The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 148

My Fall from Satan’s Seat

FOR those six years at Anvers Island, Lazarus was my rock. Lazarus was also my traitor. While it is an exaggeration to say that I built my kingdom upon him, it is not overmuch to say that his temperament fashioned the idea of my kingdom. It is also accurate to say that his temperament led him to overturn me. He was kingmaker and regicide, and proud for both. “What we have done!” he would say as we went out onto the ice for another season’s combat. And as often he would say, “What I have done!”

Lazarus did not interfere in my revenge on the capitanes de los Hielistos—that was all bloody and spontaneous. I stormed into their fortress, and they fell back in anticipation. I murdered their chief, Jaguaquara, and they celebrated me. I took their queen, and they bent their heads to my blade and to the blades of my sealers. Nor did Lazarus assert himself the following summer (January 2004), when, in order to dispatch a rescue mission to Golgotha, I led the attack that broke the Ice Cross blockade of Anvers Island—that was all berserker cunning and luck. Then I collapsed, weakened by my berserker fury to free the dark-haired queen, so that I lay insensate for months. I had leaped to the mastery of Anvers Island only to retreat to my hall and to lie down. It was at that moment that Lazarus stepped forward as my prime minister. He sealed my sick bed, set Germanicus and Kuressaare as my protectors, Cleopatra as my surrogate, and then ruled through her and thus through the legend he made of me. I did recover in a matter of months, but afterward I did nothing but conform to Lazarus’s sense of my grandeur and power. I was the king Lazarus made of me.

And how was it that a man who spoke so eloquently of a republic founded upon universal suffrage and written law could become a tyrant’s eyes and ears? How was it that Lazarus Furore was both conceiver and destroyer? The answer was the man; at least, that is all I have. Lazarus would say that he did what had to be done. I say that he pursued his heart as I had pursued my albatross and my heart’s desire. I cannot display Lazarus’s heart any more tellingly than the events allowed. I can say that Lazarus carried in his breast a profound contradiction that should not have worked, except that it did—that of the noble democrat and the terrible demagogue.

It was Lazarus the democratic teacher, as in Diomedes’s stories of Aristotle the Athenian lecturing the masters of the Hellenistic world, who came to use the six black months of each winter, when the Hielistos were prisoners of the ice in the caves at Anvers Island, as an academy for, as he said, “the revenge of the just.” The Hielistos mocked Lazarus at first, called him a mad priest, but as his reputation grew apace with mine those capitanes came to fear him. His program was grandiose. He told the capitanes that it was their duty to understand their historical significance. He punished any capitán who called himself a pirate. He made them recite in a singsong chant that they were crusaders, soldiers of the revolution, and, most of all, servants of a historical certainty. He said Lykantropovin was not merely our enemy, he was the enemy of the future. Whenever we struck at Lykantropovin, he said, we struck for the coming freedom of all just people, and so we must fight fiercely because we were the champions of billions in slavery. Lazarus said we were the future. Lazarus especially liked to tell us we fought for “all just people.” Whenever he used that phrase, I knew he was leaving me and the death in the caves and breathing the air of a faraway vision of what he believed the world would become.

He was not, in those trances of his, forgetful of how he must marshal the Hielistos and the wretches in the camps. Lazarus might have preached of warm, well-nourished utopias, however he remained fixed on the marching order to that end. This represents Lazarus the demagogic strategist. He commanded my council meetings with those quick eyes. He was ever wary of rebellion among the capitanes and mutiny among the Hielistos, was ever attentive to intrigue at Anvers Island. He put to death many in my name for disobedience, perhaps just for disaffection to Lazarus’s idea of our crusade. He commanded his hall-guard of spies like secret police, and they were everywhere: always second-in-command on my warships, or second-in-command in my battalions. Lazarus rarely interfered in the tactical planning of a murder raid. He would say that, as guerrillas fighting a long campaign, we would gain victory as long as we never surrendered. He would preach that