The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 130

Cleopatra’s motives are lost to me, especially since she left Jaguaquara’s quarters and moved back into the brothel that fall, while Grootgibeon and Grandfather were defecting at Anvers. This does not seem to have been a punishment.

Cleopatra only sketched this for Lazarus; knowing we were curious, she rationed her secrets. Cleopatra returned voluntarily to the brothel, because there she and Fives O’Birne had a network of spies, procurers, agents, that required her presence at the center of the web. Cleopatra also had several other Ice Crossmen, whose names are lost to me, and it would seem that from the brothel she was able to dispense herself like a poison, not to kill but to enslave the enslavers. She shaped the brothel consciously into an institution, with many births, many pregnancies, taking in children as servants, granting privileges to some and taking them away from others, including the leadership among the wretched in the camps. There was a powerful priest named Barracuedes who opposed her reach, who tried to turn the Ice Cross commanders against her. He was soon sent to Clarence West and disappeared into charity. I have heard many stories of her machinations, so many that I now understand that to her everything lascivious and voluptuous was attributed, as if she were a goddess. A goddess of what? Fertility, yes, but also dread. She groomed herself for purpose. She was beautiful, educated, merciless, and, I once believed, resolute. I once believed that she was maintaining as many portals as possible because one of them might be her way out. Now I puzzle if she did not waver, if the authority she gained at Elephant Island, the imperial corruption of her power, did not become her cause. Her portals were murderers. Her route was murder. But where did she think she was going? What was she reaching for? She enhanced herself as grandly, as fantastically, as mythologically as possible. She described herself as “the queen of slaves.” Grandfather called her “the whore of Babylon.”

I do not want to overstate her achievements. Cleopatra suffered her prostitution. If it is true that her father’s murder buried her childhood and her faith in goodness, then it is also probably true that her mother’s murder interred her heart. Cleopatra was not heartless. Her grief was frozen in Charity’s grave. It was the loss of that very grave that scarred Cleopatra in some sinister way I could never understand. It happened about a year after Charity’s death. Cleopatra had required Jaguaquara to bury Charity in the graveyard reserved for the Ice Crossmen. A series of eruptions opened a fissure that crawled along the shelf for weeks, then ripped through several barracks and swallowed the graveyard. Cleopatra did not think this an accident. She blamed the Ice Cross. It might have been why she sent a message to the newly constituted Hielistos base at Anvers Island, to Grootgibeon, whom Fives O’Birne had told her had defected. That may be apocryphal, because the timing is not precise. That fissure did seem to cut into Cleopatra’s will. She lost her control for a moment, turning against Jaguaquara, who tried to appease her. The loss of her mother’s grave also explains Cleopatra’s obsessive fear of earthquakes on Anvers Island much later. It cost me dearly once, as she interrupted a campaign to move her household from my hall to one of her own, which she claimed was beyond the grasp of Satan’s Seat. I know this is confusing detail. What is important here is that Cleopatra had a breakdown at Elephant Island when she was at the apex of her power, when she could have used her authority to get out of the South. If I could say that she became mad, then her conduct would be at once excusable and unanalyzable. Instead, she, “queen of slaves,” “whore of Babylon,” became logically and coldly crazed, shrewd in her capriciousness, deadly in her fits.

More crucial to her fate, she was tormented by her bastard son, Cesare; at least, I can suppose so by her conduct with regard to the father, Grootgibeon. It is possible that Grootgibeon did not know of his son when he went over to the Hielistos. It is also possible that Cleopatra’s message (if it happened that way) did shake him, make him reckless. I do not choose to and have learned not to be quick to discount the incredible in the South. Cleopatra’s power has appeared to me to be as unearthly as Antarctica. If anyone could have sent a message from the brothel at Elephant Island more than three hundred miles across ice and ash, it was she. The camps were sieves by then, wretches pouring in and leaking out, the Ice Cross battling the Hielistos, transport ships and merchantmen diverted, pirated, bartered between camps. Whole camps were exterminated by nature, only to be resurrected with new arrivals.

Finally, in the summer of the year 2001, Grootgibeon led a murder raid against the Ice Cross on Elephant Island. He actually captured Elephant Main for a few hours. Grandfather credited Grootgibeon with inventing the strategy then that I later perfected, if that is the word: combat by massacre. The victorious is as reduced as the defeated. However, if one commands filthy little creatures, half-men who fight for no gain at all, one can waste them in great number to gain a distinct goal. Grootgibeon’s prize was Cleopatra.

Anvers Island

I must speak of the worst possible, of the third realm in Grim Fiddle’s cosmology. As there was a new and aggrandized Asgard, home of silent gods, as there was a new and reduced Midgard, hovel of wailing wretches, so there was a new Niflheim, realm of the murderous dead. Grootgibeon stole Cleopatra from the edge of Midgard and carried her into the pit of the Hielistos, Anvers Island.

The Norse were inexact about Niflheim, which means Misty Hel, because their sense was that its forbiddenness should remain unspeakable. I emphasize that the Norse did not think of