The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 146

treacherous assent and my years of bloody rule in this scratchy fashion so that I could have the pause to relate one totally revealing crime. This gives Grim Fiddle his terrible due. It took place three years after my berserker dreaming. I was in rough strategic command of the Hielistos from Adelaide Island to Joinville Island; Lazarus was my prime minister; Cleopatra was my queen; and Germanicus and the sealers were my hall-guard. I was acute and hard and locked in combat with Lykantropovin. There can be no possible claim that what I did was because I was not of right mind. Grandfather told me at our first meeting, “Make right by doing right. All their talk, it does not matter. You shall be judged swiftly and finally by Lord God.” Here is proof that not only did Grim Fiddle make wrong by being wrong, but also that what I have done can only be forgiven by a God whose compassion is ineffable. For this alone, Grim Fiddle condemns himself.

It was late in the summer, the ice heaving onto the South Shetlands, the volcanoes pouring a sulfurous cloud that was so swollen in places there seemed new ice islands where there were only ash-heaped Hoes. The skuas screamed, and the sky and the sea were one wash of imminent oblivion. To sail into that thunderous and putrescent panorama was wild risk. It was also bright strategy. No ship, large or small, armed or crammed with filthy little creatures, was more able than another if the real adversary, Antarctica, was not battled effectively. That climate crushed the quick and the doomed. That climate was my ally, the reason why my small, ill-led, poorly armed guerrilla force could best the superior strength and discipline of Lykantropovin’s Ice Cross. We did not care if we lived or died; we cared only for revenge.

I was escaping a sorry defeat off Gibbs Island, southwest of Elephant Island. My capitanes de los Hielistos had overreached themselves, been caught by Lykantropovin’s in-home flotilla. My flagship went down under me. I got off in an open boat with Davey Gaunt and twenty others. We fell in with one of our small cutters. We came about in an effort to get free of the tide that ripped us seaward. The wind stripped our sail. The cutter, captained by Coquito Blades, brother of a man I had executed for betrayal, gave us a line. We made for the closest landfall, Clarence Island. By late in the day, the sun a small torch at the horizon, we were at anchor in the inlet, shaped by a glacier and a natural bulkhead of rock slabs. A huge ice island—green and blue, carved by the wind to contain deep caves where seals and penguins hid—had hooked on the underwater rocks and swung around to push against the beach, bashing the Ice Cross boats at anchor against the bulkhead. The sea shivered about us, a big blow coming from the west. A large freighter had foundered in the harbor and was slowly being capsized by the aground ice island. I ordered most everyone off both cutter and longboat; I chose the men who would stay aboard the cutter to ride out the storm. We thrashed ashore, using a grotto in the ice island as an entry ramp. There is no way to describe what it feels like inside an ice island. We were so tired and desperate there were men who wanted to stay in there rather than risk the beach. We expected to be overrun immediately by the Ice Cross detachment at the camp on the bluff above, the notorious Clarence West.

The attack did not come. A white flag was raised on the redoubt that fronted the camp’s main entrance on the bluff. That was not a fortified position, more a large barn, half-crushed by a rockslide, situated at the mouth of the elaborate cavelike network that led into the camp’s barracks. We were too cold to care about the possibility of a trap, or the other, infection. We hurried up the escarpment. Coquito Blades led the assault at the gate. It should have meant our massacre. Instead, the Ice Cross commandant surrendered, begged for mercy for himself and his men. By the time I got inside, my Hielistos had done their duty, leaving the commandant for my decision. I had him interrogated and then nailed up over the camp entrance. Within the hour, I was in command of the whole of the camp, with the auxiliary staff—more than two hundred of the Fathers in Agony—lined up for questioning. What I learned was not all that unusual. There had been a revolt four days prior to our arrival, triggered by the advance of my fleet, and the wretches were in control of the main part of the camp. The Ice Cross had surrendered to me rather than to the inmates and their diseases.

We cared only for ourselves, got on dry clothes, ate, and rested in preparation for departure as soon as the blow lifted. Davey Gaunt woke me to tell me that the barracks leaders had gathered in the tunnel, pleading to meet with me. It was not sane to go down there. I went because I felt that I had become invulnerable by the freak of our escape from the sea. The Fathers of Agony formed a cordon between me and the barracks leaders. The Fathers were another of those rogue orders I have mentioned, with the important difference that they took their initiates from the camps. We had real priests on Anvers Island, who denounced them as gravediggers. I grant them their worth, for no other order—not even the Dominicans—would go into Clarence West. Coquito Blades wanted to kill them. That would not have helped; they died harder than the Hielistos. I told the Fathers I did not intend to harm the inmates. In the dark of the tunnel I heard a man call out in Spanish, “We know! It