blades wanted to kill them. That would not have helped; they died harder than the Hielistos. I told the Fathers I did not intend to harm the inmates. In the dark of the tunnel I heard a man call out in Spanish, “We know! It is told! Great Grim has come for us!”

  Portent ruled Clarence West. This should explain my reception, “It is told!” I was the focus of their high dreams. It was as Lazarus planned. He taught me that I could never fight Lykantropovin as effectively as my legend could. Lazarus maintained that the idea of me, unkillable warlord, not only helped frighten the Ice Cross but also helped win the loyalty of the wretches in the camps under Lykantropovin. The formula was simple. What the wretches lacked was hope. Lazarus made me into their hope incarnate. It was often too successful, moving the wretches to premature revolts. In every camp, I was spoken of as immortal, with the strength of a hundred Lykantropovins. They said I was everywhere at once, attacking by sea at Half Moon Island, attacking by land on King George. Skallagrim Ice-Waster was my dreaming. Theirs was called Grim El Grande—the Great Grim.

  And no matter how many wretches my Hielistos slaughtered while fighting the Ice Cross, no matter how little food my Hielistos were able to provide to the camps that fell under my control, or how much worse were the wretches under my protection than they had been under the Ice Cross, there was ever hysterical attendance and celebration of Grim El Grande. Lykantropovin offered them the Charity Factor and security. I offered them hope for a better day. It was a fantastic hope, an impossible hope, a false hope. They must have known that; on some level, they must have understood that if the sponsors of the Ice Cross had cut off our supplies, we all would have perished. This did not happen. Lykantropovin never even threatened to let all the camps starve—despite the fact they came to siding with me. He fed them food and I fed them fantasy. And how does one explain their hatred for the Ice Cross and their worship of me? Lazarus said it, and I restate: The wretches wanted me to be more than their loving Jesus or their militant David or their visionary Moses; they wanted me to be an angry god.

  That is why the wretches at Clarence West screamed for me, all that night, into the next day, and the next, when the storm finally weakened, and we had to get away before the Ice Cross came looking. Davey Gaunt and Coquito Blades forbid me to go down again into the tunnels. They were afraid of disease, yes, but more, that the wretches might have torn me apart in celebration. We listened to them, chanting, singing, in many languages, and always refrains of “Great Grim!” and “Freedom!”

  No more than a few thousand broke out to get to me. Somehow, as if they could hear through ice, they knew I was leaving. There was a rush up the main tunnel that carried through the cordon of Fathers and outside, before the redoubt. Some of the leaders attempted to keep them out of the wind. The camp was near riot, many more thousands below chanting and marching, waiting to hear how those up top fared. I was cut off from my ship by a mob who expected me to save them.

  My memory is that it was late in the day. The storm was finished, and so were we unless we got off. More than the Ice Cross threatened us by then, for the mob inside was trying to force the gate to the redoubt. The Fathers told us they could not hold them. There were killings, many children were being trampled. The leaders begged me that I give their people ships, food, clothing, medicine. Davey Gaunt wanted to fight our way through. Coquito Blades said we could not make it. It was madness until one of the Fathers came up and provided me part of the answer, saying, “Go to them. They won’t hurt you. Tell them they’re free.”

  I did it, no one else. Grim Fiddle gave the lie to those people, though he had the truth. I went out on the beach and walked among them. I told them to settle down and to wait. I could have told them to go back inside and wait for another day. It might not have deceived them. I did not try it. I knew I was not mad. I knew I was wrong, just as Father Saint Stephen had been wrong. Three thousand wretches lay down before me like sheep. They listened to me as I got up on a beached berg and preached to them that I was in control, told them the story of how my ships were coming to save them, to carry them, well-fed and warm, away to the west and north, to new lands and bountiful lives. I had to scream over the wind as the sun melted to the horizon and the temperature plunged. I serenaded them with my corrupt pride. That is the sort of shepherd Grim Fiddle was. In my great sealskin mantle, in my wolfskin cowl, holding my harpoon and my truth, I told those wretches to sleep, because when they awoke it would be a new day, and they would be under the protection of the invincible. I had fires built along the waterline, not for warmth but so they could see me silhouetted there against the glacier as they closed their eyes. I waited with them through the night that was no night, that was a long, howling shadow from the north. I refused shelter, moved back and forth among them huddled in clumps like rocks. And when they
were all quiet—because they were dead, or if not that, dying—I left them.

  That is the sort of black shepherd I was. I sneaked away in the ashen night, like a Norse murderer. My crime was done to people who loved me, was done in the shadows, by deception and betrayal. What could have been a more infamous crime? I murdered them in the worst way, violating any law ever conceived, pagan or Christian or New Benthamite.

  No, it was worse. After that shadowy night, nothing done by Grootgibeon, or Jaguaquara, or Fives O’Birne, or Lykantropovin, was a match for my work. I see the truth of it now. I have denounced my enemies as heinous. After that night, I was the same. I committed the crime of the Charity Factor all over again, justifying my choice as the greatest good for the greatest number, that is, saving Grim Fiddle for his realm. I became that night the darkest criminal in the South, the avenger truly deserving of revenge. My war came back to me and obliterated my pretense of justification. I became an outlaw from my own heart. I confess now that I murdered those wretches as another had murdered my family. I was he. It was as if Grim Fiddle had taken Peregrine, Israel, Guy, Earle, Thord, Orri, Gizur, Molly, and Charity out onto the ice to die, and told them at the last, “There is no God of Love. There is a God of Hate. I am his servant. My crimes are my monument.”

  My Fall from Satan’s Seat

  FOR those six years at Anvers Island, Lazarus was my rock. Lazarus was also my traitor. While it is an exaggeration to say that I built my kingdom upon him, it is not overmuch to say that his temperament fashioned the idea of my kingdom. It is also accurate to say that his temperament led him to overturn me. He was kingmaker and regicide, and proud for both. “What we have done!” he would say as we went out onto the ice for another season’s combat. And as often he would say, “What I have done!”