Changing Planes

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. She wore 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 1st, and I worked my way towards him. It took quite a while, as everyone was streaming along with the slow procession of the coffin bearers and their entourage towards 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 litde Sissie!” And he broke right down and cried aloud.

At this moment the King and his sons and brother passed quite close to us. I saw that both the boys were weeping, and that the King’s stony face betrayed a superhuman effort to maintain calm. His slighdy retarded brother appeared to be in a daze, holding tight to the King’s arm and walking beside him like an automaton.

The crowd poured after the funeral procession. People pushed in closer, trying to touch the fringes of die white silk pall over the coffin. “Sissie! Sissie!” voices cried. “Oh, Modier, we loved her too!” they cried. “Dad, Dad, what are we going to do without her? She’s with the angels,” the voices cried. “Don’t cry, Mother, we love you! We’ll always love you! Oh Sissie! Sissie! Our own sweet girl!”

Slowly, hampered, almost prevented by the passionate protestations of die immense royal family gathered about it, the coffin and its attendants reached the coaches and cars. When die coffin was slid into the back of die long white hearse, a quavering, inhuman moan went up from every diroat. Noblewomen screamed in thin, high voices and noblemen fainted away. The girl in the miniskirt fell into what looked like an epileptic fit, foaming at the mouth, but she recovered quite quickly, and one of the fat, pale men shoved her into a limousine.

The engines of the cars purred, the coachmen stirred up their handsome white horses, and the cortege set off, slowly still, at a foot pace. The crowd poured after it.

I went back to the hotel. I learned that evening that most of the population of die city of Legners Royal had followed the cortege all die way, six miles, to die graveyard, and stood dirough the burial service and the inhumation. All through the evening, late at night, people were still straggling back towards the palace and the royal apartments, weary, footsore, tear-stained.

During the next few days I talked with the young viscount, who was able to explain to me the phenomenon I had witnessed. I had understood that all the people in the Kingdom of Hemgogn were of royal blood, direcdy related to its (and other) kings; what I had not known was that there was one family who were not royal. They were common. Their name was Gat.