The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 61

“Ye’re free of us now. We’re back for my captain. I’ll not have him on their wheels, the divils. I’m grieved for yer folk. If they make Stanley, it be ours still. Keep to the high road there, east, eighty miles. The hills be bad with the beasties. My advice to ye be to go with the column the morrow.”

“Can you give us a boat, or take us with you, when we’re rested?”

He tightened his bandoliers, said flatly, “It’s finished here.”

“We can walk back,” I tried.

“So ye say. Frazer tells, what’s south of here on both sides of the Sound be Patties. Yerr chance be east, or none. If there’s trouble for ye, tell them Volunteers ye served Germanicus Frazer, Elephant Frazer’s son. He owes ye debt for yerr backs and faith.” He offered his hand; we touched as we could, raw flesh on raw flesh.

“This is Lazarus Furore, and Otter Ransom, from America and Sweden,” I said. “And Iceberg. I’m Grim Fiddle, Peregrine Ide’s son.”

“Luck then, Grim Fiddle,” he said, and was gone. It is crucial to note that Germanicus’s captain, whom he never found, was his older brother, the legendary and beloved Samson Frazer, whom the chaplain, Longfaeroe, referred to when he sang, “Keep him, keep him!”

Despite Germanicus’s promise that we were free to make our own way, we were drafted as bearers into the hospital column leaving the next morning for Port Stanley. We learned something of the fighting from the guerrillas as we waited to move out. The South Georgia Volunteers, and what was left of the Falkland Irregulars, were in full retreat from a massacre at Goose Green on East Falkland’s Choiseul Sound the day before Germanicus’s raid on 2 de Diciembre (whose Falklander name was Port Howard). None of this should appear grandly military. At most a thousand men and boys were involved on Germanicus’s side—fishermen, shepherds, sealers, whale-poachers. As the guerrillas wanted us to understand, these were the vocations of Jesus’ disciples. I suspect this detail had been forced on them by their preachers, like Longfaeroe, to fuel their fight. It was not a holy war, however, even if the guerrillas saw it that way. It was primarily a blood feud between those who spoke Spanish and those who spoke English, a contest for territory and revenge, what Germanicus meant when he bellowed, “What’s ours be ours by right!”

Once he had some facts to add to his intuition and knowledge of South American history, Lazarus insisted this was less a civil war than the remains of an imperial conflict. In the nineteenth century, Great Britain had used its fleet to acquire the Falkland archipelago, making it the chief component of what was then a sealer’s and whaler’s promised land, called the British Falkland Islands Dependencies—which included the Falklands, South Georgia, the South Sandwich, South Orkney, and South Shetland islands, the Palmer archipelago, and Graham Land, also known as the Palmer Peninsula of Antarctica. The British claim was ever in dispute by the Argentine Republic, who laid cross claim to the whole of the Falkland Dependencies, and to the Falklands in specific, calling them the Islas Malvinas. I am describing this too carefully for the information I can be sure of, but it does evidence Lazarus’s ideological mind, and does pertain to what happened to me there. Bluntly, the Falklanders, who were mostly British descendants, hated the few South Americans settled among them—a racial and religious bigotry. By the late twentieth century, revolutions and reactions on the mainland had upset the shaky political equilibrium in the Falkland Dependencies. The Argentine Republic was certainly the main sponsor of the invading Army of the End of the Earth, who were mostly from Argentina’s Patagonian steppes, those whom Germanicus called Patties.

I have a faint heart for this. It seems as over-simple and miserable recording it now as it was living it then. In every land, for every people, the oldest wounds opened as easily as the fresh ones. Who first transgressed in the Falklands, and why, and where, is lost to me in the cycle of lies, what Israel taught me was the politics of falsehood. I know Germanicus told me the Patties struck first. I imagine a Pattie would say opposite. What matter now.-‘ Patriotism, separatism, imperialism, colonialism, adventurism all fine words, all graves and ruin, north under fire, equator under tempest, south under ice. As Grandfather told me, there was no refuge, there was no sanctury, there was no peace. As I had seen, there was only flight and exile and abandonment and endurance until one could take no more, then standing or dying—perhaps first giving what one got. There is profoundly more to the politics and ruination of the end of the earth, but that must await further events in this chronicle without whose explanation I realize now, acutely and fully, what happened to me and mine would remain incredible, unacceptable, seemingly less history than fantasy—so dark, I worry that even the light this writing means to me might not be able to show the truth.

I reach too far ahead. There was specific jeopardy for us in that hospital column in retreat across the high moors of East Falkland. The Army of the End of the Earth—I shall henceforth call them as did the South Georgians: Patagonians or Patties—was said to have been reinforced with a heavy-weapons company of regulars on West Falkland, was said to be rushing to obliterate the so-called loyalist resistance (Falkland Irregulars, South Georgia Volunteers) before the fall winds hampered the supply lines from the continent. The loyalists had no hope against gunboats supporting artillery. Worse, the desperate refugees cast up on the Falklands, as Angel of Death had been, whom they called beasties, were wandering the islands, killing and being killed. The Patties used the beasties as forced labor, sometimes as paramilitary labor, since many of them were originally from the Americas. The loyalists had three sorts of adversaries then, closing a claw-hand on