The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 119

to Iceberg, demanded to know if she remembered her sister. I did ask, was Goldberg on the ice? Was Goldberg with Mord Fiddle? She snapped, yanked at her chain, unsentimental. I thought, the last living thing to link me with my childhood, my blood kin, and it was an animal slipped to the beast. She wanted release; they all did, maddened at being chained from their instinct to run. We men might be confounded by threat, might grasp at vainglory. My wolves knew murder was at the door.

The alarm came in course, with distant cannon-fire. A runner came down to me, and my guards alerted me that Germanicus needed me up top, that King James was cut adrift and afire. In my disgust I shouted at them, “There is no ark, no ark either, no ark! Grandfather, hear me now, no ark to be had!” It is difficult to recreate the inanity of my self-pity. One might think that after so many instances of danger in twelve years in darkness, Grim Fiddle would have been girded before such catastrophe, would have achieved some tolerance of the comedy. He was, in fact, flat weary with bitterness, pressed flat by the weight of his pretension to rule, not serve, to rule the wretched. I looked at those three men, wasted, bent, taking their power from mine. I thought, I despise you hopeless creatures. I realize now my feeling was worse, selfhatred. I told them to get on, that I would follow. I turned to issue some pompous last testimony to my wolves, thought again. I pried open the outside hatch with my harpoon, moved down the lines with my knife, and cut them free. They sprinted for the ice. When I came to Iceberg, I thought upon killing her—all the sort of mercy there seemed left to me—instead cut her line and said good-bye.

Iceberg had more heart than Grim Fiddle—part beast, yes, but also part of my luck. It so happened that her instinct to survive was in league with her desire to regain her own blood kin; and it so happened that her high dreams were coincident with mine. She went to the hatch with Beow, halted, came back at me, snapping and pleading. That was a Norse wolf with purpose. She commanded me. I studied the hatch, also the tunnel back to Germanicus. It is truth that my bloodlust was up with hers, so was my self-serving fear, and that when I should have most held to my responsibility to my people, I quit them, and reason, for inspiration, or portent, or plain egotism. Grim Fiddle was cursed at Port Stanley; Grim Fiddle was reluctant on South Georgia; Grim Fiddle was rash on King James; Grim Fiddle was cowed at Golgotha.

And what use is there to explore my cowardice? I ran with the pack. I fled to my destiny in my own way. Did I hear Goldberg? I did not. Did I have a plan to get to Greenwich Island and find Grandfather? I did not. I was a low-minded coward, and nothing more. I got outside on the escarpment and fled down to the windward shore of the peninsula. The wind from the north off the Scotia Sea was whipping ice into the air; it was like a snowstorm with overlarge flakes swirling into the crevasses and into my eyes. The wolves had scattered right and left, some silhouetted atop high ground. The barking and screams told me the Hielistos were discovered, though I could not see them. I made my way deliberately up the closest ridgeback to look down upon the waterline on the Bransfield Strait. There were several small cutters beached in concert, fires lit before them, small figures scampering in concert. This gave me cause to reconsider the assumption that the Hielistos were disorganized pirates without tactics or discipline. Out in the Strait there was an imminent sea battle. Two white cutters were running through the fogbank, coming about to avoid a jade-colored berg. Our rescuers had come after all, and what awaited them was a squadron of open boats filled with Hielistos, the sunrise and snow-gale at their backs. Golgotha had been bait. This was the jaw closing. Was there rebellion? There was Jaguaquara.

I wanted to see the face of my enemy. I screamed down at them, taunted them in all my languages—polylingual blasphemer. I pranced along the ridgeback, cursing the wretched of the earth. I found a suiting hollow, my back against a boulder formation, the ground slick with lichens and bird droppings. The ground mist made my landscape seem a cloud. I thundered and howled, and when my voice cracked with strain, I leaned back and waited. I did not want to die. Why had I come out here? The answer was sad—because I thought myself special and was rewarded for my election with meaninglessness. I was undone by my own pride, had little strength to lift my harpoon. I thought—how queer it is that one thinks one sees clearly when in such hysteria—that it was fitting judgment upon Grim Fiddle that he would not end as either hero or berserker, instead as weakling, weeper, deserter, betrayer. They started throwing rocks, tumbled from their holes, filthy creatures without firearms, come to stone a deceived man. I saw the humor, did not laugh. Nothing was to be left me, not even the boast that I had freed slavish beasts, for then a wolf flung itself off an incline and bounded to my side. It was Beow, the tip of a spear in his flank—brave Beow come to stand with a shirker. And when they finally closed, from all sides, Beow fought hero-well and died for it, and I fought miserably and did not. I lost my harpoon in one, my knife in another, my dignity with my terror. I have the memory that before I went down, I had one before me, and ripped at its face, to find the eyes of a child,