The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 132

to honor her bargain and gave Grandfather the protection of her corruption. After the raid on Elephant Island, Grandfather refitted Angel of Death, captured in the attack, and entered into his mission. He became a seeker. The Hielistos thought of Barbablanca as a charm. From what he described to me of the battles, he would hang back in Angel of Death until the carnage was complete, and then he and his attendants would move over the landscape, praying and prying, looking “into their hearts.” And what was he seeking? The obvious answer is Grim Fiddle. I think there was more to it. I suggest he was also looking for a sign, a message from his Lord God, that would confirm for him that what Mord Fiddle was doing, and seeing, was as wrong as the Minister of Fire must have known it was. He permitted his search to blind him. How else to explain how a man who had seen the darkness long before any reasonable man had known what was coming could then have let himself become lost in that darkness?

The proof of what I say is that when Grandfather found me, the scales lifted from his eyes. His self-deceit began to kill him. Kuressaare said that Barbablanca had collapsed before. The profound distinction at Golgotha was that while telling me what he had done and seen those seven years in the darkness, he reconsidered his conduct, and it shriveled him. I suppose now that such wasting away had begun before our meeting on the beach, had begun when word of the capture of a man who was Wild Drumrul reached Grandfather at Anvers. When he finally got Wild Drumrul (captured in the attack of the Hielistos on King James) before him at Anvers Island, Wild Drumrul could only tell Grandfather that I was last seen offshore Greenwich Island, but this had been sufficient for Grandfather to press his reconnaissance in the camps. When his men had taken Ugly Leghorn on the glacier, Grandfather had known exactly where I was. I was not wholly right about that day on the glacier; he had not been up there, only skuas and his Hielistos. He was too reduced by then to climb, had lain offshore in Angel of Death while the capitanes de los Hielistos closed their trap on the Ice Cross. All had been for Grandfather’s purpose: to blunt the Ice Cross in the neighborhood while he reached into Golgotha to find me. I was also not right about why there had been no Hielistos raids. From the moment Grandfather had heard I was in the South, Golgotha and several other camps on Roberts, Greenwich, and Livingston had been under the absolute protection of Barbablanca.

Cleopatra’s Luck

Grootgibeon’s murder raid on Elephant Island wrecked the infrastructure of the Ice Cross. Out of the carnage the Hielistos established bases on Deception, Smith, and Livingston islands. By March 2001, Jaguaquara was made acting commander-in-chief of the Ice Cross in the South Shetlands, more because he was the remnant than because of merit. He grew cautious, had the measure of the chaos, rebuilt Elephant Island as best he could, directed the Ice Cross to help the camps and to avoid the Hielistos’ cutters. His masters, the signatories of the Treaty of Good Hope and the Peace of the Frontier, disapproved completely, ordered him to obliterate the fortress at Anvers. Jaguaquara knew this was futile, and not just because of the worsening fall weather. The Hielistos were all-powerful, and Jaguaquara urged his masters to negotiate with Grootgibeon and the capitanes at Anvers.

It was nature that called the next tune. In early fall (April 2001), the volcanoes erupted with colossal explosions, burying many camps, poisoning the Bransfield Strait, pinning both sides in their caves. So much ash was heaved into the sky that it was said to be black. This blocked off the sunlight preternaturally early, which seems to have increased the reach of the pack. That was the winter the pack enwrapped South Georgia. In Antarctica the pack leveled everything, especially the success of the Hielistos. Nature had done what the Ice Cross could not have; the Hielistos ate themselves.

The following spring (November 2001), as me and mine were sent from South Georgia, a new commander-in-chief superseded Jaguaquara at Elephant Island, K. H. Lykantropovin. No one knew his real name; I still do not: Lykantropovin was said to be his selfchosen nom de guerre. There were many capitanes de los Hielistos who venerated Lykantropovin, some even defected to him; it was his reputation of limitless cruelty, so much that he could seem more a curse than a man. He was said to be the grandson of a Russian general deported once by the Soviets for suspicion of loyalty to Russia and not the revolution, who had been resurrected to fight the German blasphemers, then again sent into exile, north of the Arctic Circle, to the mines at Vorkuta. This might be fanciful; it is true that Vorkuta means “the people of the underworld.” The grandson, Lykantropovin, was no Russian devil, was no Russian saint. I think now he might have been the face of war. He certainly was a hired mass-murderer. I have learned that by the time he came to the South he was a veteran of murder campaigns against wretches in Africa and the Far East. He is best understood as an imperial errand boy, dutiful, ingenious, incorruptible though seemingly corrupted completely by envy and ambition. Also, I think Lykantropovin was a sincere and even tormented fanatic. No man could have served so faithfully in such abysmal conditions if he lacked self-conviction. His god seemed order. His fist was iron. His face was said to be awful—a wound of the cold. He was physically pale, willowy, a fish-eater and insomniac. I never heard him talk. He remained to his end an indomitable Northman with a ghastly name and simple quest, to subdue his enemy. If even I seem admiring here, it is