The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 80

“Lazarus says we should force an election for a president of the Assembly,” said Abigail. “I agree. We have a part. We must have a say. Lazarus says there should be a constitution, and a popular vote.”

“So Lazarus says,” said Germanicus. “My dad cannot.”

“It won’t be for governor-general,” said Abigail. “For a president to speak for us wee folk. Elephant Frazer speaks for the elders. My dad speaks for the parsons and those pious hens of his. The Hospidar speaks for the Volunteers. Brackenbury, he speaks for the Falklanders. And the beasties, Toro Zulema says their part. Who speaks for me and Jane and the like?”

“Begod no, woman,” said Germanicus. “Beasties and Patties ain’t the problem now. Volunteers! The Hospidar has our sworn loyalty. I’d follow him to Davy Jones. If Dad tried to form a government of presidents and the like, the Hospidar’d say ‘rebellion’ and take over. Yerr talk be daft.”

“So now we’re shy of the Hospidar?” said Jane Gaunt, a rosy, round woman of nineteen, plucky, sharp, competitive of Germanicus, proud.

“Not that, Janey,” said Germanicus, who I thought had a good point. “Lazarus’d be sure to be elected president right soon. He’d speak for himself all right, and against the Hospidar and Brackenbury. Dad’d be caught like a hand in a vice.”

Jane suggested that Germanicus was jealous of Lazarus’s popularity among the young people. Germanicus puffed up, did not reply. It was true that he had come to distrust Lazarus as I had once, for his arrogance, his high-handed intellectualism. It was also accurate that if there was an election, Lazarus would win easily; the mothers wrould vote for him in a block. He was their schoolmaster, and charismatic, and smart, perhaps the only man on the island who cared to show that he loved children.

“What if Lazarus stepped aside?” said Otter Ransom to me in Swedish. He was hesitant to participate, not just because of his poor English, but also because Germanicus was his captain and he was an appreciative and loyal seaman. I encouraged him to talk in English, helped him with his words and idioms. He told them of Sweden, when the King’s government had stepped aside in favor of churchmen who spoke for the common people. He inadvertently scrambled facts, made Grandfather’s revolution seem more sensible than it had been. I was taken aback at how another man, fifteen years my senior, and at one time a hunted outlaw in Sweden, remembered the crisis there. He made it seem logical, just, saving.

Abigail listened and shook her head, said that Lazarus would not stand by quietly. “They burned his school,” she added.

“Oh, aye, his school now? A pity he’s quarrelsome in his inks and books,” said Germanicus. “I done wrong to speak against Dad, but not the half of what Lazarus done to stir up the folk. He’s full of himself for a stranger here among those that feed him. Burned his school, did we? Our school, I think, and what does Lazarus say to that? Ten years I was in that school, and it’d be there still but for Lazarus’s tongue.”

“Lazarus doesn’t matter, does he, because he’s no Frazer?” said Jane Gaunt. “Or is it because he’s married a Gaunt?”

“He be no Frazer,” said Germanicus. The two of them separated.

“Why would he step aside?” Abigail asked Otter Ransom.

“In the North,” began Otter Ransom, “there is a story of an assembly that met once a year, the beginning of summer, where the clans met for their talk and grievances. It had priests, like churchmen, who spoke for the peace of the common people. Grim Fiddle knows.”

I explained that what Otter Ransom was recalling was the Althing, the legislative and judicial assembly for medieval Iceland. I talked slowly, because it was my discovery, listening to my closest friends on South Georgia, that they were better at fighting than at thinking about their fight. I knew myself a weak intellectual in comparison to Lazarus, but I saw then that what little I had absorbed from listening to Israel and Peregrine argue politics, and reading Charity Bentham’s works, and studying Longfaeroe’s notions about kingship and just government in the books of Samuel, made me their master in terms of political science, of reasonable government. I did know the difference between authority and tyranny. Therefore I described the Althing carefully, telling them it was a once-a-year assembly meant to adjudicate feuds among families. Thirty-nine priests presided over the Althing, men drawn from the major families from early in Iceland’s history and whose offices then became hereditary. The priests were considered to be above bribery and blood influence. It was as close to democracy as the medieval North ever came, and I think it fair to say that the Althing was no less broad-minded than the much celebrated Greek assemblies that were responsible for words like democracy, despotism. I told them the Althing was created because Iceland was a refuge for outcasts from the North Sea kingdoms, men who hated kingship yet had to agree on how to live in harmony. I concluded, “The decisions of the Althing were final. Any man who dissented was banished. And that was the Althing’s worst punishment for a crime—exile. Since Iceland was already an outlaw haven, exile from Iceland was the same as a death sentence.”

“That’s your Skallagrim Strider, isn’t it?” said Abigail.

“From what you say,” said Jane, “Lazarus’d be wrong for the presidency, because he’s married a Gaunt. We need someone from outside the big families, but who could please the families and the Volunteers and Reverend Longfaeroe and Lazarus, also the Zulemas, the beasties. The Hospidar wouldn’t dare against such a president. He’d be free of all, including Elephant Frazer. A people’s spokesman.”

“Lazarus’s tongue, that be,” said Germanicus.

“It’s fine learning. It’d do some no harm,” said Jane.

“I have my ways,” said Germanicus.

“The Frazers have their ways,” said Jane. “No use to us if there’s a plague coming, or more beasties. Lazarus says