The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 93

“Elephant Frazer is dead? Elephant Frazer killed Christian Rose?” I said.

“No, old Rose isn’t dead,” said Lazarus. “Frazer struck to unman him, they said. Davey Gaunt came for me at the school and told Vi that Frazer never missed a throw. Kevin Gaunt’s asked that you and I surrender without a fight. They want you, too, Sergeant Motherwell, and you and you.” He nodded at Wild Drumrul and Otter Ransom. “They won’t say about Orlando, afraid of his men, I guess. Gaunt doesn’t want more killing. I agree, this time, I do.”

“Lazarus, why did he do it?” I said. I was numb. I put my hands over my ears, but could not muffle my mind’s voice. I knew, as Lazarus said, “It’s Abbie, oh, Mary and Joseph, forgive, forgive.”

I screamed then, threw my body back and screamed off the chair. I might have done more if not for Motherwell, who then expertly knocked me senseless with the butt of the harpoon. He struck to kill. He later told me he wanted me dead but could not use the spear tip, it was rusted and would have shattered. He had seen me take Germanicus’s bullet at Stanley and did not really believe he could kill me. He tried, partly because of what I might do, berserker among the panicked, partly because he was a hunter and knew mercy for the mortally wounded. He meant to spare me.

They had burned the Frazer camp. I am talking about a mob of a dozen boys bloated with drink and the black thoughts of their elders. They had stormed up to the Frazer camp’s main house, a two-story stone-and-pine-built manse amid cottages and barns, and hammered down the door. Robby, as the only man at the camp, faced them. In some peculiar twist, he momentarily found his bravura long lost on the Falklands; but when they grabbed at him, demanding he account for his whereabouts that day, telling him as they did that Lena was dead, Robby was overwhelmed. He fled within the house, waking those upstairs. Abigail and Meg and Dorothy, Germanicus’s two sisters, were already awake from the barking of the dogs. Dolly Frazer was still with Lena’s corpse and the old wives in town. Abigail took charge and came down. She must have comforted Robby and taken him with her back to the front hall to rebuff the threat. The reports were sketchy hereon. An argument followed, Abigail commanding, “Get out, and fast with you, before our men come.” The boys were ready to run. Robby started his screaming at them and went for a harpoon. There was a struggle on the front steps, and Robby was thrown down. The dogs sent up a howl. The claim later was that Abigail shot first, with a sealer’s double-barrel shotgun loaded with buckshot, ripping away the face of Ian Brackenbury, wounding two of the other boys, a Rose and a Lindfir. The boys shot back as they fled, one salvo, aimed blindly, that struck Abigail. She was not dead, perhaps mortally wounded, perhaps just stunned.

Someone threw a torch, or perhaps a torch had been dropped in the scramble. In that wind, fire is sudden in the dry timbers of a house. Meg and Dorothy (Meg very pregnant by her husband away in the north) got the youngest babies out, one of them my Sam. They were all hurt by the smoke, and there must have been hysteria for the rescue work to have been so inept. There was no explanation as to why the boys who had not been wounded did not go back to help.

The toll was unbearable, eight of the Frazer household dead, including five children under twelve years of age: Gabe, Adam, Michael, Louise, Augustina, the cook, the servant girl, and Abigail. My Sam did not die; he was put in hospital, where Jane Gaunt did not leave him, breathing for him when he could not work his smoke-clogged lungs. The dead, including Meg Frazer the next morning, were buried two days hence in a mass ceremony, along with Elephant Frazer, Ian Brackenbury, and Lena Rose.

We, the arrested, were not permitted the funeral, a precaution by the Hospidar that was bald cruelty. Germanicus, Lazarus, and I were kept in separate cells. Otter Ransom, Wild Drumrul, and Motherwell were in the same cell, at the Volunteers’ fort surrounding the lighthouse on Cumberland Bay. We could converse across the floor of our dungeon, did not at first. Longfaeroe came out to us the night after the funeral in order to sing psalms. I was still weak from Motherwell’s clubbing and my grief, and listened disinterestedly until he stood right before my cell and sang Psalm 19, “The heavens tell out the glory of Jehovah, the vault of heaven reveals his handiwork. One day speaks to another, night with night shares its knowledge, and this without speech or language, or sound of any voice—”

I resented Longfaeroe’s presence. He did not seem grieved by the loss of his daughter and two of his grandsons. His face was undecipherable, his words were not. He sang with cunning. I might have been wrong at the time, but I heard in his psalm a call for a hero, for me, to rise up and take hold of South Georgia: “Their music goes out through all the world, their words reach to the end of the earth. In them a tent is fixed for the sun, him!, who comes out like a bridegroom from his wedding canopy, rejoicing like a strong man to run his race. His rising is at one end of the heavens, his circuit touches their farthest ends; and nothing is hidden from his heat—”

I also thought at the time that he might have been calling on Germanicus. I had no patience for Longfaeroe, regarded him as much at fault as others I could name. He visited us several more times in the next week, to sing and to pass on messages from Orlando the