The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 135

most significant puzzles is, did Grandfather actually say, “Go to her”? I am certain he did not use a name. Whom did he mean? Could it have been Lamba? Could it have been Zoe? More worrisome to me, he might not have said, “Go to her.” It might be that my memory, which has often failed me throughout this work, has here fooled me. Did I want him to say, “Go to her”? Did I imagine the whole testimony in order to preface “Go to her”?

I suggest the truth of it might be that Grandfather himself invested his last testimony with the mystery that was Cleopatra. Grandfather knew he owed Cleopatra a debt he could not himself pay. She had protected him at Elephant Island, and then again at Anvers, had permitted him to continue his search for me. Grandfather had promised in return to help Cleopatra save herself and Charity. Some might have said that the debt was canceled when Cleopatra chose to fall to the corruption at Anvers. My grandfather would not have agreed, did not. Yet as Grandfather increased his debt to her, he increased his revulsion toward her. She gave him her charity, and it enslaved him, and he reviled her for it. He did not call her “the whore of Babylon” idly. Nor did he cast her as the protector of fertility idly. I suppose now that Mord Fiddle was caught in the same paradoxical position that Cleopatra forced on all who loved her and despised her. Honor the mistress, defame the mistress, she remained the mistress. I did not then understand the depths of Grandfather’s problem. Like Lazarus, I saw only artifice in Grandfather’s portrait of Cleopatra. Now I have come to see that my cosmology of the South (Grim Fiddle’s North interpreting Skallagrim Ice-Waster’s South) can solve Cleopatra’s role in the South. I realize it might not be any less artificial than Grandfather’s creation, but it is what I have, and it does continue to comfort me. I suggest that Grandfather was confounded because he owed a debt he did not know how to pay to a human being who had become half a woman scorned by fate and half a serpent scorning fate. Cleopatra was both a monster and a protector. I shall not press this more than to say that Mord Fiddle commanded Grim Fiddle to attend a queen of slaves who was black and white, scaly and sad, her mansion Eljundir and her name, Hel.

Mord Fiddle was dead. I would like that this event could explain, or excuse, more of my conduct. I suppose that the reason I am unable to recall accurately Grandfather’s last testimony is that death, which lifted the shadows from the face of a failed despot, dropped those same shadows on my mind’s eye. The Norse would say: Grim Fiddle was death-darkened.

Germanicus tried to restrain me; Jane and Violante tried to nurse me; Longfaeroe tried to get me to mourn in a ceremonial fashion. Lazarus alone stood by silently. I am said at one moment to have collapsed dull-eyed and feverish, at another to have pushed aside their nurture, to have commanded that the wretches of the camp be led by Grandfather’s chamber to bow before the corpse of a Norse hero. My hysteria is said to have lasted a week, while Grandfather’s corpse blackened and putrefied. I am said to have heeded eventually their pleas for decency and to have orchestrated Grandfather’s funeral, washing his body, trimming his beard, dressing him in robes I took from the Brothers, building his pyre above Aurora Bay. When Mosquite tried to betray Grandfather’s Hielistos to the Ice Cross who came in search of their lost ships, I am said to have ordered him hanged the day of the immolation, and also to have ordered Kuressaare and his men to massacre the Little Brothers. Then I am said to have taken up the torch. I said my farewell to Grandfather’s remains in a state of mind that looked to my people to be a dream.

It was a deep dream, a berserker’s dreaming. I have mentioned that when I changed shape, I became a beastly killer, inflamed and dauntless. What I have withheld is that the change also acted upon both my mind and my mind’s eye, so that not only Grim Fiddle changed shape, but also figures, events, and words appeared to Grim Fiddle to change shape. As I was bewitched, so I saw magically. I have kept this revelation, because it seems insupportable by the record; there was never anything I read in Norse myth or legend to explain what I experienced while in a berserker state. There is certainly no rational explanation for what I want to present. I should defer. I cannot.

It is true, I did not report my dreaming while a berserker at Port Stanley; it was lost to me while I screamed at the mountains on the high heath of South Georgia. I shed it deliberately; Abigail’s love helped me shed it completely. My dreaming following Grandfather’s death is carved in my mind. Though it is not a logical tale to record, I want to try. I have embarrassed myself so often in this confession, I am left without such philosophical delicacy. And also, I can rely on the fact that I learned after my dreaming lifted what actually happened in that year or so of Grim Fiddle’s darkness. I shall relate in detail what Germanicus, Lazarus, Longfaeroe, Wild Drumrul, Kuressaare, and Cleopatra told me of my conduct. It was straightforward enough: Grim Fiddle abandoned his responsibility to his South Georgians; Grim Fiddle took Angel of Death and the best of his sealers and Grandfather’s Hielistos to Anvers Island to slay and to rescue, and when seduced by murder, and by the dark-haired queen, Grim Fiddle remained to usurp and to avenge.

First, though, there is this berserker’s vision of my crimes. Why? I want compassion. At least, I want understanding. I want some