The Birth of People's Republic of Antartica, стр. 99
I did not know what bothered him, offered sympathy and apology for my self-concern since Robby’s execution.
“Hear me out. That’d be the day I faulted a man for keepin’ his own way. Begod, we’ll likely all be drowned afore midnight. I want ye to have my apology. I’ve kept a hard thing from ye. I had call. I were afeared ye’d leave us, when we could not’ve stood it. Mark me, t’were not mine to hold back from ye. It be plain. When I landed on the Falklands two years back, I came through the Sound and touched on yerr Mead’s Kiss.”
“Were there any graves?” I said.
“No man nor beast nor grave. T’were a marker, a great stone marker. Words on it. Said ‘Fiddle,’ with a date. Summer of ninety-eight.”
I turned from Germanicus and went to the rail. I remained there through the night, old Iceberg my stalwart nursemaid, as that storm did break over us, huge seas and howling winds. I had seen it before, on Angel of Death, and was not moved. Germanicus and Half-Red Harrah yelled, climbed, and dared, did everything men can do in the face of unbounded nature; and I knew then it would not have mattered had not God spared us. That storm was an encore for me, a tempest heralding another time in the wilderness, and when it weakened two full days later, I realized that the tempest in me for six years was what made me indifferent to that blow. Grim Fiddle himself was a whirlwind. Why was I unable to set a course? Why did I wait for men and catastrophe to direct me? I was the unchallenged commander of that flotilla of discarded ships. I knew that those people would obey me, by right and by choice. I had acknowledged that the Hospidar was correct, that he had taken control and then concerned himself with right conduct. Why could not I do the same? What more charge would I require than that Grandfather had fixed a marker for me four years before, two years after I had left him on Mead’s Kiss?
The storm broke. Violante brought me food on the quarterdeck. She said Lazarus was badly seasick below, as were many. She asked me what chance we had to make Africa or Australia if a storm days out of Gaunttown had nearly finished us. I would not answer her. She demanded attention, a quick woman with heavily accented English, full of challenge. She said, “If you are afraid, keep it to yourself. There are too many afraid. You are not allowed fear or anger, or, like Lazarus, apologies. Be brave, for us, not for yourself. If I were a man, I would take your place. I would be brave.”
I remained at the rail. Violante had hailed me there. I was afraid and furious and apologetic. And it did not seem to matter that I admitted to it. It still kept me from taking charge. I had seen nothing but reversal, failure, hope abandoned, human outrage—and what had it mattered whether men or women were brave or cowardly or indifferent? Do nothing and perish; fight like a wolf pack and perish. Once I had wondered when I should stand and fight. Then I had stood and fought, and it had come to this, another defeat, more ambiguity. I could blame it on my luck, or on the darkness, or on my own darkness—those first blank years on South Georgia—yet no finding of fault could release me. If I had been born to purpose, I was as ignorant of it as I was frightened of it. Voices! Did I hear voices when I slept? I heard them continually, and there was no single sense to them. I needed an interpreter.
Germanicus and his crew kept clear of me. Longfaeroe tried to approach me, and Iceberg growled him away. I stood there for several days after the storm, talking to myself, cursing the sky and Grandfather’s Lord God, taunting the storm clouds that trailed us. I cannot provide a moment by moment account of what happened in my mind. I do have this memory. I record it expecting it to fall short as an explanation of my future conduct. It is what I have.
Out of that swirling gray sky, out of the flocks of storm petrels and diving petrels and wandering albatrosses, there emerged a single pale albatross that caught my attention. I knew what Germanicus had told me of the wandering albatross, when we had spied their breeding nests on our marches on South Georgia. For sealers, they are laden with superstition, and I think Germanicus told me the science of them as another way to exemplify the difference between sealer talk and plain talk. The albatross makes landfall once a year, to breed; the rest of its life is devoted to circling the Southern Ocean alone or in flocks. It seems an animal designed by God for one thing, magnificent flight in all weathers, now skimming the waves, now swinging high and around, rarely needing to flap its wings as it banks this way