The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 78

had been tentative and short-lived opposition to various maneuvers by the Volunteers, in concert with Elephant Frazer, as South Georgia had moved closer to a military dictatorship. What kept it from an oppressiveness was Elephant Frazer’s evenhandedness and the fact that the homogeneity of the island—cousins upon cousins upon in-laws—disposed people toward cooperation. The detention and enslavement of the beasties was overmuch. Lazarus, who had by then become schoolmaster, and had often before criticized Elephant Frazer and the Volunteers for their tactics, led the opposition to the treatment of the beasties, what he called martial lawlessness. He recruited sympathy among his teachers, among people who had intermarried with beastie families, and from the best-educated people in the beastie camp, notably the Zulemas. Soon enough, Lazarus was denouncing Longfaeroe as a “hypocritical scold,” the Volunteers as “secret police,” and Elephant Frazer as “our despot.”

Lazarus made his worst attacks in the Gaunttown Assembly, a powerless body that was meant mostly as a place to air grievances against neighbors and that had no authority to challenge or direct the governor-general. Lazarus was a good public speaker, played on jealousies between the families, got increasingly larger turnouts as he slandered Elephant Frazer and the Hospidar. Elephant Frazer took this hard, told the new patriarch of the Gaunts, Luff Gaunt III, called Trip Gaunt, that he should control his inlaw, since Lazarus had married a Gaunt widow, Violante. Trip Gaunt had no sympathy with Lazarus, but coveted Elephant Frazer’s position—which would have been Luff Gaunt’s if he had lived—and so took advantage. The Gaunts appeared to break with the Frazers, which in South Georgia terms was as if the right hand had denounced the left hand. They jointly owned the sealing schooner King James, and there was talk that spring of a seizure of the ship by the Gaunts when Germanicus returned from fishing and a run to Africa for supplies. Gaunttown felt obliged to choose between Frazer authority and Gaunt pride. The Falklan der exiles under Simon Brackenbury stood against all beasties and with those extremists who thought the camp was coddling the beasties. Lazarus attacked the more, made a speech at the Assembly Hall (the old Society of Friends’ Meeting House) in which he accused the Volunteer officer corps of making up the plague talk in order to tyrannize South Georgia further.

“Where is this dread disease?” Lazarus asked. (I was not present, off in my precinct building watchtowers. Abigail, who told me about it later, stood beside Lazarus throughout, as did Germanicus’s promised, Jane Gaunt.) He continued, “Has anyone proved it? Has there been a word on the radio? Is it true? The Volunteers send a ship to the Falklands, at the risk of it and its men, in order to placate the Brackenburys and their hatemongers, and then tell us there is plague. What proof do they offer? None! Friends, friends, there is a plague. I admit it. It is the disease in their lawlessness. They imprison innocent men and women and call it proper. They take children from their homes and make them fill sandbags. That is the sickness! Where is this disease? Not in us. In them! And what is it? Not plague out there in some port. A plague in their minds, and the plague is tyranny!”

Within the week, there was a knife fight on the quays below the High Street, between a Gaunt boy and one of the beastie children who, as an orphan like me, had been taken in by the Frazers. The Gaunt boy lost an eye, the Frazer child was badly wounded in the stomach. The Frazer child had been one of the best young students at the school, a prodigy at mathematics, and that he would get involved in violence was telling enough of the stress the island felt. It became much worse when one of Longfaeroe’s presbyters, a sly crank named Fergus Moog, declared at Sunday service that the real knife-wielder was Lazarus, whom he called a “copperheaded snake.”

Events tumbled after that. Jane Gaunt, one of Lazarus’s teachers, was accused of poisoning the minds of the youngest children against the Volunteers. And when Jane called at the hospital to tutor the two wounded children, she was blocked at the door by old women and some of the wild children who lived under the whaling factory. She tried to force her entrance, and was stoned. Those blows left worse than physical scars. When Germanicus returned from Africa to find Jane still convalescing from her wounds, he lost his temper. He denounced Frazers and Gaunts alike. Out of character, he drank too much one night in the sealer tavern, night sun, and challenged his father’s reluctance to heed the counsel of the Gaunttown Assembly, said his father was afraid of Lazarus as he had never been afraid of the Patties. Germanicus’s words flashed through the Volunteers, because he was considered the champion of the young officers, about forty of us altogether. It was recalled that Lazarus had once said that the Volunteers were no better than the Patties. The question was asked, did Germanicus now agree?

The next day, Germanicus was humiliated by what he had done, rashly, in revenge for Jane’s stoning, and realized that he had invited on himself the dilemma of either weakening the Volunteers’ chain of command or watching South Georgia break into factions like splinters. In trying to correct his error, he stumbled further, calling for an emergency meeting of the Assembly (scheduled previously only twice a season) to air the doubts. The meeting was blocked at the last moment by the Hospidar, commander of the Volunteers, who said it was an invitation to sedition. The Hospidar acted cleverly, knowing his intervention smeared Germanicus’s patriotism. This was meant as an affront to all the young officers as well as to the Frazers and, through Jane Gaunt, to the Gaunts. There was talk of a duel, also talks of a court-martial, also mention of a more outrageous solution—posting Germanicus to Cape Disappointment