I relate hurriedly my last days as King of Antarctica. It was early summer, six years after Grandfather’s death and my murder of Jaguaquara, at the beginning of my seventh summer as warlord of Anvers Island. The Bransfield Strait was open with several lanes through the floes. Lykantropovin was dead seven months, not by my hand but by my office. Germanicus was dead two months, of wounds and despair. The past winter had ripped up the ice camps as one might gut an elephant seal. My capitanes in charge of the camps sent cutters to Anvers pleading for food, discipline, hope. Another cutter arrived from the Falklands bearing an envoy from the republican signatories of the Treaty of Good Hope and the Peace of the Frontier, who presented Lazarus with terms for a truce. My capitanes remained in their halls throughout the Palmer archipelago and the South Sheltlands, waiting to continue the war or to die. The Ice Cross was defeated by me; my army was defeated by Antarctica and by a blood lust that had finally ebbed, leaving melancholy, madness, starvation. I too stayed in my hall; I was recovered from my wounds from the battle at Elephant Main, yet still in the lingering grip of my own darkness. Grim Fiddle, the berserker warlord, had become increasingly only that. This was a fraud, however, for I had come to rely upon my rage to get me out of my hall, onto my flagship, into the blood-work. Now, summer come again, the disease that is murder had corrupted my limbs as well as my heart. I was sick of the blood. I had killed so many that I thought and felt and saw only killing. I presumed the worst in all, because I was the worst of myself.
I must be blunt, though my brevity beggars accuracy. My berserker dreaming of my rise to kingship had been replaced by a nightmare that was more mortal than that of a shape-changer. I had abandoned my sense of myself as Skallagrim Ice-Waster, Hard-Fisherman’s Promise-Keeper, left in the ocean of hatred that had been my home for six years. Without Lykantropovin I thought there was no more purpose, and if there was, it was not for me. I saw myself in my dreams as a coward, a cheat, a lie, in all, damned. That was the overwhelming image. I convinced myself that I was the servant of the God of Hate. There was no one left to comfort me. Longfaeroe might have contained my ranting—he never emerged from a cave-in on Anvers; the sealers had disappeared one at a time in battle against either the Ice Cross or the whales; Otter Ransom and Wild Drumrul had obeyed my order at Elephant Main and drowned for it. I have no strength to continue the list. They were gone. I remained in my hall. I would give no orders. I refused to go out into the sun, preferred to wrap myself in the walls of my cave. I see what I was doing most clearly now. It was prescient of me, another misused gift from Mother. I sensed my guilt, put myself on trial, accused myself of slaughtering nearly everything I had ever loved and of having gained nothing from taking revenge. I judged myself a criminal without remorse, and stood condemned to a solitary prison. My mind was in premature retreat. I wanted no answers, no opportunities, no hope. I recall that I was able to go very far in my self-torment, for I betrayed my memory of Grandfather.
I convinced myself that Grandfather’s service to his Lord God had been wrong, because there was no God of Love, rather there was a God of Hate who had made mankind wretched the more to toy with and torture the sinner. I cannot re-create my reasoning; it was not reasonable. Nonetheless, it felt more real to me than the cold. I screamed at myself, refusing food and sleep. I will not bother to reproduce here my blasphemy. The sum of it centered on my recurring delusion of the God of Hate. I claimed that I had defeated Lykantropovin and the Ice Cross as a servant of the God of Hate, claimed that I was as good a servant as was the Dark Prince, Satan. Grim Fiddle, the Black Prince of the black ice, filled himself as a well would fill with bad water and pretended even unto the power of Satan, Grandfather’s Satan. I boasted I was in league with Satan, that he was my brother-at-arms. I vowed to give myself to my comrade, to open up the Southern Ocean as Satan had opened up the doldrums. I was mad. None of it makes sense. I was mad. I chanted to my own slaves, “Satan is my ally. We are slaves of the God of Hate.”
Lazarus came to me, ministering to me as a father. He blamed himself for my condition. He said he had asked too much of me, said he was prepared to relieve me of my burden. He made long speeches, colored by Lazarus’s mix of the mystical and pedagogical, yet concluded with his sense of the practical. He tried to draw me out of my hall with promises. He said the Ice Cross wanted to surrender to me at first opportunity, that the Ice Cross had guaranteed massive resupply of the camps and immediate resettlement of the camps, had also guaranteed amnesty and rehabilitation of the Hielistos. Lazarus also tried my vanity. He said that though I was a hero to the Hielistos and the camps now, soon I would be to the world, said that I had shown that the Treaty of Good Hope and the Peace of the Frontier were death warrants, and that now the disgrace of the fleet of the damned was done and I was a great man.
“This is what you fought for, Grim,” he told me, and later, “You must act now, Grim, it all waits on you,” and then in ever more desperate terms, “We can’t let the summer pass, Grim, the camps won’t make another winter,” and, “We’ve won, you’ve won, this is the time!”
I countered Lazarus’s pleas with descriptions of the plots against me, how the Ice Cross was attempting to defeat me with trickery, how I could no longer trust my capitanes or my councillors. I told Lazarus that he was a dupe of my enemies, told him that he was a defeatist, told him, yes, this was the time, the time to attack. There was also crazy talk that we must prepare for a summer campaign, must hide the women and children, especially my South Georgians (who were all dead), for I declared Lykantropovin was alive, my capitanes had brought me the wrong head.
“There is no refuge from my enemies!” I thundered to Lazarus and my councillors. “There can be no peace! Satan is our ally! The time to attack!”
Cleopatra came to me later, and along with her, her shadow, Babe. I expected more of Lazarus’s persuasions, began again about the conspiracy against me, and thus her as well. She sat beside me. Babe stood vigilantly behind her. Cleopatra was no longer a beauty, her hair cropped off, her teeth rotten, her body weakened by starvation, the cold, the sunlessness, the sort of fatigue from which sleep is no relief. For some cause that I have forgotten—an accident that not even Babe could prevent—she was slightly paralyzed. She had to look and talk out of one side of her face, had to use one arm to lift the other. I did not pity her. I appealed to her hard heart. Her heart answered me.
“You have it right,” she said.
“I am surrounded by enemies,” I said.
“You must act,” she said.
“Satan is my ally. My enemies are his enemies. I shall assemble my army and attack!”
“There is more than that. You must do more,” she said.
“How do you know?” I said.
“She told me, your albatross,” she said.
It fills me with wonder now, twenty-nine years later, to recall Cleopatra’s wasted face when she spoke the lie that slew the Kingdom of Antarctica while in the same instant it gave birth to the People’s Republic of Antarctica. One of her eyes was moist with tears because she had to keep opening and shutting it by hand. Her lips were cracked, her skin pitted with sores. She might have wanted to change her expression in order to give conviction to her deceit, could not, because of the paralysis perhaps, more likely because, in imitation of Lazarus, Cleopatra had forsaken smiles, grimaces, surprises. Her face was a single facade. It surely would have misled a saint into thinking he beheld a victim. I doubt if even a looking glass could have displayed Cleopatra accurately. Yes, there was misery, mourning, hatred there; but more tellingly there was a “queen of slaves” who was willing to do the last that was necessary to settle her fate. That face was resolution. I do not blame her. I suppose I am proud of her for her cleverness, can still feel my admiration. She possessed one confidence to use against me, for only once had I shared my secrets, and that was when I ravished Cleopatra after murdering Jaguaquara. I told her I had reached for her because it was my destiny, and then I told her of Grandfather, Skallag
rim Strider, and Lamba Time-Thief, in specific, of that pale albatross.
I credit Lazarus’s role as well, for he must have been behind Cleopatra’s ruse. I guess that he had gone to her to debate what could be done either to enlist my aid in making truce with the republican masters or to conceive a plan to unseat me. My capitanes were caught between their self-interest and their loyalty to me, not out of love, out of fear of what I had done to all who wavered. I was their purpose; I was also their peril. They fought for me, or they fought me. Lazarus could not negotiate without their cooperation, which meant that he had to have my authority. I see his dilemma. I see the wisdom of his treachery. The king was mad. My victory over Lykantropovin was a defeat for hundreds of thousands unless the Hielistos accepted the Ice Cross’s surrender and the offer by the republican masters to relieve the deprivation in the camps. What had to be done was clear. How to do it, and with what weapon, was not clear. Lazarus needed to get rid of me in such a way that he could sign the truce while not shattering my kingdom into dozens of conclaves of pirates. If he had assassinated me, he would have risked having my capitanes put forward a new warlord who owed nothing to Lazarus and his plans. Therefore, Lazarus had to keep me alive, and a threat to the capitanes, but also had to keep me out of the way until the truce was in effect. Cleopatra provided Lazarus with a weapon, a perfect blade, a lie she knew Grim Fiddle would believe. Cleopatra picked up my mother’s power and thrust it into my heart.
I do not recall much of the convoluted debate that followed her lie. I must have knelt before her, thinking she could provide me with genuine counsel. That does not mean her task was easy. She had me, she had to maneuver me. Who introduced the idea of a new quest? Who first raised the possibility that a pilgrimage to Satan would give me new strength to carry on my war? Who began talk of a journey to Satan’s Seat so that Grim Fiddle could confer with his ally? I recall dimly that I did most of the ranting, that Cleopatra did not raise points so much as confirm my hallucinatory logic.
There was another voice in our conference, a real thunderer. As we talked in my ice cave, Satan’s Seat rumbled way to the south. It made Cleopatra bend, from her fear of sudden fissures. It made me thunder back, a pathetic imitation of my birth, when I sang the upper part of that Fiddle duet. I convinced myself that as I had answered Grandfather, so now I should answer Satan’s Seat, as I had condemned everyone on board King James and Candlemas Packet in pursuit of my heart’s desire, so now I condemned myself in pursuit of my black heart’s desire, Satan.
Cleopatra withdrew. Babe trailed behind her. He gave me a sad, hard, fertile look. There are no parting words with her to record. I have not seen Cleopatra since.
For his part, Lazarus did come to me, while I prepared my pilgrimage. He said he understood my decision was final. I suppose this means that even then, as he watched me ready my own regicide, he had his plans firm. I said that my decision was inspired. He said yes.
I can sympathize with his betrayal. I had fought for revenge as fury. Lazarus had fought for his idea of the future as duty. The truce with the Ice Cross was in his grasp. Also, I can suppose, he knew that within his reach was a profoundly more significant document, the declaration of a people’s revolution that commenced the People’s Republic of Antarctica.
I have not seen Lazarus’s triumph. I have been told, by my tribunal, and by Diomedes. It is said to be a single sheet. It is said to be entitled “The Constitution for the People’s Republic of Antarctica.” It is said to indict a tyranny and to declare the tyrant, Grim Fiddle, overthrown. It is said to announce that henceforth the people in the South are citizens of a republic in which no man or woman is above another, in which there is neither black nor white, male nor female, first nor last.
It is said to be in Lazarus’s hand. Did Cleopatra sign it? That is my fancy. There would have been no need for signatures. The republican masters would have accepted any scrap in order to conceal their crimes and put a new face on their war with Grim Fiddle. With that document, and with the power to interpret it as they wished, Grim Fiddle was made the transgressor, the ice camps were made Grim Fiddle’s victims, the Ice Cross was made the beleaguered savior of the South.
Lazarus could not have been surprised when he, the traitor, was soon betrayed by his enemies, the faceless benefactors who sponsored the Ice Cross. It pleases me to suppose that Lazarus had thought through his deed. He sacrificed me and the kingdom we had built out of revenge in order to give birth to a people’s republic of mystical egalitarianism, in order to insure that this people’s republic existed only to be dismantled immediately and its citizenry resettled a world away as soon as possible.
What else for him? The camps were doomed. The Hielistos were uncontrollable. The Ice Cross was broken by exhaustion. Only a bold stroke, a magnificent philosophical construction, could have saved anything. Lazarus took up his pen and made those marks, “The Constitution for the People’s Republic of Antarctica.” He called it a people’s republic because that was his mind. For this alone I reward his genius.
Lazarus knew that the republics of the North and South that had signed the Treaty of Good Hope and the Peace of the Frontier would try to corrupt the government that represented the victorious Hielistos and the ice camps under their control. Lazarus knew that if he went to them representing a hierarchical government—a monarchy, or parliamentary monarchy, or congressional republic—then the republican masters would be able to manipulate the negotiations by promising amnesty and resettlement like bribes, to fall to the powerful in the conclaves of the Hielistos and the ice camps, while the wretches were abandoned again. It would have been the oldest, most trite manipulation: the victorious oppressed seduced to become the oppressors. Lazarus understood that only by making every human being in Antarctica an inviolable equal in my victory could he insure immediate and complete dismantling of the camps and relocation of the internees—the most wretched out first, the most wretched out last. And Lazarus knew that the only way to promote such a fabulous desire was to constitute the ice camps and the Hielistos in such a way that they represented a truly unworldly idea: All men and women are equal. I believe it no accident that the language I am told that appears in Lazarus’s document resembles a description of another unworldly place, the garden of Eden.
Lazarus conceived the Kingdom of Antarctica to secure impossible liberty, then he conceived the People’s Republic of Antarctica to secure impossible justice. I am aware that the record shows now that Lazarus’s dare was a failure, that the dissolution of the ice camps that did follow his negotiations in Africa and the establishment of the ice state by “The Constitution for the People’s Republic of Antarctica” was almost as ghastly as if it had been done by madmen. This does not mean to me that Lazarus’s grasp and reach are forgotten or dismissable. To repeat his balm to me, do not speak of what is, speak of what must be. Lazarus stood firmly for the highest ideals conceivable by him, a perfect egalitarian state, an Edenic republic. He was a hero. If he failed to save hundreds of thousands, he did save tens of thousands, and he did so by making a deal with men he knew to be treacherous. They were what he had. And if they were soon overwhelmed by the scale of their task to relocate the wretched in the camps, this does not take from Lazarus. Lazarus knew himself, knew his enemies. He could have stood by reluctantly, could have made excuses and stalled. He chose instead to gather his reason and his inspiration and then to plunge.
And is it my excited mind, or is there not a lovely joke in Lazarus’s triumph? Did he not overthrow me in order to construct what he believed as perfect a state as man will ever manage on the Kingdom of Earth? In Lazarus’s People’s Republic of Antarctica there was no time for factionalism, rebellion, cynicism, blood feuding, and degradation. There was only time for a smile at the grand conceit of an icebound Eden. And then it was gone, its loyal citizenry back to green and purple fields. Its birth was its death.
In my rush I have sung poorly of that great man, Lazarus Furore. I met him one wild day when I was almost twenty
-two years old, and found him a copper-skinned ideologue, a sharp, fast, angry young man. I left him one wilder day when I was thirty-five, and left him a scarred, shrunken, weathered mourner, also a brilliant leader, a splendid hero who believed in freedom, a better day, the goodness in all just people. Most tribute of all, Lazarus Furore believed he was right and was willing to give all that he had—love, life, history, honor—in order to make right. Lazarus was his own monument.
He did betray me. I accuse him of that. He is guilty. I cannot believe that he also intended for me to be delivered into the vindictiveness of the republican masters. He could not have thought that I would return from my false quest for Satan, two hundred miles south into mountains never penetrated by man or animal, and after that up the ashen slopes of an active volcano. He must have thought that when we parted at the shore of Anvers Island, I was a dead man. We did not meet again. That was chance, for within the week he was gone to the South Orkneys and then to Africa to speechify for his high dreams, the People’s Republic of Antarctica; and within the year he was gone to his Maker, where I imagine he continues to speechify to the angels themselves for his high dreams, and perhaps for a People’s Republic of Heaven.
“Good luck, Grim,” he said to me on the shore.
“I’ll show them, you’ll see,” I said, some crazed sense of the coming Twilight of the Gods glazing my vision.
“You have done. I have done. We have done. What we have done!” he said, and that was the end for us, unless, I note, my memory is tricking me and he actually said, “What have we done?”
The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica Page 46