The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 68
What trial? I realize I hint at matters that I have not prepared. This bewilders me. I must be deeply upset by the recounting of the loss of Black Crane, of the abandonment of Angel of Death, and of my darkness. I must wait, and specify, and explore the meaning of the events of my life, before I can speak of my trial. Let it be sufficient here to say that certain men who did not know me, who were from the enemy camp, who said they were speaking in my defense, whom I cannot know whereof, they made much of my so-called virgin birth, my so-called invasion of a temple, my so-called assembly of disciples at Anvers Island. What distortions and nonsense they heaped, and for their own purposes, not in my defense at all, sneakily confusing the dark story of Grim Fiddle—bastard, fugitive, warlord—with the compassionate story of Jesus, son of the God of Love, disputatious preacher, king of the meek. Those distorters used a timeworn trick that has been used by many apologists for many outlaws who have fallen to crime, yet then enjoyed undue reward in myth as revolutionary heroes. I shall not give those odd-tongues any more weight by speaking of the ruin caused by all those false messiahs. My trial was the same sort of falsehood. When I get to it, it will be clear that my time at Anvers Island was no saving work, was the vengeance of a furious, criminal, fallen, pagan fool. I have already recorded enough to give the lie to those first two twisted claims. I have confessed the facts of Grim Fiddle to bury what could have become another deceptive myth—Grim Fiddle was like Jesus. I write no, completely no. Lamba was a virgin; mine was not virgin birth; there was blood. My father was not a spirit, was Peregrine Ide, in a telephone booth, a weepy, drunken, angry man. I did get inside a king’s palace at seventeen, not grandly and righteously, rather as a servant’s servant, and not to dispute men and women of worldly learning, rather to aid my family. I shall not pursue this further. I am probably overdoing. I do have a foreboding of what the politics of falsehood might have done with the lie that Grim was messiah of the abandoned on the ice. It has been such a long time, lies can seem as fertile as truth, bring forth rotten harvest certainly—food for glib men with bad motives regardless. I cannot know what that sort might have done, have done, after my trial and imprisonment, and I cannot get this confession out to show they were false witnesses. It likely came to nothing. I deserve, infamy deserves, forgetting. I read the stories of the infamous in the Fiddle Bible however, and there seem other ends: what they did was long-remembered in poetic lamentations. No more of this. I have been foundered by the rage and loss at Port Stanley. I have drifted from my time line. I have grasped at woe, shall now withdraw my hand, let it pass, for fear that contrived worry might become self-fulfilling. There is magic in the world; the bad magic can work like that. I am nagged by so many voices, all dead, all urgent and worthy, that I shall take my own advice and keep going. I stress, though it seems pretension, necessary only because in my Norse way I see the worst possible as most probable, that I am a man, my Hielistos at Anvers were human, we erred and failed and came to ruin as prideful fools, as victims who fell to crime, as false disciples of false gods, as wretches elected by no one for nothing but murder.
On South Georgia, for six years, there was a more immediately troubling distortion for me than the much later savior talk. It was said that I was a new David. Longfaeroe said it. Longfaeroe claimed that I was a new David for his flock on South Georgia and for those lost to the Patties on the Falklands. Longfaeroe would visit me, as my pastor, in my shepherd’s hut high in the wind-gouged pastures above the main settlement on Cumberland Bay. There I had been settled by the Frazers, who took pity on poor, mad, orphaned Grim Fiddle. Longfaeroe would come up to me, would sing psalms to me, would tell me that he knew me, had known me when I crawled from beneath the cart to his side during the massacre on East Falkland’s heath, had known me when he watched me fight the Patties and beasties, and that what he knew was that I was sent by Jehovah to him as a “wee David.” Longfaeroe meant David the Hebrew, youngest son of Jesse of Bethlehem, who was called to King Saul as a harpist, who rose, by bravura and luck, to become himself King of Israel and Judah. Longfaeroe’s prodigy requires brief explanation of the Reverend Learned Sharon Longfaeroe. He was born in the Highlands of Scotland, brought up in the Wee Kirk of Scotland, a literal-minded group of Calvinists, also hard-minded, high-minded, vigilant, hungry for inspiration. He was the youngest son of a sergeant major, eventually killed in an imperial debacle in Egypt, and of an orphaned Jewess raised by nuns in Palestine, where she converted to Christianity and where she married the sergeant major. She was a second wife, produced a second family as soon as she removed to the sergeant major’s mother in Scotland. Longfaeroe’s upbringing was as confession-laden as mine. As the “bairn” of an intractable