The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 28

Mother. My dogs growled at her. She hissed at them. Mother was the only living thing who ever cowed my dogs. They hid behind me. I recall being frightened of her powers just then, for the first and not the last time.

“This is my prophecy,” she continued. “You shall rule the South as king. Flee the fire. Seek the ice. You are Ice-Waster. Follow the counsel of Skallagrim Strider. He will guide you. Listen to him. Follow your heart. Listen to it. It will protect you. The black and hurt half-men of the wall of blizzards and behemoths await your coming, Wolfman and Rune-Carver. And hurry, hurry, hurry!”

I pleaded for more intelligibility. I felt her words, but could not accept them.

“I am Lamba, called Time-Thief. The spirits of the exiled and unavenged have told me your future. Heed the hardest heart. Trust the fisher-of-men. Your destiny is with the cold and the cruel.”

I was uncomfortable now, probably angry. She was pushing me too far and too fast. I stiffened. I scowled. I flaunted my defiance. I think now she might have been trying to protect me from the truth, which she could see and which was then too unacceptable to say aloud. She was wrong to protect me from the truth, even if it was the worst imaginable. I forgive her that; it might have been mother-love, a sad bargain, a bad bargain, part of her fate to have given birth to an heir of magic, wonder, crime. I suppose that she realized then that I was about to reject her completely, for she paused. She stepped back. Astra covered Mother with her robe. The two stood to the side, chatting in Old Norse, too quietly for me to hear. Mother turned back to me to whisper, “This is what I can tell you. You are not yet what you could be, Skallagrim Ice-Waster. Remember that if you fail, it was fated and is no fault of yours. Remember that all things are not set. You are loved. As long as you are loved, you are safe from shame. Also, you are lucky.”

Mother danced away. I was dumbfounded. I wanted more. And yet I did not want more. It is no easy thing to demand to know the future, one’s own destiny. I shook my head—it was too much for me. I got to my feet. Mother and Astra vanished into the shadows. I did not pursue. I kicked rubbish and cursed the night, the sky above me, black and star-packed. I barked at my dogs to follow me. They whimpered, joined just then by another female whom I had forgotten in my temper.

“Oh, Grim baby,” said Sly-Eyes, moving across the room, weeping, acting, manipulating. “What am I to tell Mother?”

“I wouldn’t know about mothers,” I said, turning my passion on her, forcing my advantage, warrior claiming his bride of mischief. Sly-Eyes responded in kind, and it was easy to dismiss for the rest of that night, and for many self-indulgent nights afterward, that my future was said not to be there in silk and woman’s heat, was instead somewhere far beyond the constellations of the northern sky, on the track of a thousand-year-dead outlaw, at the end of which I would come to rule the cold and the cruel.

The Fire

I DID nothing about what Mother foretold. I did have wild dreams, of herds of animals, of immense blue pools covered with sunbursts. There were also feelings of loss, or irreparable damage, and, contradictorily, a sense of swirling adventure. I was not a player in these phantasms, more an observer, or most accurately: a listener to descriptions of vivid events. This passive role—listener—was based on what I knew of Norse lore, in which the spirits of the restless and unavenged dead are said to whisper to the living in their sleep. There were indeed aspects of the images that made me think the scenes were of long ago. I thought them like pictures I had seen of Iceland, those volcanic ridges cut by glaciers and washed by ashen clouds. That was not Iceland. I pushed all this aside at the time. It was not that different from the rich, boyish fantasy life I played out in my daydreams. I was very young and very easily persuaded. I told myself that the sibyl’s prophecy had engaged my yearning for such experiences. I certainly never saw fire in those dreams, and this must mean that the only born child of a sibyl inherits nothing practical of her gift. The first I considered fire as a foe was with Israel’s letter at summer’s end.

“They outdid themselves last night,” he wrote, referring to the Loyalist League for Swedish Homelife. “Me, Guy, and Earle hiked up along the canal after curfew, across from gooktown. We couldn’t believe those sad little creatures on the other side were human. Whole families were huddled along the canal bank. Guy figures they are the ones who keep moving all day to avoid the roundups. We were walking up toward the smoke when we heard these insane screams. Some of those poor bastards take their own dogs and hang them and set them on fire. Guy says it’s because they think the screams will scare away evil spirits. Behind the dogs an entire block was on fire, a real monster. Within half an hour, sparks lit up the shacks along the canal. It was one of the so-called safe fires, since it couldn’t jump the canal. But there were firemen on our side in case a gust launched some cinders. There were Loyalist lackies, too, passing out handbills that said the fires were a ‘blessing’ because they ‘rid the city of filth and infestation.’ Guy read it to me, and when he saw my face, he got so angry he made a move on the Loyalist. Earle kept him in control but not by much. I can’t let this upset me again. You should know that