The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 144
I have no heart to answer my defamers, which is why I list their accusations bluntly. It is for others, safely in the future, to ask, when is a state not a conceit? When is a king not a pretender? When is war not a crime? I could point to the birth of so many kingdoms in the North as models of the events acted out yet again on the ice of the Bransfield Strait. A fortified tower becomes a duchy; a duchy becomes an oligarchy of warriors; a gang of chieftains becomes a kingship born of necessity in battle against another oligarchy; and then the kingdom becomes a ruin after long struggle to justify itself by conquest and theft as empire. The evolution rolls along as easily as it rolls from my pen. What an old, tired, splendiferous tale. Yes, I simplify. I ask, however, is not there crude simplicity in whatever mankind does when it begins and ends in murder?
The Kingdom of Antarctica, then, my black kingdom on the black ice—whether one recognizes it as my illusion or as a genuine catastrophe—was ever a twice-told tale. I believe this profoundly true, because what I have called the Age of Exile does appear to me, abandoned here in my timeless ice prison to ponder and to muse, to be a cruel repetition of the Norse Age of Migration. That is what the book writers called the close of the first millennium anno Domini, without irony. All I ought to know of the Age of Migration, ten, eleven, twelve centuries back and half the circumference of the world to the north, ought to be fog, screams, and the transcendant language of the document that shines through that darkness: the holy book of the Age of Migration, Beowulf, King of the Weather-Geats, slayer of Grendel and mother, hero of heroes. Instead, I can convince myself that I have lived through that same darkness at the close of the second millennium anno Domini. The fleet of the damned has raised sails over the oceans of time.
The joy is gone for me now in the poetry of Beowulf’s evil-battling days. And I believe it no coincidence that my berserker dreaming can resemble the book of Beowulf. As to why, I have two minds. Either one can argue some Norse virus was awakened in my blood, like an infection of ideas, when I thrust myself from Golgotha into the terror of Anvers Island, so that the language of Beowulf spilled up across a millennium to flood my mind with ghastly images; or else one can argue that the mind of Grim Fiddle was overwhelmed by the loss of his grandfather, father, family, and reason for being, and thereby Grim Fiddle was hurtled back into a language that he had studied more closely than his heartbeat when he was warm and secure with his loved ones.
I do not choose. Both are revealing. And my dreaming was not a fleeting nightmare. I lived it. Yes, Mother’s portent, her theft of the future, was fulfilled in the most bizarre way—in my dream. But not only there. How shrewd of Lamba Time-Thief not to have mentioned that Skallagrim Ice-Waster, Wolfman and Rune-Carver, king of the black and hurt half-men of the wall of blizzards and behemoths, heeder of the ghost of a thousand-year-dead outlaw, would also, and at the same time, become the warlord of Antarctica. How humbling of my luck to discover that when a prophecy becomes a history it does not salve the sting of truth. Murder is still murder, crime is still crime, and no matter how fancifully one has envisioned it—the head of a hero, or the Bulwark of the South—there is no going back. It is a fate in a dream from which one awakens covered in genuine infamy.
My crimes were legion. The worst was pride. I pretended to be greater than those wretched people. In my vanity, I pretended to lead the meek to glory. I did not see at the time that when a fallible man takes upon himself the work that belongs only and finally to God, he must fail, and fail in the worst way possible. I did not try to be God. I tried to do his work. This is still prideful, and ruinous, and damning.
Grim Fiddle caused the death of Jane Gaunt, Violante Furore, Cleo Furore, Annabel Donne, Magda Zulema, who were innocent of murder, who were murdered by the Ice Cross; in revenge, Grim Fiddle murdered the Ice Cross, slaughtered it without mercy. Grim Fiddle put his blade to the officers and crew of the Ice Cross frigates Repulse, and Coronation Mercy, and Good Hope, and Nightingale, and Ursula, and Cape Agassiz, and more, many more. Grim Fiddle was also the murderer of Jaguaquara, who had murdered Grootgibeon, who had murdered Xavier Grumpa. Grim Fiddle was the murderer of Hector the Fat, who had murdered Lalo the Butcher of Port Stanley, who had murdered Iacovella the Butcher of Deception Island. Grim Fiddle was the murderer of Fives O’Birne, who had murdered Cuellar Alcanfores, who had murdered Gumic Blades the Liberator. And Grim Fiddle was the murderer of the Little Brothers at Golgotha, was the murderer of the Fathers in Agony, the Dominican Relief Mission to the South Orkneys, the Holy Father’s Mercy Commission at Elephant Island. Grim Fiddle murdered the ice camps on Livingston Island, King George Island, Smith Island, Elephant Island, Clarence Island.
Three generations of mankind were murdered by me, grandfathers and fathers and sons, grandmothers and mothers and daughters. Grim Fiddle murdered them with his own hand. Grim Fiddle murdered them with his rank. Grim Fiddle murdered by depriving them of food and permitting the ice to close over them. Grim Fiddle murdered them