The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 25

once was called Mozambique (I have no knowledge of its name now). The summertime girls also had names: Gunnhild, who was called “Lace-Cuff”; Liva, who was called “Fine-Hair”; and the ultramarine-eyed Unn, whom I called “Sly-Eyes.”

Sly-Eyes was the only daughter of a life peer, a minor count from the western dairylands. She was a major influence on my libido, three years older than me when we met, leaving me feeling too old when we parted. That last summer at Vexbeggar, I thought of Sly-Eyes as my Charity Bentham, for she was smarter, sexier, sneakier than all the rest. That was youthful fancy. I was yet to meet the real thing. Still, while she was there, Sly-Eyes twisted me about her vain self. Everything about her seemed to me careful, ladylike, gorgeous. I did love the way she smelled. She could make me do anything, including dressing properly enough to attend the dissolute parties at her father’s shore house. And the more I feared her foolish friends, the more I clung to her. Lilli, in an uncharacteristic aside, said that Sly-Eyes was a pale snake in my tree of life. That was overmuch, though Sly-Eyes tempted me greatly. She taught me envy, jealousy, pettiness. She ran with a bad lot; her other suitors called me, to my face, a fishmonger. And I took it, because I thought that if I challenged them they might question my identity. My safety remained in my apparent thickheadedness. I hung at the fringe of that bright crowd, waiting for Sly-Eyes to bore herself with the pretty boys. She fancied me her Norse outlaw, as in the stories I told her. I was her “Grim Evening-Wolf,” hiding from the relatives of my victims. She said this innocently, without sense of the burning half-truth.

One weekend under the harvest moon, Sly-Eyes and I fought over how much wine she could drink and still remain ladylike. I broke a bottle against the carriage of one of her feyest suitors. She refused my appeals for reconciliation the rest of the month. This did not annoy me, because I was very busy washing dishes at three different restaurants for funds I needed. By the new moon, I had lost patience and retreated to my shack to plan how to win her back. I aimed to make her regret that she had toyed with Beowulf-Come-Again, King of the Weather-Geats, slayer of Grendel and mother, bested finally by the unnamed dragon guarding an ancient gold-hoard.

I gathered my harness from the tattered remains of Vikingland. I dressed my dogs as well, decided not to take along the three pups I had kept of their litters. We were decked in as much iron and wolf fur as we could heft. I let my hair down, combed out my red beard, coated myself in grease and fish oil. I looked and smelled unholy. I had not dressed the warrior since we had closed the camp ten years before, and my full-grown bulk made it no masquerade. I figured this would scare Sly-Eyes into submission. It scared me enough—examining myself in the polished helmet—that I mention that I carried no weapons that night. I was only crudely sensitive to my power then, intuited enough about the strange darkness inside me to avoid provocation.

I knew from my friend Dede Gone, an angry Turk and fellow dishwasher, who also delivered groceries to the rich, including Sly-Eyes’s shore house, that she was giving a party that Saturday. My dogs and I approached her house—a cakelike affair set on stilts on a low cliffside amid other equally pretentious roosts—from the wooded plateau behind. In position by moon-rising, I climbed up a pinetree from which I had spent many embarrassed, delightful evenings watching people in their baths and so forth. I had first seen Sly-Eyes from that perch, since it was directly in line with the sun deck off her mother’s cluttered living room. I planned our howling entrance at midnight. Sly-Eyes had unwittingly prepared a surprise for me.

Just before midnight, Sly-Eyes and her best friend, Asgerd, the daughter of a scoundrel who actually called himself the Duke of Vexbeggar (the King had made life peerages a lucrative game), swept onto the sun deck and waved the partygoers to attention. There were cheers. At fifty yards I could not hear what they said. Soon they had turned off the electric lights and distributed candles around the deck’s railing. They also arranged large pillows in thronelike display at the edge of the terrace.

From out of the revelry and firelight, two cloaked figures appeared through the screens to the side. The larger figure sounded a long, high-pitched whine. It stunned the party, and shocked Goldberg and Iceberg, who commenced answering whines. I waved them to silence, checked the crowd to see if they had noticed. Instead, they were transfixed by the whining figure, who threw back her cowl to reveal a bloated face, caked with white powder, distorted with artifice. She had greased her hair back so that it hung to her shoulders like snakes. She carried a wooden staff a foot taller than herself, and this was a large woman; she used it to clear a circle about the pillow throne. In her sweep she paused, seemed to fix her eyes directly on me. It is not credible that she could have seen into a dark wood, as one generally uses the word see. I ducked. When I looked again, the smaller figure had fixed on me. Her eyes were bright in the candlelight. She stood as still as a statue. I knew something was wrong. Then, with a histrionic spin, the smaller figure dropped her cloak and began a dance around the pillow throne.

The small woman was a prophetess. Such performers abounded in the Kingdom then, for they suited the chauvinistic need for Norse folklore. Sly-Eyes and Asgerd had hired a sibyl to titillate their guests. From the looks of her I knew they had paid a high price. The sibyl was