The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 73
I dispute silence. Perhaps I should not make apology. I did not want excuses from others at my trial, did not want it from Longfaeroe at my hut, should not now turn to speculation and vanity in a work I mean as self-accusation. Moses was not a criminal like me; he did not murder multitudes. That was my conduct, and it would be disingenuousness like Longfaeroe’s to try to cover my shame with eccentric exegesis.
I think now this detour has been worthwhile. I see here something that escaped me before I recounted my reading and understanding of Jesus and David and Moses. Those were three kings to three very different peoples: oppressed Galileans, beleaguered Israelites, enslaved Hebrews. Grim Fiddle was a ruler of people who shared one sure thing with God’s chosen people: they were outcasts, undone, unloved. Grim Fiddle was a bad ruler, and I do not want to obscure that fact by declaring here, in passing, that it might not be possible to take up kingship in any way in this world devoid of refuge, sanctuary, peace, without also taking up the curse of pride that will eventually usher a fall. This formula only seems to be avoidable if one heeds the lesson of Jesus and takes a crown of thorns as a suffering servant rather than a crown of iron as an insufferable master. I did not follow such wisdom. I was a tyrant’s tyrant—capricious, secretive, gory, vain, corrupt. Yet I see now that even in the worst of earthly monarchs, like me, there are elements of Jesus, David, Moses, just as even in the worst of earthly peoples, like my Hielistos and the slaves in the camps, there are elements of the Galileans, Israelites, and Hebrews. This seems a quiet discovery. It may therefore be crucial. Perhaps this helps explain the genesis of all that false talk about my so-called virgin birth, and all Longfaeroe’s bloated talk about my so-called slayings of Goliaths, and my own loose talk about myself as a reluctant shepherd; it springs from a deep yearning in men to prove heavenly and predetermined sponsorship of what men do mundanely and blasphemously. Perhaps this is why I should be more forgiving of the glib apologists at my trial, and of overeager Longfaeroe on South Georgia, and of myself as I reflect. It might be a long-felt need for authority, for certainty of one’s actions in retrospect, for justification of what one is at the same time regretful for. I should be generous. I should not continue to protest the need of the seekers. It was a mark of their hunger for God’s love. I apologize, then, to those odd-tongues at my trial, and to Longfaeroe, for my peevish suspicions. What can their distortions do to me now? I was only a transient and counterfeit discovery in their search for an earthly ruler who is blessed with heavenly authority. It came to silence then, shall continue to be nothing.
Grim Fiddle was also a bewitched Northman. I am Lamba’s son, and she was a witch. It was Longfaeroe who first assembled the clues to argue that Lamba Fiddle was Lamba Time-Thief. I suppose that what drove him to such a cluttered deduction was his competition with Abigail. He could see, by my third summer and the beginning of my love for Abigail, that he was losing my attention, so he grabbed at ever wilder proofs of his vision. He gathered what I told him of Israel’s story of the blond girl in the telephone booth, what I told him of Thord’s story of how Anders Horshead had suspected that the midwife at my delivery, Astra, had been more than she appeared, and what I told him of the bald sibyl and the hag at Sly-Eyes’s party, and fitted all this together until he had the obvious, and some mystery left over. I did try to conceal the whole of Lamba’s portents from him. He did eventually trick it out of me, everything from Skallagrim Strider’s name spoken in ecstasy at my conception to the legend of Skallagrim Strider, to Lamba’s prophecy of Skallagrim Ice-Waster. Longfaeroe seized upon this as if Lamba’s sibylhood was some sort of prophetic calling. There is great confusion in the Fiddle Bible s books of Samuel as to what constitutes a call to prophecy yet not so much that Longfaeroe did not know then, as I know now, that for one to argue that Lamba had been called to her task was perverse. Still, Longfaeroe sidestepped reason, challenged me, “She bore the bairn! She named him! She watched over him! She meant you to be a king!”
I do not recall any extravagant surprise at Longfaeroe’s revelation that Lamba Time-Thief was my mother. I did think it unhappy that Lamba had been an opportunistic mother, that what had begun so bizarrely could only get worse. Longfaeroe was not sympathetic, said that many had endured peculiar mothers, as he had. He would only concede that I had enjoyed more than most orphans, in that my mother had taken steps, painful ones, to make clear to me what she expected. Longfaeroe strangled sense about all this, used my bewilderment to trick more dangerous material out of me, such as my dreams. I dreamed bizarrely in my shepherd’s hut: massacres, drownings, flying dragons, rams’ heads, fleets of white ships sailing over seas of blackened faces with shriveled tongues. I did not abide any of this as worthy then, fought off Longfaeroe’s crude interpretations. He thought my dreams referred to his South Georgia and the Falklands. I was frightened that they meant my family was dead. Did I believe I heard the ghost of Skallagrim Strider whispering