The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 109
This power, my ghostly familiarity, was not as helpful as one might suppose. It dulled my sense of self-defense, gave me a false sense of omniscience. It also made me at once keen for physical detail and careless about interpreting the meaning of the wretched. And because I felt that I was informed, as if I had been there before, and because I felt that Lamba’s portents might have merit beyond precognition to some form of personal invulnerability, I set myself apart from the very people to whom I was most responsible. I had turned my back on them; now I dismissed them completely. As I had elected myself to the extraordinary, I condescended to rule their ordinariness. As I challenged myself, I spited others. Grim Fiddle was becoming a stranger to reason and decency.
The fourth night off the South Shetlands we held an exhausted counsel. We were standing off Greenwich, an island of three precipices, one venting steam, wedged between the smaller Roberts and the large, W-shaped Livingston Island. Significantly, Greenwich was cut by the sixtieth meridian. We gathered in the surgery. Lazarus was edgy, not as disturbed as the rest; he made a long speech of no consequence, then added, “I won’t judge this. Did we have to come to this place? Was there no other way than this?”
Jane and Violante reported on our rations, Annabel Donne on the health of the passengers, all done in voices cracked with anxiety. They wept. I realized then how beaten down they were. The sealers said they were not for the South Shetlands but would go there if ordered. They said they had hunted there in their time, and that Ugly Leghorn and some others had wintered there. They were obsessed with the volcanoes, talked out of turn. Germanicus was subdued about the ship and crew, said Malody’s reports made it imperative he be permitted to get his people ashore immediately.
“For his sake, Grim,” said Germanicus, “we should let those cutters take us in.” It was generally understood that the relief camps would help us, and that my resistance to such a course was either misinformed or deranged.
I told them I wanted to reconnoiter one more day, perhaps two, before I decided about the camps. I did not mention Grandfather or Angel of Death. They did not agree, they did not rebel. We came about, Candlemas Packet lumbering in our wake, and moved slowly into the mist filling the sound between Roberts and Greenwich islands. I studied the shorelines as best I could—seals, penguins, thousands of birds nesting and circling; their cries overwhelmed our conversations. The lower slopes of both islands were ice-free, matted with lichens and moss, which Peggs told me was not unusual in summer. Other than the lack of heath grass, those islands looked the same as South Georgia: cliffs, crags, plateaus, unearthly solitude. The sealers pointed to the slick gray cliffs above, worried that the volcanoes were melting the ice. Christmas Muir blamed every little problem that day on Satan’s Seat, which he said was way to the southwest, on the peninsula of Antarctica.
We were attacked late in the day, as we cleared the tidal rip past Roberts Island and came about into the Bransfield Strait, turning to starboard along the lee shore of Greenwich. I was on deck, distracted. Two small cutters, single masts, rushed from the mist and opened fire with heavy automatic firearms. I did not witness the entire action, kept down by bursts, so my account must be general. We were blasted. Our helmsman was shot down first. Davey Gaunt crawled to the wheel and held our course until his wounds overcame him, and then Ferraro, a young Falklander, took his place until he was shattered by flying splinters. Our return fire was ineffectual. We clung to the deck and waited to die. The sea helped us at first, running up heavy, and strong gusts kept us ahead of the attackers, heaved us toward rocks that might have ripped us apart, did not, but kept the attackers back. There was no help for Candlemas Packet; it came under cross fire, lost its foremast, was set afire. I do not know how long we took it. At some point the firing ebbed, and there were boarders on deck. Motherwell and the Volunteers fought hand to hand. Germanicus, Otter Ransom, Wild Drumrul, and I held the quarterdeck with Indigo Zulema and five Falklanders. We killed small, dark-faced creatures, filthy and animal-quick, without self-regard or sensible tactics. They were dressed in sealskins, smelled rancid and smoky like burned wood, were armed with harpoons, knives, clubs, no firearms. We shot and shot and they kept coming on. I saw one try to bite Indigo Zulema’s leg, as would a wolf. A fire was set on our portside that we could not control. There were screams from below as the boarders got into the hold. Germanicus and I fought side by side through them; they fell easily, would not stay down.
We were rescued. That is the simple fact of it, and regardless of the outrages I would later discover done by the Ice Cross, I do not want to take from it the credit for the lives of me and mine that day. A large white cutter came out of the