The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 39

been to spurn Charity’s help, saying, “I should never have given up on those two.” He warned me never to wait for love, as he had done with Molly. Guy was more patient, doting not just on Earle but also on Molly and me and even my dogs, whom he had never much liked. Thord talked less and brooded more, but even he acted pleased to be alive when not upset by Orri’s ordeal with Gizur’s hallucinations. Earle remained steady, as taciturn as ever, with the change that he spoke up more readily in our shipboard councils; he was fatherly toward the Turks and conciliatory toward the Furore brothers, not waiting for Guy’s lead.

We had each changed some, then, not entirely for the better, certainly in concert with our expectations. We congratulated ourselves for having survived the fire. We felt tempered. We had lost everything we possessed and yet held to our community. Those first few days out of Stockholm harbor, we could admire Charity’s care for Peregrine, and Peregrine’s metamorphosis, and all our reconciliations, and have reason to believe that we were free of Sweden’s murder.

Yet we were not so free that one of our number could not easily remind us of our troubles. Cleopatra Furore patrolled our consciences. It was unfair and cruel of her, yet I know now it was in character, and is therefore condemnable only in that we had so many immediate obstacles that we could have been spared her dissent until later. Her brothers seemed to restrain their moods and did cooperate with the business of getting on. Cleopatra alone stood apart, and imperially. She treated Lazarus as her prime minister, the other two as her courtiers. She treated us as vulgarians. Whenever there was gaiety on deck, she would appear in a rush, a cloaked and accusatory look about her, and try to intimidate us into sobriety, which generally worked, even on the gentlest, least culpable of us, Molly.

And why? Guilt alone would have been sufficient. We really had rescued the man who had murdered her father. And we were openly prideful of our action. Yet that was our initial reaction, our affair to digest, and I believe would have eventually settled into a manageable history. Perhaps Cleopatra sensed that the passing of time would make her conduct out of place. And so she did more than silently accuse us. She was belligerent. I was her target. Toward me, she was cynical, manipulative, venomous. I dwarfed her physically, and she was no slight person. In reply she made me feel an intellectual mite. In conversation, between us or in a group, she would cut me off, dismiss me, overwhelm me. She was as eager to mock me as I was to avoid her. She wanted to humiliate me, and went farther on one of the first nights on Angel of Death: she cursed me.

“Any woman who could love that man is no mother to me,” she said. This is typical of her talk, premeditated hyperbole. “And if you could see as I do, Grim Fiddle, you would know how odious to me is everything that man loves. You are worse than he is.”

What did that mean? It was non-sensible, so filled with revulsion as to be pitiable. At the time, though, I thought it impossibly profound and undecipherable. I could not reply. I moved away, afraid of her temper. There was nowhere to hide on seventy-six feet of Norse timber. And she pursued me, running on about how she held me responsible for Charity’s love for Peregrine, and Peregrine’s escape from death, and all that had happened. It seemed for Cleopatra that I was Peregrine’s first and most contemptible crime, the one that had engendered the divorce, the remarriage, and Cleopatra’s conception. Therefore, for Cleopatra, I was the germ of all that had befallen the Furores.

Israel several times attempted to explain to me how he saw Cleopatra’s attitude toward me. He said that Peregrine had wrongly murdered Cesare Furore and been rightly condemned for it. Charity had delivered Peregrine from his ruin, for her own contradictory reasons. All this confused Cleopatra and gradually came to sicken her. Cleopatra was left with a murdered father whom she wanted to revenge, and an aggrieved mother whom she wanted to help. Then Charity had actually involved Cleopatra in a conspiracy to rescue the man she naturally reviled. Cleopatra had cooperated, reluctantly but effectively. Afterward, she reconsidered her actions and, feeling shame for what she thought was the betrayal of her father, turned against everyone who reminded her of the sadness. With the best and most praiseworthy of motives, love for her father and mother, Cleopatra felt something she was constrained from acting on—revenge—and Cleopatra had done something she could not accept in retrospect, helped to deliver Peregrine. She could separate herself from Charity, and could continue to condemn Peregrine, and could regret her fate. But that was not enough, or at least it did not satisfy her. Her frustration unbalanced her. I recall Israel saying she felt stained by her father’s blood. Cleopatra herself became murderous. And she stabbed at what represented to her Peregrine’s dark side—the side that had murdered—and this was his bastard, Grim Fiddle.

I remain cautious of all this. It seems too neat to me now, certainly too Greek. Israel would appreciate my suspicion of his theory. If people were so logical, there would be no difference between mankind and the stars. Yes, Cleopatra might have hated me from the first, without need for specific cause, with a general disgust for her condition. Yet she also seemed to have need of me. And I argue now that what she needed was my presence, the fact of me, the eagerness and awkwardnesss of me trying to understand her, pity her, help her. I represented to her not only her persecuting fate, as Israel said, but also her success at standing up to her tormentors, her father’s murderers. I was her pride of conquest, in