The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 110

mist and opened fire on our attackers. It passed us on our starboard quarter, hard on for Candlemas Packet, launched boats, rammed the smaller attacking boat. I cannot say what else was done, because I was too occupied on King James’ s deck. The white cutter withered the enemy. The undamaged attacker broke off and escaped into a fogbank to the south. By then Candlemas Packet was sinking. The white cutter took off survivors; however, Malody’s people were kept in longboats rather than taken on board the cutter. After we had cleared our decks (and I note how perplexed I was to find the dark-faced creatures seemed hardly to bleed), I ordered Germanicus to try to clear one of our boats to help the rescue of Malody’s people. We were signaled by the white cutter to do nothing, then signaled to follow. Another white cutter appeared. Germanicus reported our radio was cluttered with orders in Spanish back and forth between the two rescuers. We had drifted well into the Bransfield Strait. Across, one hundred miles to the south, was the blue-black landscape of the Antarctica peninsula, now and again visible through dancing fogbanks. That was my first glimpse of the continent. I was in shock, covered with blood, and it did not signify. What did was our casualty report: at least a dozen dead, including brave Ferraro and our greatest loss, Toro Zulema. There were so many wounded, we did not count. And belowdecks there seemed carnage, for the attackers had gotten down there and cut their way through women and children. Motherwell assembled the Volunteers at the mainmast and then reported the missing-in-action, including Peggs, Ensign Ewart, the little harpoonist Khartoo, and, worst of all for me, Wild Drumrul.

King James’s steering was wrecked. We were afire, but with muscle and plain courage Germanicus and Half-Red Harrah got us about, controlled the smoldering, and followed the white cutters into the mist along Greenwich’s coast. Sometime that evening (there is no sundown in Antarctica’s summer), we dropped anchor in Aurora Bay, off the lee shore of Livingston Island, before the wharves and outbuildings of an ice camp.

What did I see first? Aside from the other ships, and a small steamship off-loading goods, there were long, low-built structures on the shoreline, tucked cleverly into the ravines in the rockbed; there were the two white cutters we had followed in; but the most striking feature was the sheer wall of gray-white stone that shot up from the interior of the bay to disappear in the mist above. That wall of rock shuddered with each rumble from the volcanoes; it would come to represent a gigantic clock, new cracks for new eruptions, seams growing ice-crystal arrays whenever the wind poured a gale from the Scotia Sea.

I was wounded, splinters and burns, was bandaged below. The Ice Cross men were waiting for me on deck. There were more than two dozen of them, well-armed, in dirty white parkas, bearded, weathered, the confidence of veterans and the posture of the forever tired. Their leader was a German named Dietjagger, or something like that. He asked my name and our port of origin. Germanicus did not want me to talk with him. I understood that I must. I answered his bad English in my poor German. That surprised him and, I think, explains why he was as forthcoming as he was, something I know was not procedural. He had an impossible, defeated, vile job and knew it. He was to judge us, asking for details that centered on our health. That was the crucial issue, what determined our fate. Dietjagger insisted his men inspect belowdecks. This took time, and meanwhile Dietjagger hinted at affairs. He used much obscure language, and preferred jargon and half-sentences. It was from Dietjagger that I first heard of the Ice Cross. There were other clues about the situation in Antarctica, most of which were no help then. Now I know, better than any man alive, and can translate Dietjagger’s obtuseness. The Ice Cross was a colloquialism for the International Committee of the Red Cross Antarctica Relief Collective. That was mother mercy on the South Shetlands; it was sponsored by many sorts of patriarchs, such as the Antarctique International de Paris, the same in Rome and Munich and many more: Europe, Africa, the Americas. The Ice Cross men knew their sponsors by their myriad acronyms and by nicknames, such as the one Dietjagger used about his masters in Munich, Der Eisvater. Altogether there was no real international community involved, only haphazard confederacy, funds from here, goods from there, food from governments and private industrial consortiums, and most especially from the Roman Catholic Church. Altogether they were charity. The Ice Cross was the enforcer of this charity. It should not have functioned as well as it did, staffed with volunteers, convicts, pilgrims, true patriots, truer saints, and what came to be an elite of the world’s crudest and most rugged mercenaries—soldiers of fortune, though I would prefer to name them soldiers of charity.

All that, I would learn later; then Dietjagger explained matters to me in a ritualistic, high-handed manner. He said the camp before us on Aurora Bay was administered by a Roman Catholic order, the Brothers of Perpetual Witness at Golgotha. He said that once we were ashore, he had neither jurisdiction nor concern. His advice was to keep my people together. He said the Brothers were better than most, that they had spiritual concerns, that the food was said to be regular. He pointed to the off-loading freighter as proof of our welfare. He added, flatly, not as if he believed it, that as soon as possible I should seek out a representative of a treaty organization for petition for resettlement—I forget the acronym he used, probably SATORE, at that time the relief network with jurisdiction over offshore African islands. He did not explain how it was I could seek out this patron.

I looked at Lazarus as Dietjagger concluded, and he shook