My flight to Satan’s Seat did not take much longer than Lazarus’s to the camps of our enemies. I loaded a thousand pounds of supplies atop my sled. It was the best I knew to build, hand-lashed, light, doubly strengthened ropes. I harnessed nine of the most rugged dogs I could risk, all huskies, part wolf, part everything else, from the stock the Ice Cross had brought in. Such a beast is not calm unless dead. My wheel dog was a massive veteran, nearly blind from fights, sure footed, reliable; my lead dog was one of Iceberg’s great-grandchildren (Iceberg and Goldberg died weeks apart, in their sleep and, yes, peacefully), a gray heap of scar tissue and muscle who could sense crevasses like meat, could break trail without a man leading him, and was blessed with a fierce sense of loyalty: he would always turn the sled when I was pitched off, would bark murder to the team until I righted myself. My team was mongrel and mean, could live on blubber and pemmican, and when that was gone, would live on the promise of more, until hunger made them killers.
Once landed on the continent, I commanded, “Haw!” and we were off across the ice, weaving between the hummocks, over fields broken with jagged slabs, up onto the glacier that I chose as the first leg of my highway to Satan. My dogs did not sense my delusion. They ran heads down, best when wet and cold, their tails raised high behind them in the wind like mainmasts stretching canvas. When we were right, we sailed up that glacier. We had to zigzag, often doubling back when a track ended at a fissure. I remember a feeling of passionate numbness. As long as my strength held, I was exuberant, the sun overhead, the light, wet snow swirling in updrafts right and left. The farther we got from the shore, the easier our run, because the snow slackened off. There is little snowfall on the continent itself, the blizzards being the wind picking up crystals and flinging them. On the glacier, I was protected from the worst of the coastal winds, and the first few days felt myself climbing into an untracked world of white and compelling wonder.
It could not last. My journey was a lie. And I believe what happened to me there was luck. As I left behind Anvers, which I had made my tomb, I also left behind the turbulence in my mind. My heart was lightened by the beauty of Antarctica. I have emphasized the dread of the South. If a man ignores death, sheds Grandfather’s and Longfaeroe’s sense of wreak flesh and holds to the might of the spirit, then he can stand back and appreciate God’s creation. God made Antarctica as seriously as he made Eden. Before those gigantic blue-black mountains that tower to heaven, draped in mantles of gale-blown clouds pink and blue, made majestic by fingers of glaciers that rippled the exposed rock, what is adequate to be said? It can seem a dream.
The physical reward is pain. That pain overcame me after a week’s run. My giddiness passed; a dull vertigo settled in. I anticipated my fall. The cold stiffened my limbs, my solitude slowed my step. I fed the dogs, made sloppy efforts to keep on. They were ready; I failed them. We stayed three days waiting for one blow to pass, lingered another twro days farther up a new glacier for no reason. After that I lost sense of and care for time. At the top of the glacier, I was faced with a futile choice, either down into a valley of mountainous shadows pocked with deep drifts, or off onto a ridge the team might not have managed. I hesitated, camped at the crest, built a shelter of rock slabs and snow, kept a large fire, consumed too much of my coal. The dogs lay down in their holes, I in mine. We all knew I had quit.
My ice mausoleum was well set, a natural window to the south, opening onto crisscrossing mountain chains that heaved ever higher toward the gateway onto the Antarctica plateau itself. That was several hundred miles southward. There was more immediate spectacle: the stepping stones that surrounded the great smoking colossus, Satan’s Seat. It dominated the landscape, master of Graham Land, set above the Wilkins Coast, between the Larsen Ice Shelf and the whale-shaped Alexander Island, and amid what is charted as the Eternity Mountains. I was at least one hundred miles upwind of the worst of the eruptions, yet the poisonous black clouds venting from the crater had splashed the snowfields with twisted geometric designs. It seemed a masterwork of a master abstracter, the master mystery-maker. The winds could sweep clear the slopes of the volcanoes, west to east, so from my vantage I could study the cycle. The earth would shrug; rockslides and ice ridges would jump once and then pour down the slopes in an avalanche that sent a gray-white wash into the valleys; the crater would then spew ever blacker smoke streams into the cloud cover above; finally, roars would pronounce a new episode, a glow building in the fumes. Instead of Satan’s Seat then heaving ashen fire into the sky, one of the stepping stones would vent, a demon’s seat evidencing obeisance. I saw this cycle once completely, saw it repeat just short of spewing continually. It was hypnotic, drew me into the process, humbled me, witness to a clockwork of ash and wind. I felt, feeding my own fire, eating the last of my food, that my end was privileged with secrets of creation. I watched myself die as I watched the earth tremble with cataclysmic renaissance.
It was humility before that splendor that returned me to cold reason. My delusions about conspiracies, treacheries, imminent world wars, gradually came to seem to me to be trivial, mean-spirited, proceeding from my vanity. More to the point of my being camped on that glacier, my deranged notions that Satan was my ally came to humiliate me. I saw my gibberish and was mortified. I taunted myself, told my team that their master was a pitiable, pitiless fool, unworthy of their muscle and devotion. I did talk to my wolves, but not as a berserker, nor as a madman, instead as a simple sinner, low and regretful, sane and ironic in reflection.
“Satan’s Seat, we call that one,” I told Iceberg’s great-grandson. “That gives more to Satan than to that mountain. No devil could ever be so grand! Look at the size!”
(This should be explained: On Anvers Island, the fumes from Satan’s Seat could appear an enormous figure, such as Christmas Muir had once described to me, a great ram’s head, horned and grinning. I had first dismissed this as sealer talk, then, as warlord of murder, embraced it as fitting judgment on the evils of men, as if Satan ruled the camps. Now, I rejected it again and for all time as gab. It was a volcano, a grotesque and terrifying one, and no more. It was the world in motion, only that, vomiting up the goods of elemental nature. If one were to look down into that volcano, one would not see Hell, or evil; one would see the future fields of bounty. And the cloud that billowed and glowed above it was merely windblown ash, in the shape of nothing but metaphor.)
“I called my master the God of Hate,” I told my wheel dog. “Israel, he would groan at me, call me a brat. God, yes, God most tender. The hate is my invention. God created this lovely world. Man made hatred, did so out of disgust for his own ingratitude. And what man has done wrong, he can do right. The God of Love, I see that, Israel, a lesson so simple.”
With my reason, I regained also one of the keenest defenses with which man is blessed, fear of death. I understood that a good measure of sanity is an acceptance of such a fear. I emptied of folly as I filled with fear. I did not want to die. I was cold and alone, yet wanted more of life, even if it was to be torment. I saw my end and wept. This journey had been suicide, I realized, and I was sorry for it. More, I blamed myself for my presumption to defy the knowable limits of nature, for my pride to be more than a man. Of all the sins I committed, this seems the worst. God had graced me with life; Lamba had given me birth; Peregrine, Israel, Guy, Earle, Thord, Orri, Molly, had given me childhood; Grandfather had given me chance; the Furores and the South Georgians and the wretched of the camps had given me everything they had. What right had I to return this trust with smug blasphemy? My fear of death blended with my anger at myself. I turned the fury that I had lavished on the Charity Factor onto myself.
“Stupid, extreme, cruel, lustful, faithless, small, small man!” I shouted to the dogs. “That is what sits here! All of life was before me! Look at the heavens, look at the earth, for me, all could have been for me! Selfish, rash, blundering Grim! You wolves have more dignity in your teeth than I ever managed in my life! Would you have come up here to quit? B
efore your sensible wants my learning is waste. I know why you don’t answer me. What could you tell such an ignoramus? You are beasts, and happy for it! I am a man, and sad for it! Not for good cause! Out of contrariness! Ludicrous, trivial, vain, spiteful, greedy Grim! The only decent thing I can do for you now is make myself your last meal. What is a man who feeds himself to wolves? A bootless fool, sour meat!”
I stress that though this seems ranting, it was not. I had to shout over the wind and the barking. Otherwise it was intimate intercourse, self-indulgent, true, yet it was my last meal and I permitted a feast of woe. I acted accordingly. I was despondent, not overmuch. I felt stupid, also very sanely ridiculous.
As I lay restless and chatting, the cold and the solitude joined to give me that phenomenon of life in Antarctica that is best described here as useful melancholia. I lost perspective. The window on Satan’s Seat closed. A new window opened onto my past. Memories beckoned me. I walked forgotten paths and met forgotten acquaintances. I turned from talking with my wolves to conversing with my history. The same experience I endured then, I reiterate, is what has made it possible for me to recall so much of my story here in the ice prison, with a minor difference. Then, I was clumsy at travel in my mind’s museum, and images blurred, scenes collapsed out of chronology. I stumbled through my life both seeker and fugitive. It did not then lead to clarity, as I can make it do now. Of consequence, I can only report my melancholy, save for one conversation that was not reminiscence but prescient revelation.
“You were my best friend,” I said.
“No long face there, Grim,” said Germanicus.
“All those dear folk, our South Georgians, why did they have to die like that?” I said.
“We none of us ken that,” said Germanicus.
“Are they happy in Heaven?” I said.
“O aye, be sure that the pastor sees to it. They be released. Give way, now, Grim, look to yourself,” said Germanicus.
“Abbie said that, do you remember? Save yourself, she said. I’ve always thought that was what she told Robby. ‘Save himself,’ she told Robby to tell me.”
“Aye, bonnie words,” said Germanicus.
“I’ve made a mess of it. And if I couldn’t save me, who would want to?” I said, looking away from Germanicus and down into the snow. I saw there Germanicus as he had been the winter before in my hall, broken and white, dead from wounds, a tired and good man released. He was the last of the sealers to leave me. No stories are equal for his courage, especially after Jane was murdered, and their baby boy. I mourned him so completely that I had denied my grief until then on the glacier. How happy I felt to be able to look up from the snow and find his black beard flecked with ice, his smile giving me warmth. I was not deceived.
I knew he was a ghost, or whatever he should be called—a realized memory. It still gave me great comfort. I built my fire up with my sled and the food containers, then cut free the team, keeping Iceberg’s great-grandson tethered near me to hold back the team’s hunger until it ruled them. By then, I would not need protection.
I lay down to die. There is no surprise as to the failure of that presumption. There is a final and small puzzle to my last days as King of Antarctica. I mean to say, I fell, but I was soon enough scooped up and returned to destiny. It was not just that way. I have waited twenty-nine years to figure out just what it was, however, and if it is not the most intriguing confusion in my narrative, it remains for me the queerest of inexplicable surprises. What was her mind? I have already rejected the one motive that would seem to explain such conduct. She could not have loved me. She must have hated me. Perhaps there is more to love than anyone can bear to know. Was it womanly secret on a scale that I cannot conceive that moved her to urge me to, and then to retrieve me from, Satan’s Seat? Love or hate, then, in all a great and abiding passion in the human heart, moved Cleopatra Furore to retrieve Grim Fiddle, moved the queen to dispatch her knave to fetch the king from his chatty, morbid, beauteous sanctuary. I report it as flatly as it happened. I lay down to die and Babe Furore walked out of the wind. I could not ask him, mute witness, so for the thrill it still means to me I shall close this abridged confession with a question that I shall endeavor to pursue after life: “Why Cleopatra, why did you save Grim Fiddle?”
My Sam
I CANNOT murder Grim Fiddle. This last writing has shown me what I have become in my ice prison, a curious old pilgrim, game for more, luxurious with memories that crowd my manuscript. It is six weeks since I pronounced my imminent departure from this life. I renounce my plan. No Babe Furore had to walk out of the wind this time. I have been nursed back to health by my delivery of the story of the People’s Republic of Antarctica. The patient is again patient with his destiny. Denial of the life I have been given, by love and accident, would be the most foolish sort of ingratitude. I forbid it. There is more to my decision, less philosophically abstract. I am now palpably reminded of Abigail’s advice to me to save myself, and of Cleopatra’s one queer assistance to the same end. It is time that Grim Fiddle took charge of that effort, the delivered stood up his own deliverer.
This is not to say that my apprehension about Diomedes’s letter was unfounded. A new letter has finally arrived, yesterday, obliging me to finish my fall from Satan’s Seat without detail. I had hoped to report my arrest and trial. There were some fine speeches. I suppress that now. Diomedes announces more immediate noise. I do not care to give the One World Reunion a voice in my last testimony. The sum of their endeavor is that, according to Diomedes, Grim Fiddle is reborn in green history. The Reunionists threaten the worst of my anticipations. Along with Diomedes’s letter, the supply ship—long delayed by happy storms—brought communication to Gardiner to prepare this place for extinction. They are all expecting momentary recall. The excitement here is cluttered, does not interest me. Grim Fiddle the goat becomes Grim Fiddle the lamb; it is the same, a lie.
What recourse for me? I am lucky for my genius. I talked with Gardiner this morning. He could not have been more obliging. I sense my conceit colors this report. I should scold myself for my deception of such a well-meaning, hopeful man. I shall not. I told Gardiner that I wanted the freedom of the quay; he agreed. I told Gardiner that I wanted his promise that this manuscript would reach Diomedes no matter what happens to me or my pending reawakening; he promised. I made him swear; he swore, on the Fiddle Bible.
The door to my prison is open. The path to my future is clear. I intend to become a fugitive. I am sixty-four years old. I have a savvy wolf, and know the Antarctic as well as any man who ever lived. The fortress on Anvers Island beckons me. There I was criminally king. There again I shall be—not regent of but brother to ghosts and possibilities. The volcanoes are silent. I shall make thunder in my hall. It will be my paradise. I realize now that I have also spoken prematurely of the death of the People’s Republic of Antarctica. I am the last citizen, and it lives on with me, the tyrant become the keeper of the flame.
And if this seems an imperiled fantasy, I note that the stores on Anvers were never destroyed, the fens and caves stand inviolate. How long will I have? Perhaps ten years in the flesh; Grandfather lived till seventy-four. And perhaps eternity as a ghost; Skallagrim Strider does live on in this place, Elephant Island, so why not Grim Fiddle at Anvers Island? I answer best any worry for my future by reworking Norse wisdom: Dare is better than caution for any man who goes out on the ice, for the length of my life and the day of my death were foretold long ago, and by an intimate of mine, whom I fancy spied her son sanguine and serendipitous on the ice when she looked into that magic hand-mirror late in the evening of the spring equinox of 1973. I boast I am predetermined, then, back to the wall of blizzards and behemoths. I shall have my wolves, the descendants of Iceberg and Goldberg, for the glacier at Anvers Island is a wolf-keep. I shall have my runic carvings, magical histories. I have considered taking this work with me, to continue the interrupted chronicle. It is better not. I have dim premonition, as if a whisper in my ear, tha
t I shall be preoccupied with long vigilance. The ice camps might be empty of the wretched now. The world remains full of shame.
There is a last detail. I want to believe that my Sam survived, that someday he shall read his father’s confession, this odyssey of proverbial ruin. I have no power to thieve time, like Mother. I guess at his looks and whereabouts. It suits me. Orlando the Black was no defeatist. He was a Furore, the one of them I concerned myself with least; it follows that I entrusted my Sam, my abiding concern, to him. I have my high dream that Sam thrives; more, that he has sons and daughters, and that they thrive. I have asked Diomedes, by a letter that introduces this manuscript to him, to seek Radar Fiddle, if he lives, and to enlist his aid in locating my Sam. I would urge Diomedes also to seek Sam’s grandmother, but he is a properly superstitious Greek and would never risk ensnaring a pale albatross.
When they do find you, Sam, you shall know you are my son. I suppose that you bear the scars of our parting. I think of those burns as your birthmark. Forgive me for them, forgive me for permitting your legacy to be exile and abandonment. You are not alone. There should be two others about your age whom I ask you to find and to embrace: Cesare, son of Grootgibeon and Cleopatra; and Solomon, son of Israel and Molly. Start your search in America. The landmark is Cleopatra. And when you find them, show them what I have written of your births, and of the birth of the People’s Republic of Antarctica.
Do more; tell them that if there is not a single moral to my story—what sort of life has one theme—there is this: The path to truth is to be fair-minded; never set yourself above another and you cannot fall. The hoard to discover on this path, as a good man, is that you should never bend to a master. Beware of charity. Charity is the grin of slavery. Any man in a position to give charity—not to share, not to distribute equitably—but to give from his largesse charitably, attained that lordly position by first becoming a master of the earth, and of men, a slave-master. Be a bold man, and stick the masters. Look into the face of kings and tell them they are doomed to fall. Carry the assurance that there is only one country from which exile is insufferable. Its name is Heart’s Truth. Remember that you are Grim Fiddle’s only son, and Peregrine Ide’s only grandson, and Mord Fiddle’s only great-grandson, and so your heritage is exodus as much as it is truthseeking.
The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica Page 47