The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 145

for revenge, for hatred, for conquest, for strategy, and for power—always for power, to increase his reach and to justify his reach and to gain grandeur from his reach. I did it. I gave the orders. I watched them die. I, me, Grim Fiddle, Butcher of Anvers Island, murdered Lykantropovin, Butcher of Elephant Island.

There are so many dark stories in just these crimes, and I am prevented by time from relating them properly. Each of my victims deserves my attention. I cannot give it. There is no room in my future now. There might not ever have been paper enough for me to explain what I did, and permitted, and am guilty of. Perhaps there is telling justice in this turn. Perhaps only my silence before what I remember can convey adequately the monstrosity of my crimes. So many dead, killed by me—not by starvation, or the ice, or the Charity Factor—by me. Cleo Furore. I loved her. I would not permit Germanicus to get back to her and the South Georgians my first winter on Anvers Island. I held him to my side. The Ice Cross killed her when they obliterated Golgotha in 2004 in revenge for my attack as the new warlord of Anvers Island, on their blockade at Arthur Harbor. I do not even know how she died, because Cleo was accidentally left behind when Jane and Violante led the remnant of my South Georgians out on the glacier, where Germanicus rescued them before the storms closed on them. Was it exposure, gunshot, drowning? Did they grab Cleo up and condemn her to Elephant Main or Clarence West? We looked for her there. We always looked for her. She disappeared as if she had never been, like my family, but with this distinction: I murdered her just as surely as if I cut her down.

This must not become false witness. I sense how confession has in it the hallucinogen of self-pity. I am revolted by the possibility that in my haste to denounce myself I could be distorting my guilt. My depravity was not total. That would be like none at all. My depravity was selective. I knew goodness and did the worst.

I understood truth and lied. I had the power of mercy and more often than not withheld it. I knew in my heart what was right and wrong, even when my mind was drowned by the darkness. To this point I must clarify something about the berserker dreaming that swept me from Golgotha to Anvers Island. It is a fact that I was gripped by a madness, that I sailed Angel of Death into Arthur Harbor and then pushed into the fortress at Anvers in a fantasy.

I was not Grim Fiddle, mourner; I was Grim Fiddle, Hard-Fisherman’s Debt-Payer and avenger—a berserker who cannot be killed, with the strength of a dozen men, without the conscience or limits of any man. I was wrapped inside a bloody delusion, and continued that way for more than a year, in which time I ascended to the rule of the Hielistos at Anvers Island.

This berserker dreaming might suggest that I might not have been responsible for what I did. What nonsense. The lie that Grim Fiddle might not have been guilty by reason of momentary unreason. I recall that same sort of sly talk was used at Peregrine’s trial for the murder of Cesare Furore. As broken and ill as Peregrine was, he scoffed before his tribunal. I did the same, do the same. I report that when my tribunal asked me why I had done it, all of it, war-making, mass-murdering, I spoke out more clearly than at any time in the proceedings. I quoted my father: “Because I wanted to.”

That is correct witness. I testified against myself. If I was not of sound mind when I murdered Jaguaquara that first summer at Anvers and set the slaughter in motion that spun me like a fleshly whirlpool to el capitan de los capitanes de los Hielistos, the King of the South, I was still Grim Fiddle. Who else was Grim Fiddle but Grim Fiddle? If I was not of sound mind when I slew the capitanes, whom I call behemoths in my berserker dreaming, and gathered Cleopatra to me, and took her, physically took her, ravaged her, cut her body and violated her body and beat her body, I was still Grim Fiddle. Who else? I stole her from herself. She did not agree, she did not resist. I did not ask. I am not sure now of what she filled my berserker mind with in that long black winter on Anvers Island. I can guess, “Revenge us!” I concurred. Grim Fiddle said, yes, get back at them; mad as I was, I still did it. And the following summer (January 2004), after my first victory over the Ice Cross blockade at Anvers, and after the Hielistos celebrated me as their butcher of butchers—because I was angrier and crueler and beyond even their ghoulish sense of what was murder—after all that, when I collapsed at Cleopatra’s side and emerged from my berserker dreaming as if I were dying, I was still Grim Fiddle. I awoke from that dreaming weakened, disoriented, sickly for a while, appalled at the news of what I had done, the dungeons, the decapitations, the flesh-eating, the scars on Cleopatra’s flesh. But then, when I was certainly of sound mind, I did not run from my criminal authority. I enhanced it as I used my counselors, Lazarus, Germanicus, Cleopatra, to raise me up over the wretched. I did not then give a serious thought to quitting my vengeance. What I had begun in mad blood lust, I carried on in measured cruelty. And why did Grim Fiddle do it? Not because of that sleek epigram “When want is crime, I am outlaw.” No, not that, no. I did it because I wanted to.

I must hurry. I have figured that I could abridge my year of