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illustration by John Stevens
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Hegn is a small country, an island monarchy blessed with a marvelous
climate and a vegetation so rich that lunch or dinner there consists
of reaching up to a tree to pluck a succulent, sunwarmed, ripe,
rare steakfruit, or sitting down under a llumbush and letting
the buttery morsels drop onto one’s lap or straight into one’s
mouth. And then for dessert there are the sorbice blossoms, tart,
sweet, and crunchy.
Four or five centuries ago the Hegnish were evidently an enterprising,
stirring lot, who built good roads, fine cities, noble country
houses and palaces, all surrounded by literally delicious gardens.
Then they entered a settling-down phase, and at present they simply
live in their beautiful houses. They have hobbies, pursued with
tranquil obsession. Some take up the cultivation and breeding
of ever finer varieties of grapes. (The Hegnian grape is self-fermenting;
a small cluster of them has the taste, scent, and effect of a
split of Veuve Clicquot. Left longer on the vine, the grapes reach
80 or 90 proof, and the taste comes to resemble a good single
malt whiskey.) Some raise pet gorkis, an amiable, short-legged
domestic animal; others embroider pretty hangings for the churches;
many take their pleasure in sports. They all enjoy social gatherings.
People dress nicely for these parties. They eat some grapes, dance
a little, and talk. Conversation is desultory and, some would
say, vapid. It concerns the kind and quality of the grapes, discussed
with much technicality; the weather, which is usually settled
fair, but can always be threatening, or have threatened, to rain;
and sports, particularly the characteristically Hegnish game of
sutpot, which requires a playing field of several acres and involves
two teams, many rules, a large ball, several small holes in the
ground, a movable fence, a short, flat bat, two vaulting poles,
four umpires, and several days. No non-Hegnish person has ever
been able to understand it. Hegnishmen discuss the last match
played with the same grave deliberation and relentless attention
to detail with which they played it. Other subjects of conversation
are the behavior of pet gorkis and the decoration of the local
church. Religion and politics are never discussed. It may be that
they do not exist, having been reduced to a succession of purely
formal events and observances, while their place is filled by
the central element, the focus and foundation of Hegnish society,
which is best described as the Degree of Consanguinity.
It is a small island, and nearly everybody is related. As it is
a monarchy, or rather a congeries of monarchies, this means that
almost everybody is or is related to a monarch–is a member of
the Royal Family.
In earlier times this universality of aristocracy caused trouble
and dissension. Rival claimants to the crown tried to eliminate
each other; there was a long period of violence referred to as
the Purification of the Peerage, a war called the Agnate War,
and the brief, bloody Cross-Cousins’ Revolt. But all these family
quarrels were settled when the genealogies of every lineage and
individual were established and recorded in the great work of
the reign of Eduber XII of Sparg, the Book of the Blood.
Now four hundred and eighty-eight years old, this book is, I may
say without exaggeration, the centerpiece of every Hegnish household.
Indeed it is the only book anybody ever reads. Most people know
the sections dealing with their own family by heart. Publication
of the annual Addition and Supplements to the Book of the Blood is awaited as the great event of the year. It furnishes the staple
of conversation for months, as people discuss the sad extinction
of the Levigian House with the death of old Prince Levigvig, the
exciting possibility of an heir to the Swads arising from the
eminently suitable marriage of Endol IV and the Duchess of Mabuber,
the unexpected succession of Viscount Lagn to the crown of East
Fob due to the untimely deaths of his great-uncle, his uncle,
and his cousin all in the same year, or the re-legitimization
(by decree of the Board of Editors-Royal) of the great-grandson
of the Bastard of Egmorg.
There are eight hundred and seventeen kings in Hegn. Each has
title to certain lands, or palaces, or at least parts of palaces;
but actual rule or dominion over a region isn’t what makes a king
a king. What matters is having the crown and wearing it on certain
occasions, such as the coronation of another king, and having
one’s lineage recorded unquestionably in the Book of the Blood, and edging the sod at the first game of the local sutpot season,
and being present at the annual Blessing of the Fish, and knowing
that one’s wife is the queen and one’s eldest son is the crown
prince and one’s brother is the prince royal and one’s sister
is the princess royal and all one’s relations and all their children
are of the blood royal.
To maintain an aristocracy it is necessary that persons of exalted
rank form intimate association only with others of their kind.
Fortunately there are plenty of those. Just as the bloodline of
a Thoroughbred horse on my planet can be tracked straight back
to the Godolphin Arabian, every royal family of Hegn can trace
its ancestry back to Rugland of Hegn-Glander, who ruled eight
centuries ago. The horses don’t care, but their owners do, and
so do the kings and the royal families. In this sense, Hegn may
be seen as a vast stud farm.
There is an unspoken consensus that certain royal houses are slightly,
as it were, more royal than others, because they descend directly
from Rugland’s eldest son rather than one of his eight younger
sons; but all the other royal houses have married into the central
line often enough to establish an unshakable connection. Each
house also has some unique, incomparable claim to distinction,
such as descent from Alfign the Ax, the semi-legendary conqueror
of North Hegn, or a collateral saint, or a family tree never sullied
by marriage with a mere duke or duchess but exhibiting (on the
ever-open page of the Book of the Blood in the palace library) a continuous and unadulterated flowering
of true blue princes and processes.
And so, when the novelty of the annual Addition and Supplements at last wears thin, the royal guests at the royal parties can
always fall back on discussing degrees of consanguinity, settling
such questions as whether the son born of Agnin IV’s second marriage,
to Tivand of Shut, was or was not the same prince who was slain
at the age of thirteen defending his father’s palace against the
Anti-Agnates and therefore could, or could not, have been the
father of the Duke of Vigrign, later King of Shut.
Such questions are not of interest to everyone, and the placid
fanaticism with which the Hegnish pursue them bores or offends
many visitors to the island. The fact that the Hegnish have absolutely
no interest in any people except themselves can also cause offense,
or even rage. Foreigners exist. That is all the Hegnish know about
them, and all they care to know. They are too polite to say that
it is a pity that foreigners exist, but if they had to think about
it, they would think so.
They do not, however, have to think about foreigners. That is
taken care of for them. The Interplanary Hotel on Hegn is in Hemgogn,
a beautiful little kingdom on the west coast. The Interplanary
Agency runs the hotel and hires local guides. The guides, mostly
dukes and earls, take visitors to see the Alternation of the Watch
on the Walls, performed by princes of the blood, wearing magnificent
traditional regalia, at noon and six daily. The Agency also offers
day tours to a couple of other kingdoms. The bus runs softly along
the ancient, indestructible roads among sunlit orchards and wildfood
forests. The tourists get out of the bus and look at the ruins,
or walk through the parts of the palace open to visitors. The
inhabitants of the palace are aloof but unfailingly civil and
courteous, as befits royalty. Perhaps the Queen comes down and
smiles at the tourists without actually looking at them and instructs
the pretty little Crown Princess to invite them to pick and eat
whatever they like in the lunch-orchard, and then she and the
Princess go back into the private part of the palace, and the
tourists have lunch and get back into the bus. And that is that.
Being an introvert, I rather like Hegn. One does not have to mingle,
since one can’t. And the food is good, and the sunlight sweet.
I went there more than once, and stayed longer than most people
do, and so it happened that I learned about the Hegnish Commoners.
I was walking down the main street of Legners Royal, the capital
of Hemgogn, when I saw a crowd in the square in front of the old
Church of the Thrice Royal Martyr. I thought it must be one of
the many annual festivals or rituals and joined the crowd to watch.
These events are always slow, decorous, and profoundly dull. But
they’re the only events there are: and they have their own tedious
charm. Soon, however, I saw this was a funeral. And it was altogether
different from any Hegnish ceremony I had ever witnessed, above
all in the behavior of the people.
They were all royals, of course, like any crowd in Hegn, all of
them princes, dukes, earls, princesses, duchesses, countesses,
etc. But they were not behaving with the regal reserve, the sovereign
aplomb, the majestic apathy I had always seen in them before.
They were standing about in the square, for once not engaged in
any kind of prescribed ritual duty or traditional occupation or
hobby, but just crowding together. as if for comfort. They were
disturbed, distressed, disorganized, and verged upon being noisy.
They showed emotion. They were grieving, openly grieving.
The person nearest me in the crowd was the Dowager Duchess of
Mogn and Farstis, the Queen’s aunt by marriage. I knew who she
was because I had seen her, every morning at half past eight,
issue forth from the Royal Palace to walk the King’s pet gorki
in the Palace gardens, which border on the hotel, and one of the
Agency guides had told me who she was. I had watched from the
window of the breakfast room of the hotel while the gorki, a fine,
heavily testicled specimen, relieved himself under the cheeseblossom
bushes, and the Dowager Duchess gazed away into a tranquil vacancy
reserved for the eyes of true aristocrats.
But now those pale eyes were filled with tears, and the soft,
weathered face of the Duchess worked with the effort to control
her feelings.
"Your ladyship," I said, hoping that the translatomat would provide
the proper appellation for a duchess in case I had it wrong, "forgive
me, I am from another country, whose funeral is this?"
She looked at me unseeing, dimly surprised but too absorbed in
sorrow to wonder at my ignorance or my effrontery. "Sissie’s,"
she said, and speaking the name made her break into open sobs
for a moment. She turned away, hiding her face in her large lace
handkerchief, and I dared ask no more.
The crowd was growing rapidly, constantly. By the time the coffin
was borne forth from the church, there must have been over a thousand
people, most of the population of Legners, all of them members
of the Royal Family, crowded into the square. The King and his
two sons and his brother followed the coffin at a respectful distance.
The coffin was carried and closely surrounded by people I had
never seen before, a very odd lot–pale, fat men in cheap suits,
pimply boys, middle-aged women with brassy hair and stiletto heels,
and a highly visible young woman with thick thighs in a miniskirt,
a halter top, and a black cotton lace mantilla. She staggered
along after the coffin weeping aloud, half-hysterical, supported
on one side by a scared-looking man with a pencil mustache and
two-tone shoes, on the other by a small, dry, tired, dogged woman
in her seventies dressed entirely in rusty black.
At the far edge of the crowd I saw a native guide with whom I
had struck up a lightweight friendship, a young viscount, son
of the Duke of Ist, and I worked my way toward him. It took quite
a while, as everyone was streaming along with the slow procession
of the coffin-bearers and their entourage toward the King’s limousines
and horse-drawn coaches that waited near the Palace gates. When
I finally got to the guide I said, "Who is it? Who are they?"
"Sissie," he said almost in a wail, caught up in the general grief–"Sissie
died last night!" Then, coming back to his duties as guide and
interpreter and trying to regain his pleasant aristocratic manner,
he looked at me, blinked back his tears, and said, "They’re our
commoners."
"And Sissie–?"
"She’s, she was, their daughter. The only daughter." Do what he
could, the tears would well into his eyes. "She was such a dear
girl. Such a help to her mother, always. Such a sweet smile. And
there’s nobody like her, nobody. She was the only one. Oh, she
was so full of love. Our poor little Sissie!" And he broke right
down and cried aloud. |
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