The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 67

We were cut off by beasties. I charged their position, which by accident took me back to the wharves. It was said that I desecrated the corpses with a knife, that Germanicus shot me with a pistol to stop me. I was said to have torn at the dead and dying. I was said to have eaten the dead. Motherwell and half a dozen others finally clubbed me down by trickery after I turned on the Volunteers. They thought me dead, and the reason I was taken off East Falkland was that Germanicus would not leave what he thought was my corpse for the Pattie wheels. And it was said that Longfaeroe prayed over my body in the longboat as we cleared the breakers, asking his Jehovah to forgive me for “the blackest words ever said, a serpent’s mouth.”

All this I learned much later, and incompletely; there are some things done by me there that no one would ever tell me. It is not for me now to declare what was true, what was sealer’s talk. It is for me to declare that the w eight of my shameful, wicked conduct was something I bore hard in the years of remorse that followed.

I became afraid of myself. I came to understand that there was a part of me that was fury without sense of proportion or limits. At Port Stanley’s finish, I learned that I was that most reviled of men by Christian Norse, that most revered of men by pagan Norse, a shape-changer. In this peculiar way, Mother’s magic had passed to me. I cannot now say how much of my nature was also derived from the anger in Peregrine that was revealed when he murdered Cesare Furore, nor how much was the cruelty in Grandfather that was revealed when he vouchsafed the razing of the North. I now declare this; Grim Fiddle met abandonment with pitiless abandon. The simple truth was that Grim Fiddle was no simple Christian soul. In battle, in deepest distress, in exile without hope, Grim Fiddle was cursed with the strength of a dozen dozen men, with the relentlessness and ravenousness of a wolfpack, with the fact that he cannot be killed by ordinary and mortal means. Grim Fiddle was a berserker. I am a berserker.

C

HAPTER

THE

T

HIRD

THE KINGDOM

OF ICE

Shepherds and Their Calls and Mine

THE God of Love is fine talk. I was not rational when I denied him at Port Stanley. It is a rational theme. I feel compelled here to respond to the Grim Fiddle who boasted of, as he cursed, a “God of Hate.” Pagan Grim Fiddle welled up to drown out Christian Grim Fiddle, had to lie to cover his shame for doubt and murder. I feel that shame now for what he—I—said and must show that I understand now that the dark was in my mouth, I was wrong, wrong.

The God of Love is the Christian God. He was Jesus’ Father. As I read the Fiddle Bible, Jesus spoke of a Father who provided in famine, weakness, doubt, who welcomed the repentant and especially the meek into the Kingdom of Heaven. Jesus’ Father was kind, patient, fair-minded, sweet, forgiving. He negotiated more than he judged. He loved his children so much that he permitted a profoundly costly deal, that the unjust should arrest his son, persecute him, execute him, so that by this example, and by believing in the wisdom of Jesus, the mortal son of a loving father, the children of the earth could come to revelation and redemption. This is a sublime tale, full of tricks and mysteries, which have been made that much more confounding by later apologists whose motives seem to me suspect—creeds for power, heresy trials for aggrandizement, orthodoxy for contrived unanimity. I cannot comprehend much of Christian theology because of sloth of mind and ill education. The idea of the Holy Trinity eludes me. What I do get from Jesus’ story is joy, for as Molly once told me, “the good guys win, sort of.” It is wonderful to consider that into the breach the God of Love sent his son to save not the strong but the weak, not the pious but the most impious. It is also grand to think that Jesus scoffed at the notion of his being a warlord king, took a crown of thorns rather than of gold, and suffered his humiliation without thought of vengeance. He was a brave man; his courage was forgiveness. I also find in the Gospel tale a nagging tableau: that somehow, through hunger or lust or doubt (the very temptations that Jesus took courage against in the wilderness), God’s children had fallen from the salvation they enjoyed by the grace of God, who brought them out of Egypt and into the promised land of milk and honey, and that it was required for the God of Love to sacrifice a human being to preserve and advance his plan. What nags at me is this: What happens once, reign to ruin, happens easier and worse when it occurs again—fall, salvation, exodus, fall.

Why have I opened this? I do not mean this question rhetorically. I demand it of myself. I know I say that my blasphemy at Port Stanley obliges me to demonstrate my reading and understanding of the God of Love, the true God, who was Jesus’ Father. I sense now there is more to my introduction. I feel arrested in my narrative by a presentiment of something sinister that has haunted me many years. I feel I am compelled here to declare my understanding of Jesus in order to show that I am certain that Grim Fiddle was not a savior.

This declaration reaches ahead again, too far ahead to make sense of my frustration here. I must first relate my six years on South Georgia before I can begin to speak of the lost and the saved. Nevertheless I am crushed with a