The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 64

“Get on! Beggar’s fate we’ve not shot ye!”

“Germanicus Frazer told me to thank God I got here, and to help them that need it. I need your help.”

Elephant Frazer relaxed at that. I would learn later that I had quoted him to himself. “God’s truth about the parson? Him praying and the beasties let ye be?” I said it was. “And was it ye said we Volunteers no better than Patties?”

“I said it,” said Lazarus.

“Ye’re no Pattie,” said Elephant Frazer.

“I’m an American citizen,” said Lazarus.

“Ye’re a beasde or ye’re a Volunteer, laddie. What ye said, tell Frazer it ain’t so.”

“You are willing to murder men because they’re brownskinned, and those beasties because they’re hungry. You make them beasts. It’s true, and there’s nothing you can do to me that will change that.”

I liked Lazarus Furore then; I loved him for his words, and especially because he did not care to defend himself. He could be a braggart; he was also daring, and if one listened closely, he meant what he said. I liked Elephant Frazer then also. He too did not defend himself. They challenged each other with bitter silence. Neither relented. Elephant Frazer said, “I can’t hate you, lad,” then he faced me. “Germanicus made ye Volunteers, that’s what keeps ye alive, not me, not yerr talk. If ye find yerr friends, I won’t help ye more than this. Ye’re Volunteers till we’re done, then it’s every man, every family, for it. If ye run before, we’ll shoot ye as beasties. Get on! Ye’re in the fire detail. And if ye see the parson, tell him keep singing till kingdom come.”

We dug out charcoal-like corpses for two brutal weeks—burned hands, bad backs, soot so thick we tasted it and not the rations. Iceberg distinguished us because she was expert at smelling the living from the dead. One of those living, whom we found under a collapsed building, was Christmas Muir, a sealer; he had come to the Falklands to help his brother’s family, had lost his brother to the Patties and the widow and two boys to a fireball. We did not find Black Crane, or a way back to Angel of Death. We had gained the fortress to lose freedom.

I cannot recall if the cholera broke out before the Patties launched their final drive, or if the crush of beasties fleeing before the Pattie scourge brought the cholera, or if it all happened at once. Christmas Muir, who said he could tell an ill wind from a fatal one, said the verdict on Port Stanley was set. Cholera is a middling dying, not as terrifying as the plague that kills like fire, not as slow as scurvy with the cure so simple but impossible at sea or on the ice. Nonetheless, cholera is a finish. People collapse, cannot eat, excrete so it seems their insides are running out, then melt with fever. I came to appreciate why the fear of it had paralyzed and then dismantled the British Commonwealth, contributing to the abandonment of the Falkland Dependencies. There is a vaccine, and we loyalists had it; it is a temporary clemency, and fixed a timetable for the loyalists to quit Port Stanley before the cholera did the work the Patties might not have been able to do before winter.

The evacuation began with several ships out in convoy every night, risking the blockade to run southeast eight hundred miles to South Georgia. The command drew in the defenders as the port burned and emptied. The Patties must have suffered the cholera as well, because their attacks were haphazard. The fall winds brought hail, huge seas, thick black clouds hurtling from the west. And then there were the seaquakes that rumbled increasingly beneath us, which we learned from Christmas Muir were the result of enormous volcanic eruptions way to the south, beyond the Scotia Sea, on the peninsula of Antarctica and off Antarctica’s shore on the South Shetland Islands. I record here the first I ever heard of Satan’s Seat.

“Poachin’ off Coronation isle, I was, that first summer she let go,” said Christmas Muir one night in the shelter, “and ’twere fearsome, sealer’s fate. Bergy bits spun like tops and sea shakes, this ice island to beam crumbled up, like cake. We was in the backwash of this shock wave. We got to lee of shag rock, quick, tell ye, fer that tidal wave picked up floes and flung ’em. Ice down there be black now, sort of kicked up, carved in twists. It’s meltin’ the ice, on Graham Land. That’s how’d they called it. Satan’s Seat. Big as Hell; hot, ye can fix on that. I never seen it, don’t wish it. South Orkney’s close as I been, and that ain’t the same since the shakin’ started. Makes the whales and seals easy, I admit, kind of stunned, don’t run on ye. The black ice islands are fearsome, pieces of Hell ten miles long. Satan’s Seat.”

Otter Ransom listened to my translation, then said he had seen a volcano on Spitzbergen in the 1980s and that though it had closed down the mines and scared the Russians badly, it had not affected the glacier. He supposed that if Satan’s Seat was hot enough to melt ice, it must be part of a chain of eruptions.

“Might be,” said Christmas Muir, grinning, “lot of wee demon seats, a union meetin’ in Hell!” We thought this an excellent jest, which pleased Christmas Muir, a grimy little man, forty years alive and thirty of that a sealer. He liked us because we had saved his life and because the other Volunteers treated him like an outsider too, since he had quit fighting after cutting his brother off a wheel. He liked to spellbind us with sealer talk—broad, imaginary, ten times more than truth—and continued the same next morning about Satan’s Seat.

“The worst of it be this. I didn’t see it myself, heard it, ye take it as sealer’s