The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 128
It interests me to suggest why. Perhaps, like Grootgibeon, they had accounts to settle. And perhaps the darkness had become so broad that there were no more reasons and no more ends; the means were all. I have explained this thought in Grandfather’s metaphor: that there was no peace, no sanctuary, no refuge, nor even an ark. I want to restate this more suitably here. I declare that the pirates in the South, their ranks first filled from renegades and then swelled by wretches they conscripted as well as preyed upon, were moved to realize that when there is no refuge under the sun, what one calls one’s own place is worth all the will and cruelty one can give it. The South is a white desert, a nothingness. Nothing was all that was left to the pirates, and they would come to fight for it as if it were paradise. It has always been so with New Worlds, and writh the desperadoes, outcasts, and exiles that take them for their own. As in the North, so it would be in the South.
There is a still darker way of saying this. The Treaty of Good Hope had established the ice camps to give charity to the masses of wretches who would not quit, and it had also endowed the strongest of the wretched with weapons and a battleground, the Southern Ocean, to exist upon. Men turned pirate had been moved to taste human blood and had not been reviled. The Norse said, when the wolf tastes your flesh, consume it or be consumed by it. At Anvers Island, the abandoned privateers become bloodlustful pirates, the betrayed Ice Cross disciples, the enslaved conscripts from the exodus, all joined in their hatred for each other and for everyman. They were the wolf pack. They were the antithesis. Their minds were as wasted as the ice. They cursed themselves and the immediate representative of their fall to beastliness—the Ice Cross. What sense of the comedy could have moved the capitanes at Anvers Island the following summer (January 2001), as the Peace of the Frontier was signed at Cadiz, to convene themselves as what they called the Brotherhood of the Ice. In Spanish tongue, the Hielistos were born.
The Death of My Family
I must write of Peregrine’s death. I have known that it was coming these long years I have been making this confession. Now that I am here, it seems the work of a Norse riddle-master. It does not feel believable. I know this means that I have not accepted it, and I also know that setting it down is a move toward understanding what has happened to me. I must kill my father and my family again.
Without Grootgibeon’s protection, and because of Israel’s rashness, Cleopatra lost power to keep my family and hers from the severe changes at Elephant Island. They remained in the oldest section of the base, Elephant Main, and were spared the deprivations suffered by the wretches in the new camps that grew around them. Through that winter, the rations were cut, the discipline disintegrated, medicine and sanitation collapsed. Cleopatra was approached by, or approached, several Ice Cross officers, and did barter herself for privileges. The most powerful of the lot was a Chilean, Fives O’Birne. I knew the man. I killed the man. He was dishonor itself, and small.
Something happened at winter’s end (September 1999) that took Fives O’Birne away, or moved him to desert Cleopatra. He might have sold her to the officer’s brothel at Elephant Main. Cleopatra was pregnant then, very advanced, by Grootgibeon. At least, it is my belief that it was Grootgibeon’s child, and it was his belief. Cleopatra never denied it, and that was ever her way of saying yes. Cleopatra does not seem to have been bothered by her pregnancy at first, and neither were the Ice Cross officers. A peculiarity of life in the camps was that birth was considered the epitome of eroticism. But then, at the end of her term, Cleopatra suffered a breakdown. She might have tried to kill herself. More likely some internal change gave her clarity and permitted her to see her fate. Her joy was canceled absolutely, became rage, and she turned it on herself. She stopped caring, lost weight, became glassy-eyed. The tolerable conditions in the brothel did not help. Soon after, Cleopatra was either returned to her mother, or returned herself.
Cleopatra was dying. To keep her alive, Charity Bentham and Peregrine Ide roused themselves in what was a suicide pact. I have few of the facts, because the only survivor I had to ask other than Cleopatra was Babe, mute witness; Grandfather only heard the details secondhand from Orri before he died. Cleopatra told me, “They fed me.” I suppose that Charity and Peregrine starved themselves, forcing their rations on Cleopatra. Still, that would not have been enough if Cleopatra had determined to die, and I must also suppose that Charity used some motherly power over her daughter. Grandfather said that Thord, Orri, Guy, and Earle also tried to share their food but were prevented by Charity from sacrificing to the extreme. In the end, the magnificent ambition of Charity Bentham raised itself up and directed her own consumption and that of her beloved Peregrine. Theirs was not a quick finish, for they had to keep themselves alive long enough to get Cleopatra and her baby, a boy, through the spring and the deprivations exacerbated by privateer raids against the Ice Cross. Peregrine died first, sometime around my twenty-sixth birthday. He was fifty-one years old.
Charity Bentham lingered into early summer. She was the last restraint on Israel. He had to watch not only Peregrine die but also Molly and his son, Solomon, wither to paralysis. Charity and Molly died in the same week. The camp continued to decay. There