Lazarus did not interfere in my revenge on the capitanes de los Hielistos—that was all bloody and spontaneous. I stormed into their fortress, and they fell back in anticipation. I murdered their chief, Jaguaquara, and they celebrated me. I took their queen, and they bent their heads to my blade and to the blades of my sealers. Nor did Lazarus assert himself the following summer (January 2004), when, in order to dispatch a rescue mission to Golgotha, I led the attack that broke the Ice Cross blockade of Anvers Island—that was all berserker cunning and luck. Then I collapsed, weakened by my berserker fury to free the dark-haired queen, so that I lay insensate for months. I had leaped to the mastery of Anvers Island only to retreat to my hall and to lie down. It was at that moment that Lazarus stepped forward as my prime minister. He sealed my sick bed, set Germanicus and Kuressaare as my protectors, Cleopatra as my surrogate, and then ruled through her and thus through the legend he made of me. I did recover in a matter of months, but afterward I did nothing but conform to Lazarus’s sense of my grandeur and power. I was the king Lazarus made of me.
And how was it that a man who spoke so eloquently of a republic founded upon universal suffrage and written law could become a tyrant’s eyes and ears? How was it that Lazarus Furore was both conceiver and destroyer? The answer was the man; at least, that is all I have. Lazarus would say that he did what had to be done. I say that he pursued his heart as I had pursued my albatross and my heart’s desire. I cannot display Lazarus’s heart any more tellingly than the events allowed. I can say that Lazarus carried in his breast a profound contradiction that should not have worked, except that it did—that of the noble democrat and the terrible demagogue.
It was Lazarus the democratic teacher, as in Diomedes’s stories of Aristotle the Athenian lecturing the masters of the Hellenistic world, who came to use the six black months of each winter, when the Hielistos were prisoners of the ice in the caves at Anvers Island, as an academy for, as he said, “the revenge of the just.” The Hielistos mocked Lazarus at first, called him a mad priest, but as his reputation grew apace with mine those capitanes came to fear him. His program was grandiose. He told the capitanes that it was their duty to understand their historical significance. He punished any capitán who called himself a pirate. He made them recite in a singsong chant that they were crusaders, soldiers of the revolution, and, most of all, servants of a historical certainty. He said Lykantropovin was not merely our enemy, he was the enemy of the future. Whenever we struck at Lykantropovin, he said, we struck for the coming freedom of all just people, and so we must fight fiercely because we were the champions of billions in slavery. Lazarus said we were the future. Lazarus especially liked to tell us we fought for “all just people.” Whenever he used that phrase, I knew he was leaving me and the death in the caves and breathing the air of a faraway vision of what he believed the world would become.
He was not, in those trances of his, forgetful of how he must marshal the Hielistos and the wretches in the camps. Lazarus might have preached of warm, well-nourished utopias, however he remained fixed on the marching order to that end. This represents Lazarus the demagogic strategist. He commanded my council meetings with those quick eyes. He was ever wary of rebellion among the capitanes and mutiny among the Hielistos, was ever attentive to intrigue at Anvers Island. He put to death many in my name for disobedience, perhaps just for disaffection to Lazarus’s idea of our crusade. He commanded his hall-guard of spies like secret police, and they were everywhere: always second-in-command on my warships, or second-in-command in my battalions. Lazarus rarely interfered in the tactical planning of a murder raid. He would say that, as guerrillas fighting a long campaign, we would gain victory as long as we never surrendered. He would preach that as long as we, the capitanes, survived our raids, Lykantropovin would suffer defeat though he controlled the length of the Bransfield Strait. Lazarus presented this dogma in an uncharacteristically colorful metaphor: Grim Fiddle was the head of an unkillable beast with a thousand fists. And the Grim Fiddle that was the head was not the human Grim Fiddle, was the man who was the hope incarnate of the wretches. Lykantropovin could sever a hundred fists, said Lazarus. He could never extinguish hope as long as I lived in the legend of Great Grim, Grim El Grande, Grimmagne, Der Gross Grim. More, as Lazarus gave the wretches Grim Fiddle as hope he gave my capitanes Grim Fiddle as their purpose. Lazarus preached that I was the way to victory because I was the victory, and that serving me was serving the future. Once, Lazarus took me aside; I could see his eyes were afire, and that he was gripped by one of his faraway visions. He told me, “Hell can be organized. I have organized it. The Devil cannot be killed. You cannot be killed. No matter what else, don’t leave me. I need you. Take your vengeance. Come back to me. What we have done. What I have done. What there is left to do!”
I have discussed Lazarus at length with Diomedes. Diomedes said that he too had struggled with men like Lazarus throughout his career. Diomedes thought Lazarus a man compelled by a bottomless ambition for power, yet at the same time a man who yearned to justify his greed by demonstrating intellectually that he was more worthy than the men he ruled and conquered. Diomedes said Lazarus was a usurper. Diomedes insisted there was no more to find. Lazarus usurped the Furore family after Cesare was murdered; Lazarus usurped South Georgia when it was cut off by the fleet of the damned; Lazarus usurped my office as president of the Assembly in order to aggrandize himself as the drafter of the constitution; Lazarus usurped Germanicus at Golgotha by preaching to the wretches that I was an angry god and that he had my ear; Lazarus usurped my authority at Anvers Island by sealing me in my sickbed and ruling through Cleopatra; Lazarus usurped my possession of Cleopatra in a way I shall soon relate; and Lazarus usurped my kingship once I had defeated Lykantropovin.
Some of this is true, some of it is not. I do not fault Diomedes, for his Greek learning did much to help me see Lazarus the better. It might be that I should ask, what did Lazarus think of himself? He called himself a revolutionary. I suppose he would not have, in the end, turned aside the applause that he was a hero of his revolution. There is merit to his heroism, and it would be a disgrace if I were not to emphasize the hero, the lover, the heroic lover that was Lazarus. He died for his selfless love. I do not have the details, or certainty, only a rumor that he was killed the year after my arrest, while helping to rescue an ice camp from an eruption; there was also a rumor that he was killed by panicked wretches escaping that same eruption. Either way, he died because he loved his ideas enough to act upon them.
And how did he love? Lazarus wanted to take mankind by the hand, as a lover, and not only lead mankind to a document but also show mankind how to write its names at the bottom of that document—conceived by men, written by men, intended for men—which would secure freedom and justice and, yes, charity for all just people. This introduces the major departure between Lazarus Furore and Grim Fiddle, and I would rather speak to his love of the wretched.
No, perhaps this is wrong of me. Perhaps I should speak to Lazarus’s sense of charity. Lazarus thought charity a form of love. Lazarus wanted to give men, unasked, his will and his law. He often said that if the wretched resisted, he would force them to accept his charity. He talked of how he would “forge” men. I heard this as a boast. I might now more completely regard it as also the bravura of a tyrant. He did not seem to believe that the wretched could build their own future. He believed that the future must be given, forced upon, rammed onto, the wretched. This might mean that Lazarus no more believed in the people’s will than I did, and he might have had less faith in the wretched than I did. Lazarus sought to dictate that document of freedom, justice, and charity; he did dictate in the end. That is not the mark of a compassionate republican. That is the mark of an arrogant, sinister, murderous man. That is the mark of a puppet-master.
I cannot agree to this. Lazarus sacrificed much for me. His grief over the loss of Cleo at Golgotha was complete; he could not speak of her. His grief for Violante, who died in an Ice Cross murder
raid on Anvers Island our fourth summer there, was less sad, more complex. She had deteriorated before us at Anvers, as did many of the South Georgian remnant, so his mourning was mixed with ours for ourselves. Lazarus told Cleopatra about Violante: “She was hard enough.” By this I took that he did not think her death was a judgment on her resolve. She died for no reason. Lazarus often counseled me after another defeat on the ice, and especially after my murder of those wretches at Clarence West. He told me, “This was not useless, or meaningless, if we are not. Don’t speak of what is. Speak of what must be!”
I can speak to the only thing that Lazarus favored more than his masks of pedagogue, demagogue, kingmaker, and lawgiver. Lazarus Furore was in love with Cleopatra Furore. He loved her most humanly, and was perplexed by her most humanly, and hated her most humanly. It was she, not his “agenda of history,” that gave Lazarus strength. It was she, not the ice or the rebellious Hielistos or the grueling Ice Cross, that could weaken Lazarus, disrupt his will.
I have mentioned—when I wrote of that day I met Germanicus at 2 de Diciembre—how I believed Lazarus and Cleopatra were lovers when they arrived in Stockholm, and how I believe they continued their passion on board Angel of Death. Their union was a maze to me. So was their reunion on Anvers Island. I risk incoherence to report: Lazarus depended upon Cleopatra while she tolerated his attention; Lazarus ignored Cleopatra while she venerated his genius; Lazarus spoke against Cleopatra while she trusted his heart. He could denounce her in front of my council as a victim of self-delusion, mocking her claim as the “queen of slaves.” He could also worship her openly before my council as the most durable and determined warrior in the fortress. He gave her no pity when she ranted and wept for Charity, or for Cesare; he was courtly to her when she drifted from us to care for the children.
There was the dark side of their reunion, and I puzzle if I have overlooked it purposely in my appraisal of Lazarus: Lazarus was jealous of me. If he was a usurper to me, so was I to him. I took his Cleopatra and made her my queen, and my slave. Lazarus could shudder into silence whenever Cleopatra announced that she would share my bed, which she did when she willed. And yet he could also come to me in somber measure and urge me to go to her because she needed comfort.
Were those two what the philosophers call a marriage of true minds? I cannot answer this. Was I their dupe, or was I their child, or was I their victim, or was I their battleground? I watched them for five years at Anvers Island—once I was relieved of my berserker dreaming—and they appeared to me closer than any two people I ever experienced, Peregrine and Charity, Earle and Guy notwithstanding. Is that what Grim Fiddle was to them, then, an interloper, an adulterer?
For all my talk about Lazarus the rock and traitor and Cleopatra the “queen of slaves”, it might come to this, then—that they used me as I used them. There was a man, Lazarus, who thought he had vision of the future; and there was a woman, Cleopatra, who thought herself shackled to the past that she shackled to herself, and who found in Lazarus a liberator. And what happened? Grim Fiddle cut them apart and made one his right hand and one his left hand, made one his pain and the other his pleasure. This cannot be all there is to say. I must look to Cleopatra.
If Cleopatra did rule Lazarus as would a queen, then I indulge myself to say that Cleopatra, more than Lazarus, was the imperial seat of my corruption as a warlord king. It was of a piece, Cleopatra the queen, Cleopatra the victim of the vengeance, Cleopatra the engima. I turn from Lazarus, my rock and my traitor, to Cleopatra, my lust and my cipher. There seems pathetically little to say, as there is time left to say it. I tell the truth: Grim Fiddle did not love Cleopatra Furore. That is the tale, beginning and end.
And yet my loveless adoration of her, my possessive passion for her, seems a flood of woe-singing. I have tried to convince myself that I loved her from the first, on that ballroom floor, amid swirling privilege and indifferent learning, me the oafish lackey, she the sleek inheritor. Did I love her then? It is a lost notion to me now. If it was love, it did not grow. It lingered where it commenced, immature obsession with the unattainable and unknowable. Perhaps when I claimed I loved her, I was bluffing love, dimly aware that it was futile. There was false joy in it, purposeless abandon. I have written, in romantic hyperbole, that our love was from the first as unlucky as it was hopeless. I strike that thought now. It was delusion. If that was love—angry lust, fighting and hurting and twisted, fleshly, lurid coupling—then what was my unshakable love for Grandfather, my sweet love for Abigail, my enduring love for my Sam?
I confess my failure to love Cleopatra. Why pursue it? I am old. She is gone. There seems only misery to speculate how she regarded me. That it fetches me is a sign to me of how lewd was our intercourse. Back then, she was a hunger, yet now she is a stinking gluttony. What can I say of her nature now that could be more succinctly telling than how I envisioned her in my berserker dreaming? She was the dark-haired queen, Hard-Heart. When I changed shape, I saw what Cleopatra had become. Her pain was her purpose was her pleasure was her pain. I did not trust my insight, not even in hallucination, and wrongly believed her name changed to Glad-Heart. This was childish yearning. Cleopatra was Hard-Heart, and remained Hard-Heart. Cleopatra Furore was hard, and hard enough. Have I once in my record of her provided any cause to think of her as glad?
And why did God harden Cleopatra’s heart? God has the answer. My guess seems self-serving; it is mine. Through Cesare Furore, Cleopatra was born to luxury. Through me, she inherited degradation. She must have hated many, wanted revenge on multitudes; however, she must have completely hated me and wanted total revenge upon me. I would like to write this as final. It may be. I recoil at the depth of her call to hate Grim Fiddle. How could I call myself her lover? I was her persecutor. I was the thrust of her torment. How did I ravish her? Most vilely. Look at it for what it was, Grim. Better that she could hate me rather than have to examine the cruelty of her fate. This must be why I confess that I did not love her. It is more of my promised debt to her. I pay and pay—no love, all darkness. No true love could be born of such unhappiness. Our fate was joint calamity. To the end, we reached for that ruin.
My memory of Cleopatra has hurt me. My hands feel as heavy as my heart. I have one more episode I must try to tell. I introduce it by mocking myself. I have rushed to explain the rise and fall of my kingship as if it were to be explained by the motives of the players. This is foolishness. I anticipate a criticism: does such a thing as effect follow from such a thing as cause, or is not every event an independent effect of nothing, a result of nothing? Be lucid, Grim. I ask myself what difference there would have been had Grootgibeon or Jaguaquara or Fives O’Birne gathered control of Anvers Island, and I and mine had bent to their will, or perished in hopelessness? I see none. Hundreds of thousands would still have died abandoned and forgotten. The home of the gods would still have feigned ignorance of our plight and enjoyed their stolen fruit. Black and hurt half-men might have made the camps what they were, but it was Antarctica, that wall of blizzards, that determined what happened in the camps, or perhaps determined nothing, lay absolute and unchanged by what we wretched suffered on its icy shores. More confusing to me still, there is the question: Does perceived history determine mankind’s future; or does mankind have the authority to remake its own history any time mankind wants, and continually? Grim Fiddle here acknowledges his consternation before the paradox of predeterminism and free will. I translate to the tiny scale of me and my loved ones: What would it have signified for the ice camps and my ice kingdom if Cleopatra had not been corrupted by her loathing? or if I had been able to love her and set her free? or if Lazarus could have set aside his doubt about me, Cleopatra, himself, justice, and taken charge of our destiny?—ours, and not that of “all just people.” I suggest a good reply is that it would not have signified. The wretches would still be dead. The gods would still be luxuriating.
I realize this is suspect, as if the New Benthamites have captured my mind, have convinced me tha
t love, fear, decency, sacrifice, revenge, criminal responsibility, freedom do not signify, as if what pertains is just the hedonic calculus, and philosophy is a whine. This is not the case, yet I believe I lack the wisdom to set down my discrimination keenly. Men and women think that what they do and how they do it does signify. History is what they have done. Philosophy is how they have done it. Yet there are turns of such pervasive darkness that the will and the heart, the history and the philosophy, of men and women are lost in the turmoil.
My Kingdom of Ice seems a fit example. We wretches threw our high dreams and our weak flesh against Antarctica. The ice and the volcanoes continued as before. What is accusation against one’s brother in the face of a black-ice island? What is massacre of tens of thousands in the face of the fumes pouring from Satan’s Seat? What is food for a famine-bloated child in the face of that black winter that blots out compassion? And then, the scale of it, what is truth and falsehood in the face of that endless wind that hurtles off the Antarctic plateau to churn the rock and sea into an ice world that does not seem the planet Earth, that does seem a place and a time where and when no human being could ever venture? What fool Grim Fiddle is to ask. How pretentious Grim Fiddle is to think that what he wrought in the South matters. The heart is the truth, I claim. Antarctica has no heart. It is five million square miles of near lifelessness, where only at the edges can anything that feels pain cling to misery to know it is still alive. Antarctica seems one step short of the cold, black, exploded universe that spills over my ice prison. The deepest mystery for me here in my ice prison, looking up to the sky whenever I can, is not, why does the universe exist, why does that aspect of the inhumane cosmos, Antarctica, exist? It is, rather, how strange of God to have made mankind, surely a mistake caught between the utter fire and the utter cold of creation, and to have made mankind in such a way that a sinner and penitent like Grim Fiddle can think that he ever counted for more than a germ. Grim Fiddle’s history and philosophy, mankind’s history and philosophy, is no sense. It is laughter.
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