The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 34

of terror. I learned as I worked. Not just Sweden but all of the Baltic was afire. In Finland, there had been a murderous bombing at a rally called by the government’s opponents. And for Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Konigsberg, the anarchistic revolution in Poland (millions starving as winter approached, crucifixions commonplace, battle-tanks out of petrol being overrun by teenagers with petrol bombs) had awakened slumbering Slav chauvinism. There was street-fighting in Riga, food-rioting in Tallin, and an interminable dock strike in Leningrad. Panic was omnipresent and pitiless out there. Whole populations scattered, seeking shelter, asylum, mostly food. Stockholm harbor was filled with those clever enough, brutal enough, to procure oceangoing transport. The radio crackled with lies in twenty tongues. The news in Stockholm was mostly rumors, and they were dreadful. The King was said to have retired to Uppsala, was said to be very ill. There was strong word that the government had fallen; other talk that the King had abdicated in favor of replacing the parliamentary monarchy with an Evangelical Republic. But there was also talk that the King had denounced the Loyalist League and their so-called Provisional Revolutionary Government, that the King had called them all traitors and insurrectionists, and that the King’s illness was in fact gunshot wounds, or perhaps poison. The Prince, at sixteen, was believed a Loyalist sympathizer, and it was equally assumed that he was implicated in a long struggle to wrest the right of succession from his elder sister, the Crown Princess, who had been sent overseas for safekeeping. In all, the weather in Sweden was revolution.

One certainty in Stockholm seemed that the Provisional Revolutionary Government had taken control of the security network, especially of the King’s Spies, now called the Evangelical Brigade. A nation of law had become a nation of men, some very bad men. One of the first declarations by the PRG had been posted at the King’s castle that morning; it said that Peregrine Ide would be executed on the King’s prison island before another sunrise, along with more than one thousand arsonists, rapists, assassins, saboteurs, and other “godless ones.” Another certainty in Stockholm seemed that, once the new government was in place, there would be an end to so-called tolerance of so-called undesirable elements; this meant that aliens, half-breeds, and socio-sexual deviants were marked for terror.

All this should explain why, as I directed my family and our new allies, the Furores, to load and ready Angel of Death, it was wisest to post Babe, Wild Drumrul, and one of Thord’s most loyal lieutenants, Otter Ransom, on guard at the pier. The city was stricken. There were hangings and crucifixions. There were immolations. Stockholm was pursued by demon Purity. There was no refuge there for either the righteous or the wronged. There were sirens, fires, and faraway howls—a larger, more obscene version of what I had fled the night before in Vexbeggar. Columns of refugees wound from the foreign quarter to the quays. Columns of smoke wound from the foreign quarter to spread a stench over the docks, the air sometimes so thick that it was necessary to wear moist cloths on our faces as we worked. The harbor changed for the worse as the day faded, steamers shifting for safer berths away from the smoldering depots, small craft ramming smaller ones, ragwomen in open boats bartering for food, rafts of armed thugs guarding their ships from raiding parties. None hesitated to shoot, and there were bursts of gunfire all day, a few gray lumps, which were probably bodies, to be seen floating in with the evening tide. I thought I saw the worst of mankind that day—far short of it, as I know now. It was still hard on us, more disorienting than any of us admitted. Our known world disintegrated irreparably, and none of our grand assumptions about the intrinsic decency of human nature could protect us. We felt beyond mortal succor. If not for our obsession with delivering Peregrine, I do not rule out the possibility that we would have collapsed with the North. It was a near thing. Molly and Thord suffered a wordless hysteria. Israel started drinking again, passed out at least once, not from spirits, from despair. We had to force Earle to eat for strength, and even sturdy Guy lost his temper at me over stowing a crate. I watched the Furores more suspiciously than was right, and thought badly of Lazarus without call.

Thord took leaving the worst. He saw the rightness of it, and did not grieve for his lost warehouse. He had grown tired of what he had become in his own land—a persecuted deviant, a marked man. But he and the Fljotson brothers, Orri and Gizur Sail-Maker, were the only full Swedes among us, without links to any other culture (Otter Ransom was part Ukrainian). Sadder, Gizur Sail-Maker’s young wife had died the year before of meningitis, a disease he insanely ascribed to Sweden’s irreligion. He had not been rational since. He wanted us to take along her gravestone; Orri had to lie to him. As Orri’s protector, Thord suffered the Fljotson dilemma acutely. More, he could not forgive himself his powerlessness to save us. He felt, with a bleak conviction, that he had brought on our jeopardy by remaining silent about the truth of my birth.

I must include here that I also learned that day that if not for Charity Bentham, there would have been no escape. She was the heroine, and the mystery, had been from the first. Her motives in discarding her widowhood and retrieving her first husband are beyond me. I declare here that Charity Bentham made her own mysterious bargain with her own mysterious conscience, and the particulars that contributed to such seem lost to me now in her love for Peregrine Ide and Cesare Furore. I can guess that she longed for order, decency, kindness, a fragment of happiness; she longed for an end to her self-torment; she reached for peace of