Star of Gypsies (14 page)

Then I had the third of my visitors. This one came at noon, which for all Rom is the strange time, the dark time, the most mysterious moment of the day.

This was noon of Double Day, you understand, and so a doubly strange moment, when both the suns of Mulano are at their highest at once and the light of one erases the shadows of the other. A shadowless instant, a dead moment in time. When that moment comes I halt wherever I am and seal my nostrils against the air, for who knows what spirits travel freely in that instant?

On the day of the third visitor the air was curiously warm-warm for Mulano, I mean-as though a springtime might actually be on its way. There was a faint glaze on the surface of the ice, a sort of millimeter-thick melting, and indigenous ghosts by the thousand clustered overhead, crackling and buzzing with peculiar excitement.

I had been out for a long walk that Double Day morning, to the edge of the glacier and halfway up its slow fluid side, carving my way with an ice-axe like some prehistoric huntsman. There was a cave I liked on the glacier's slope. It was deep and low-roofed, with glassy walls that glowed with vermilion fire when the light of both suns came striking down through its ceiling, and far in the back was a spiraling tongue of ice that ramped up from the cave floor as though it were some sort of ancient altar, though I doubted that it was anything more than an accidental formation. I would often go to it, lay my gloved hands on its sleek curves, and close my eyes and feel all the stars in their courses go spinning through my brain.

On my way back from this place the moment of noon overtook me, and I stood still with my openings sealed. In that moment between moments a deep rich voice spoke:

"Sarishan, cousin."

The surprise of it came with the force of a kick. I would have started and perhaps even fled instinctively. A sudden spontaneous flood of primeval fear-hormones came pouring into my blood. But I reacted just as quickly to regain control, turning off the flow, instructing the cells of my blood to devour that wild flow before it could reach my brain.

"Damiano!" I cried. "Cousin!"

As if he had materialized out of a snowbank. A lean long figure who bore himself with the tense powerful force of a coiled whip. All Rom are my cousins but Damiano is my cousin truly, the son of the son of my father's youngest brother. His eyes are Rom and his heavy sweeping mustache is Rom but he has lived most of his life under the baking white sun of Marajo of the sparkling sands, and for protection's sake he wears his skin in thick leathery folds that to me look neither Rom nor Gaje but like something not even human.

Holding himself at a distance from me, he looked around and shook his head. "What a place, cousin! The boy said it was forlorn but I never imagined anything like this!"

"There is great beauty here, cousin. There is wondrous peace. Stay here a week or two and you'll come to see it."

"I'll take that on faith," said Damiano. "Do I disturb you, cousin?"

"Disturb?"

"I think you are not glad to see me."

"Devlesa avilan," I said, the old formula of welcome. "It is God who brought you."

"Devlesa araklam tume," Damiano responded. "It is with God that I found you. The boy said this place was all ice, but I didn't believe him. He didn't tell me the half. Is there nothing alive here but you?"

"There are frozen rivers where shining fish swim as though through water. There are ghost-creatures of pure energy all around us as we talk. There are little animals that scamper over the ice and eat invisible plants, or one another. And on the far side of that hill there is a great forest, cousin, although I think you will not recognize the trees to be trees."

"And you're happy here?"

"I have never been happier."

"I am only Damiano, cousin. No need for dancing around the truth with me."

My eyes blazed. "You come five thousand light-years to call me a liar?"

"Yakoub, Yakoub-"

"Did the boy say I seemed to be happy?"

"Yes. He did."

"And I say it now. Shall we ask the ghosts for affidavits too?"

"Yakoub."

"Damiano… cousin…" Then we were laughing, and then finally we were embracing, and pounding each other on the back, and doing a little dance of gladness on the shining thin-crusted ice. "Come," I said, and led him, half-running, back over the hills and valleys to my ice-bubble.

He gaped at the forest.

"Chorian said nothing about this!"

"He never saw it. I was living on the other side when he was here."

"These are your trees?"

"I could show you how they grow, beneath the ice."

He shivered. "Another time, perhaps."

I opened several of the flasks that Julien de Gramont had left me, and gave him a meal such as I think Damiano had not dared to expect from me on Mulano; the wine flowed freely and he gulped it in the manner of any wandering Rom, a whole goblet in a single swallow. I think that would have turned Julien apoplectic, to see wine of such rare vintage poured down my cousin's gullet that way. But Julien was far away and we didn't feel any need to honor his French niceties in absentia: I matched Damiano guzzle for guzzle, until we were easy and loose with each other and his strange leathery skin was glowing like a charcoal fire.

I knew he hadn't come here to see the sights. Damiano is a great man on Marajo, with rich business interests of every kind, fire-egg plantations and magnetic farms and a vast slave-breeding establishment and much more, and if there had been nine of him he still would not have time to oversee everything properly, so he had often declared. Yet he had made the journey to my bleak little hiding-place, and he had come alone and in the real self, sending no mere ghost, no doppelganger. That was a great compliment. Well, and so he wanted to add his voice to the chorus urging me to give up my exile. We drank and ate and ate and drank and I waited for him to make his appeal, but instead he talked only of family things, the cousins on Kalimaka who were pulling trans-uranic elements out of their sun and selling them to all comers, and the ones on Iriarte who had gambled away five solar systems on a single toss of the dice and then had won them all back before dawn, and those of Shurarara who without even bothering to ask permission of the Imperium had yanked their world out of orbit and were taking it off into nomadry, telling everyone that they were going to leave the galaxy entirely. That last astounded me. "Are they serious, Damiano? What will they use for a sun, as they cross those hundreds of thousands of light-years?"

"Oh, they have a sun, cousin. Or its equivalent: enough to keep themselves warm, at any rate. That part's no problem. But nobody believes that they'll actually leave the galaxy. They're just putting that story around to cover their disappearance, when all they mean to do is head for the Outer Colonies and live as pirates, eight or ten thousand light-years beyond the Center. Strike and run, strike and run."

"This is not the Rom way," I said gloomily.

"Valerian?"

"One pirate, yes. But a whole world of them?"

"These are strange times, Yakoub. With both the Empire and the Kingdom headless-"

Ah. Here it comes, now.

He held out his glass for more wine. I filled, he guzzled.

"Is the emperor still dying?" I asked.

"They give him six months, a year."

"And then?"

"Sunteil, I think."

"It could be worse."

"It could. I think he's manageable. But the question is, Will the new king be able to manage him?"

"The new king."

That sounded strange in my ears. More than strange. I felt the echo of those words go clanging and clamoring through my soul and my bones began to ache.

"The new king, yes." Again he extended the glass to me. The devil! He had his hook deep into me now.

I poured for him.

"There is a new king?"

Damiano shrugged, nodded, shrugged again. Then he rose and strolled around the bubble, fingering this old Gypsy artifact and that one, taking in the immemorial past through his fingertips. I boiled and bubbled with eagerness to know. The devil! The devil! How beautifully he had caught me!

I said, working at indifference, "Chorian did say that the krisatora were thinking of holding an election, since I seemed to be sincere about my abdication. But Julien de Gramont-you know him, the French pretender?-was here a little while afterward. He was still working on me to go back to Galgala and reclaim the throne."

"You told him you weren't interested, cousin."

"You know that already? Julien was in touch with you too?"

"Julien has been in touch with everyone," said Damiano. "In particular the krisatora. He reported what you had told him."

"Ah."

"And so there has been a new election."

"About time," I said. Casually. Keeping tight control, though I was on fire inside. I allowed myself a little more wine, and forced myself to drink it as Julien might have done, savoring its bouquet. "So we should rejoice that the Imperium is saved from chaos and there will be no more worlds turned pirate. The Rom again have a king and Sunteil will be emperor soon, and all is well."

Curiosity was raging at my gut. But I wasn't going to ask.

Damiano smiled in an angular, off-center way. "It isn't certain yet, about Sunteil, you know. And we have no reason to think that all will be well for the Rom, either."

"Because of the new king, you mean?"

"Because of the new king, yes."

I sat absolutely still, staring at him. And Damiano, for all the flush of wine burning in the deep-hued folds of his heavy skin, sat just as still, stared back at me just as stolidly. I felt the great strength of him. Truly he had the blood of my fathers in his veins. Was
he
the new king? No, no, he could never have gone so far from Galgala this soon after the election, if that were the case.

"All right," I said. "Who is he, Damiano?"

"You care?"

"You know I care."

"You have taken yourself far from it all. You live beyond the Imperium now, in a place of ice and ghosts and shining fishes."

"Who is he?"

"Why did you do this to us, Yakoub?"

"A time comes when a change is needed."

"For the Rom, or for Yakoub?"

"Yakoub is who I was thinking of," I said. "I had to leave, or I would have choked on my office."

"Well, so you left, and there has been a change. Not only for you but for all of us."

"Who is he, Damiano?"

He gave me a terrible look.

"Shandor," he said.

"My son Shandor is King of the Gypsies?"

"Shandor, yes."

It was like a giant blade twisting and churning through my entrails, that one simple statement. I could feel rivers of my own blood rising and surging and spewing forth. It was with the greatest effort of my life that I kept myself from leaping across the table and digging my hands into Damiano's throat, to throttle the words back into him and make him not have said them. But I did not move and I did not speak. It was a calamity beyond all measure, and I had been its unwitting architect.

Into my stunned and shattered silence my cousin Damiano said, "Well, Yakoub?"

"I never foresaw that. In all my dreaming and planning I never foresaw that." I shook my head again and again. "How long ago was it done?"

"Very recently."

"If any of this is untrue, Damiano, what you have told me here today-"

"Shandor is king. May my sons die within this hour if I have told you any untruths."

"My God. My God."

Wild angry Shandor, the one man in the universe I had never known how to control! Shandor the red, Shandor the murderous. Him? King? I should have taken him from his cradle and hurled him down into the dark sizzling heart of the Idradin crater. There might still have been the chance to halt him, back then. How could I not have seen that this would happen?

"And are the worlds accepting him?" I asked.

"They flock to him. They rush to him. There is such hunger to have a king again, Yakoub. Even a king like Shandor."

"My God," I said again. "Shandor!"

"Is this what you wanted when you went away, Yakoub?"

"They are not supposed to give the kingship to the son of a king." My voice was leaden. "It is against the custom. It is not hereditary, the kingship."

"He asked. He forced them."

"Forced the krisatora?"

"You know what Shandor is."

"Yes," I said. "I know what Shandor is." I felt an earthquake beginning in my soul. Great boulders were breaking loose from my spirit and tumbling down upon me, and I was being crushed by them. Now I saw the full immensity of the mistake I had made by leaving Galgala. I had left an open place for him, never suspecting the reach of his ambitions, or that he could ever realize them. And he had rushed in to fill that place. What a fool I had been, and telling myself all the while that I was being supremely clever! To be shrewd and invulnerable for a hundred seventy-two years, and then to play one final card, thinking it was the shrewdest play of all, and in that way to destroy in one moment of misplaced cleverness all that I had worked to build-

I have never known such shame as I did in that moment.

Damiano must have seen it in my face, some outward show of the horror and anguish I felt, for it was reflected in his own; he looked into my eyes and he seemed startled and shaken by what he saw there. I could not face that. I turned my back on him and went to the door of my bubble and kept on going, out into the bitter night. Double Day had ended while we talked, and the searing light of the stars bore down on me from every corner of the heavens. It was about to start snowing again. The first few flakes spiraled past my head. I stood alone in the midst of the ice-field, aware that there were ghosts around me everywhere, Mulano ghosts and perhaps Polarca's or Valerian's also: their chilly laughter was everywhere in the night. But I knew I would not be hearing that laughter much longer. The game was up for me here, sooner than I had thought, and without my winning what I had hoped for. The question now was one of salvage, not one of victory.