I don’t suppose his was quite the sort of figure I had in mind when I wrote the piece (which I had forgotten all about), but I let that go. ‘How very kind of you,’ I said. ‘I did wonder why the League had invited me, especially as I had heard you’d banned the book.’
‘No, no, Ms Morris, I have told you. Indisputably not banned. Simply unobtainable for administrative reasons, I remonstrate you. As you will find, certain segments of it — that same glorious passage, for example — have been reprinted by this Office and intentionally circulated. We all very much hope that if you publish a sequel, bring your reflections on Hav up to the instant, we shall have the pleasure of reprinting it in full here in Hav — we would rather have it done here, because, you must know, your Western publishers are notoriously unreliable in matters of administrative cooperation. I am myself, as you may perhaps have observed, a student of English idiom, and I personally relish your use of vocabulary.
‘So there we are, dirleddy. Our cards are displayed. It is an ornament to have you here, and I hope you will allow me personally to conduct you on an inspection of our new Hav. I know you have already tasted the wonder of Lazaretto. (They spell it with a symbol of astonishment, you know, just for effect — a cranky modernism, in my opinion, but you know what publicists are.) Now, you are expected for a morning conference with my deputies here at the Office, disposed for 10.30 sharp, and after an early lunch we shall spend the afternoon en promenade, so to speak. (We used to have a French resident here, before the Intervention — a literary cove himself, as it happens — and he always used to amuse me by his talk of going en promenade — so much more gentlemanly, he seemed to think, than simply taking a turn, as you or I would have exclaimed it.)’
With elaborate politesse he showed me to the door.
‘My private name, by the way, is Dr Porvic, and I will now say you goodbye. See you later, alligator.’
I very nearly responded in kind, but I wasn’t at all sure that he was joking.
Downstairs his deputies awaited me, five of them. They reminded me of the ideologues of apartheid who, long before, had greeted me with similar earnest solemnity at Stellenbosch in South Africa. There would be no joking with them, I knew. They sat me down on a hard chair in a small conference room, and gathered about me rather like medical students at an anatomy theatre. They were all young, all in suits and ties, all with small Achillean badges in their lapels, and they were clearly settling down to put me straight.
It was a bit like being lectured — not exactly brainwashed, just having inaccurate notions corrected. They knew, they said, of my well-known sympathy for the Havian ethos — the Director had told them about it, and they had read the Office’s extracts from my book, and now wished only to make clear to me what had been achieved since the end of the Intervention.
Fundamentally, they said, the change was revelatory. When the Cathar Perfects had assumed power, after the withdrawal of the Intervening Force, they had made public the results of secret scholastic research which they had undertaken down the centuries, and which made apparent for the first time the profoundest origins of the State. As was well known, although the Cathars had been forced into anonymity in the sixteenth century, they had always been the true guardians of the Hav identity, but it had hitherto been supposed that the cult had been established here by knights of the First Crusade.
‘Now then,’ said they (I forget now which one of them actually said it — in my memory they seem to have spoken with one voice), ‘I’m sure you are aware that the earliest known urban settlement on our peninsula was that of Troy. Schliemann himself identified its remains on the western coast, and there is no doubt that Achilles set up his camp there when the Iliadic expedition first arrived from the Aegean (there was, of course, no such thing then as Greece).
‘You also surely know that Achilles brought his own bodyguard with him, Myrmidons, from the province of Thessaly in the north of what is now Greece. They sailed in their own ships — fifty of them in all. The Myrmidons long ago vanished from history, or legend for that matter, except as a synonym for fierce and dogged loyalty. By the time Achilles died they had dispersed, gone, vanished we know not where — Homer does not tell us.’
I was beginning to see the light.
‘Are you beginning to see the light, Ms Morris? Dr Porvic tells us that your enlightened attitude to the meaning of Hav comes, he believes, purely by instinct. As we remember it, he tells us that you yourself come from the country of Wales — Cymru, is it? He says it is itself an often forgotten province of heroic origins, and suggests that this predisposes you, as it were, to absorb the Hav epic and its aesthetic.
‘Be that as it may… I dare say you are aware that in the past it has sometimes been proposed that the Kretevs, the cave-dwellers of the Escarpment, were not as had previously been thought Celts from central Europe, but descendants of that lost Myrmidonic host. It is also indisputable that the Cathar cult itself drew its original inspiration from Eastern mysteries—in particular Manicheanism and related dualistic conceptions. Now DNA tests carried out by our Office ethnic scientists have indeed established that the Kretev blood-stream, or as we prefer to call it, Ethnic Authority, had no known Celtic affinities. On the other hand it showed scientifically detectable analogies to ethnicities of certain provinces of what is now called Greece.
‘And here is the glory of it. During the Intervention, evidence was clandestinely discovered which proved without doubt — we repeat, without doubt, Ms Morris — that the ancient Cathar families of Hav, the Perfects of the ancient cult, shared the same ethnicity. In short, that our Cathar theocracy could claim unquestioned and legitimate descent from the Myrmidon warrior people who first came to Hav with the hero Achilles — possibly, unlikely though it sounds, through the medium of the troglodytes! It has even been suggested that Mani, the original prophet of Manicheanism, may have settled on our peninsula during his meditative wanderings. So it was established that the Cathars were, so to speak, the divinely sponsored rulers of our republic, suppressed for so many years by prejudice religious, political and ethnic.’
The five deputies sat back in their chairs, observing my reaction. It must have satisfied them. I was fascinated, and astonished. So much about the new Hav now fell into place.
‘I see that the implications of this momentous certainty are apparent to you, and now you will begin more truly to understand the nature of our Republic. It is indeed revelatory. We honour, as it were, two aesthetics, one spiritual, one secular — not unlike the division of loyalties in the old Soviet republics, between theoretical Communism — Leninism, if you like — and the Stalinist State. On the one hand there is the mysterious aesthetic of the maze, which has been for many centuries the inspiration of Havian art and philosophy. It was itself perhaps introduced here from Crete — the Cretans themselves, you may remember, sent eighty ships to Troy. On the other hand\??\. there is the more absolute aesthetic of the Myrmidonic tradition, bold, warlike, glittering. Just as the concepts of Good and Evil are accorded equal respect by Manicheans, so these two structures of thought and beauty have now been reconciled by the Cathar theocracy, resulting in the Republic which, while grandly Myrmidonic in its outward aspects, is sustained by more ethereal principles beneath.
‘Both are animated,’ he continued, ‘by an inner conviction, cherished by Cathars down the generations, that Hav occupies a particular transcendental position in the world at large, peculiar to itself, which is how it has maintained its separateness down the centuries. You will have noticed, perhaps, from your visit to the Tower, that when our famous Kiruski designed the Lazaretto island, he made sure that all three conditions were to be allegorically represented. The brilliance of the resort is balanced by that less lovely appendage, the Diplomatic Suburb, expressing the darker nature of creation, and high above there rises in culmination the magnificent assurance of the Tower. And the whole is embraced within our immemorial symbol of the maze.’