The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 131

it as a punishment. It was not meant to be an equivalent of the Christian concept of Hell. There was no distinction made between the afterlife of those who died justly and those who died as criminals. Dead was dead, and the corpse was thought to travel to dwell in Niflheim for eternity. Yes, it is true that dead heroes traveled to dwell in Valhalla for eternity; however, that was such a small and elite number that their fate was not meant to condemn those who died by accident, disease, old age, and who abided in Niflheim.

Niflheim was said to be nine days’ ride downward from Midgard into a dessicated cold that extinguished joy. Anvers Island, a forty-mile-by-twenty-mile juggernaut of towering glaciers, thunderous peaks, fume-spitting cones, was four days’ hard sail from Elephant Island, southwestward across the ice-streaked Bransfield Strait, through the ashen fog of the Gerlache Strait, to the fortress originally built by the privateers on the southwestern shore, at Arthur Harbor. Niflheim had a citadel, called Hel for the halfserpent half-woman, black and white, scaly and sad, who ruled there. Hel’s mansion, Eljundir, was built beyond the rock Drop to Destruction. The fortress at Arthur Harbor was blasted into the rockface about the remains of the weather station, was sprawled before the tumultuous motherlode of the eruptions, Satan’s Seat, set back on the peninsula of Graham Land several hundred miles farther southwest. The Norse said Hel’s servants were a man, Ganglati, and a woman, Ganglot, who snaked about so slowly they did not seem to move. Anvers Island’s lava carved steaming cracks in the blackened glaciers. The Norse called Hel’s plate Hunger, and Hel’s knife Famine, and her pallet Sickbed, hung with trappings called Glittering Misfortune. There were many dark names for the Hielistos at Anvers; and the reason so many of them were small was that there were as many women and children as men: the women ate less, weathered the cold as well, were as brutal as the males. And while Anvers Island’s Hielistos had almost endless supplies—not only robbing the Ice Cross and the religious societies but also plundering the merchantmen and, at first, receiving large shipments from the southern republics that sponsored the privateers—it is not an exaggeration to say that the Hielistos’ plate was hunger, their knife was famine, their dwelling in the caves was sickbed. The caves at Anvers Island were certainly hung with glimmering misfortune, the bounty from a hundred raids on the camps.

Grootgibeon was not the leader of the Hielistos. It seems to have been at first an oligarchical structure, what Lazarus called tribal confederalism. The Spanish-speaking predominated. Grootgibeon’s well-armed cutter, and his flotilla’s commanders, made him a leading capitan. His murder raid on Elephant Island propelled him to the fore of the ranks. Afterward he established himself and his men, along with Cleopatra and her courtlike brothel, in the best-built sections of the fortress. They had slaves as they were slaves. Grandfather said that the fortress then, before I rebuilt it, faced seaward, cut between the sheer rock walls vulnerable to bombardment from cutters laying off Bonaparte Point. It was thought to be impregnable. It was not. However, it seemed so for the Ice Cross that summer. Either the Ice Cross was completely on the defensive, or else the answer to why Grootgibeon and Cleopatra were able to establish themselves securely and to begin to gather the diverse warlords of the South into their control was that Anvers Island for the Ice Cross, like Niflheim for the Norse, was thought to be magical—bad magic, cursed magic, supernatural. It was a sulfurous waste. It was a realm of pirates. This combined with the madness there to transform it for the Hielistos and the Ice Cross into a place of depravity. They seemed monstrous, so they acted monstrously. This last should not shock now. I have prepared the way.

As the Norse spoke of the immortal dragon, Nidhogg, who dwelled in Fiflheim, gnawing the roots of the eternal tree Yggdrasil and sucking the blood from men and then eating their corpses, so at Anvers Island there was the spirit of Nidhogg: cannibalism. Grandfather said Grootgibeon tried to contain the worst of it, more by shifting command from the worst privateers to the Ice Cross defectors than by forbidding the Hielistos from eating the dead. This does not explain the phenomenon for me, for when I ruled, Nidhogg remained unkillable. I found that no amount of food, no guarantee of continued supplies through the black winters, could keep some men and women from cannibalism. It would seem to be part of the beastliness that remains in men from antediluvian times; when famine and hopelessness and rage take hold, slumbering Nidhogg awakens, hungry.

Barbablanca

In such a place, it was the cruel-minded and hardhearted who gained. I speak here of Mord Fiddle. Grandfather would interrupt his story with a defense of his conduct that was actually a self-serving justification. He said he believed since leaving Stockholm that Lord God was punishing him for his great sin of abandoning me at birth, was testing his resolve to make amends. He believed that when he lost me at Mead’s Kiss, Lord God tested him by casting him among “Satan’s Own.” Grandfather believed that no matter what he encountered, it was a test of his will not to abandon me again to suffer the evil in order to find me and release me from the darkness. His righteousness in seeking me was what he believed was his armor against his Satan.

I think it telling that Grandfather wrould not actually join in the butchery. He would stand by; he would countenance anything; he would not actually kill. The capitanes de los Hielistos did not resent Grandfather’s passivity, regarded him with awe. His manner was ghostly. He thought he was in Hell and moved like it, with the aura of the damned. Grootgibeon would defer to him, and none of the others dared challenge him. More importantly, Cleopatra continued