Star of Gypsies (24 page)

I stood there in that first dizzy moment breathing in the perfume and staring at the swirling colors of the sky and looking across the way at the green and glorious towers of the city of Ashen Devlesa, whose name means "May you remain with God" in Romany. And I felt myself being grabbed by an invisible force and swept into the air. I went soaring across the countryside in a wild swooping ride that ended when I was dumped down like a sack of onions in an open-roofed courtyard.

I picked myself up, blinking and grumbling, and looked around. Towering columns of speckled blue stone walled me in on all sides.

"All right, where the hell am I?" I asked the sky.

And the sky answered me. The sound of my voice activated some sort of responder device and out of mid-air came pleasant synthetic female tones telling me, first in Imperial and then in Romany, "You are in the Ashen Devlesa holding tank of the Imperial Xamur Department of Immigration."

"You mean I'm a prisoner?"

A long itchy silence. What were they doing, looking up "prisoner" in the dictionary?

I breathed perfumed air, in-out, in-out, making little hormonal adjustments to keep myself calm. Vague hissing and buzzing sounds came from overhead.

Then, finally: "You are not a prisoner. You are in detention. You are awaiting normal clearance procedures."

Oh.

That was annoying, sure. But not really surprising. Or very threatening, really. This was just bureaucratic bullshit: I knew how to deal with that. I felt myself easing.

When you land on a non-imperial world like Mulano you are of course completely on your own from the moment you drop from your force-field. But if the sweep puts you down anywhere in the Imperium, your arrival is a matter of record once the immigration scanner of the planet where you are arriving detects your signal, which is usually six to twelve hours before your landing. So there had been plenty of time for Xamur Immigration to get a fix on me and grab me with a tractor beam the instant my sweep-tendril released me. A routine pickup of an unscheduled arrivee from God knew where.

"So?" I said. "Let's get on with it, then. Bring on your normal procedures. You think I came to Xamur to stand around in here and admire the architecture of your holding tank?"

Almost at once someone official-looking poked his nose between two of the stone columns. He looked at me and made a little gleeping sound and went away, and came back with another of his kind. They gleeped and gobbled and honked at each other some more and went back outside for further reinforcements. In a matter of moments half a dozen people in the uniforms of the Imperial Xamur Department of Immigration were staring at me in total wonder and disbelief.

They couldn't have been much more flabbergasted, I guess, if they had reeled in the Emperor Napoleon, or Mohammed, or the Queen of the Betelgeuse Confederacy.

They knew right away who I was, of course. Not only by the face, the eyes, the mustachios. Before setting out from Mulano I had taken the trouble to don my seal of office, which I hadn't worn in maybe ten or fifteen years. Now great pulsing heroic splashes of light were cannoning off my brow in that flamboyant gaudy way which is at once so overwhelming and so absurd. It was like a broadcast going out on every wavelength of the spectrum at once, hammering in the news: KING-KING-KING-KING. I might just as well have come out of the relay-sweep wearing a crown of gold and emeralds and rubies half a meter high.

Two or three of the Immigration people were Rom. They were down on their knees in a flash, making the signs of respect and muttering my name. The Gaje ones did no such thing, naturally. But they were plainly taken aback, and they stood there gaping, goggling, twitching, and yawping.

I knew what they were thinking, too. They were thinking, This sly old bastard has turned up without warning, without bothering to trouble himself about using diplomatic channels at all. We can't send him away without touching off a terrific uprising among his followers, but we can't admit him without dragging Xamur into whatever enormous Rom power-struggle the old bastard's return is probably going to touch off, and no matter which way we go we are very likely to lose our jobs over this. Or thoughts to that effect.

I switched off my seal of office. It was blinding everybody in the holding tank. To the Rom who were groveling at my feet I said in Romany, "Get up, you idiots. I'm only your king, not God Almighty." To the others, those miserable terrified Gaje civil servants, I said in a more kindly way, "I'm not here on a visit of state or on any sort of political mission. I've come here purely as a private citizen who owns property on this world."

"But you are King Yakoub?" one of them stammered.

"Certainly I am."

"I don't think we have a protocol on former kings," said one of the others nervously, and brought up something on a screen that was just out of my direct line of sight. "Officials to notify, appropriate municipal response, parades, light-spikes, sky-banners, display of regalia, pyrotechnic celebrations-no, there's nothing here that covers any such-"

"I'm not a former king," I said quietly.

The Gaje officials looked at me in bewilderment and the Rom officials looked at me in horror.

One of the Rom said, "Sir, the covenant of abdication-"

"Don't worry yourself about it, child. Whatever stories about me that you may have heard coming out of Galgala were highly inaccurate."

One of the Gaje-he seemed to be the highest ranking of the bunch-made a frantic gesture and something else came sliding up on the screen. This time I moved around and got a squint at it. It was the table of reception protocol for a royal visit.

"You are still king, then?"

"When did I say that?"

They looked more baffled than ever.

But I wasn't ready to take up the issue of whether I was or was not still king just now. Especially not in a holding tank in front of a bunch of Immigration Department flunkeys. Let them puzzle over it, I thought.
He denies being a former king-but he doesn't directly assert that he's the
present
king-but on the other hand-and furthermore-nevertheless-contrariwise
… Yes, let them stew.

"The question of the kingship is neither here nor there." I said airily. "I just told you: this is a private visit for me. I'm here to inspect my estates at Kamaviben and nothing more. I don't want there to be any fuss made over me." And gave them my most regal glare. "Is that understood?"

BUT I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER. OF COURSE THERE was fuss, and plenty of it.

Bureaucrats! Accursed paper-shuffling functionaries! Pettifogging little tenth-echelon panjandrums! I'd sooner have the honest refreshing company of a herd of salizonga snails any day.

In general I am not the sort of person whom anyone is likely to call naive. Not at
my
age. But I would have to agree that I was being naive, and then some, to have entertained the fantasy that they might have just let me walk out of that holding tank without any sort of complication. There was no way that the King of the Gypsies whether incumbent or retired was going to enter Xamur or any other kingly world in secrecy and privacy, no matter how much blustering and storming he did. That I understood. But I did imagine that they would admit me with a minimum of pomp and circumstance, if that was what I seemed to want.

I was wrong.

Kings and even ex-kings may have vast power over this and that, but when it comes to matters of protocol the bureaucrats always get the last word. In this case I had the Rom immigration people to blame as much as the Gaje, or more so. The Rom saw their king-or their ex-king, whichever I was-coming to town unexpectedly and they felt it absolutely incumbent upon themselves to cry hallelujah over me so that I would be properly covered with the appropriate glory.

Therefore they passed the news of my arrival up to the highest levels of the Xamur imperial administration and inevitably from that point on there was no halting the avalanche-like force of the bureaucracy as it swung eagerly into full action. You can't expect governmental functionaries to carry out any sort of useful activities, naturally-the whole concept is practically a contradiction in terms-but give them something meaningless like an official welcome to organize and it's their finest hour. It was all that I could do to head off a full-scale parade along the shining ramparts of Ashen Devlesa. But I did have to go through an interminable reception at the capital, a grand pyrotechnikon that lit up the skies over four continents, a noisy and crashingly boring concert by the Xamur Symphony, and a banquet so ridiculously inept in its overelaboration that it would have sent Julien de Gramont off weeping to light a candle to the memory of Escoffier.

All of this was a nuisance but in one way it also served a worthwhile purpose for me. It served notice on Galgala and to the Empire at large that I had reappeared. But since I had declined to claim the full royal treatment, had turned down the usual parade and the awarding of the usual decorations, my appearance in Ashen Devlesa created more than a little ambiguity surrounding the matter of my intentions in coming back from retirement. Which was fine. Keep them all guessing: that's always a useful strategy. I didn't say a thing. I smiled a lot and waved a lot and looked sublimely radiant while the speeches were going on around me, and when it was all done with I thanked them politely and went on out to Kamaviben, to my grand estate far off in the countryside by the shores of the Sea of Pleasure.

(Actually Kamaviben isn't all that grand a grand estate, as grand estates go. The grounds are of decent size and the location is sublime, but the house itself, while of some architectural interest, wouldn't raise the pulse rate of a small-town magistrate. At no point in my life have I ever been a particularly wealthy man, you know. And perhaps there is just enough of the old wandering Rom spirit in me to make it superfluous for me to live in a really overwhelming place. I am just as content in an ice-bubble or a roamhome or a simple log shanty as I have ever been in the various palaces that I have occupied in my time. Yet I think Kamaviben is marvelously grand in its way, and I would never want to live in any dwelling more splendid. Or even in any other dwelling at all, unless it be on Romany Star.)

In the years of my absence they had maintained it for me in perfect shape, as though I might show up there unannounced on any given afternoon. The stables were swept, the lawns of quivergrass were impeccable, the double rows of blackleaf pseudo-palms down the main drive had been pruned only a week before. A staff of ten took care of Kamaviben for me, the most loyal and devoted robots on any world of the galaxy. They were sweet machines, my Kamaviben robots: they even spoke Romany. (With a Xamur accent, that faint little lisp.) Of course a Rom craftsman had made them for me, the Kalderash wizard Matti Costorari. I have known Rom that were less Rom than those robots.

From Kamaviben I sent word to those who mattered most to me, telling them I was back. And then I waited.

POLARCA WAS THE FIRST TO SHOW UP. NOT HIS GHOST this time, but the true and authentic item. My grand vizier, my good right hand, my companero, my cousin of cousins, my blood brother.

This man Polarca is more dear to me than either of my kidneys. You can get new kidneys if you need them-I have done it-but where would I get another Polarca? I saved his life once, as he never tires of reminding me. I think he regards me as being in his debt because I saved him. That was long ago, on Mentiroso, when we suffered side by side in Nikos Hasgard's foul clutches, which is a story I mean to tell you sooner or later. Since that time we have been brothers. Polarca is small and quick and jittery, a hedgehog sort of man. Like the hedgehog he is very prickly but sweet inside.

He came rollicking in from Darma Barma, where he keeps a grand and glorious floating villa out in the lightning country. He calls it his vardo, his Gypsy wagon, and sometimes he speaks of it as a roamhome, which is a bit like calling a bludgeon a toothpick. But Polarca has always been fond of exaggeration.

He had had a remake since I had last seen him and that took some getting used to. He was wearing his eyes a deep piercing blue now with bright red rims, and his ears were higher and thicker than before, with black fur on them. He looked strange but he looked healthy and full of fire.

"Yakoub!" he cried. "Oh, there, you Yakoub!"

"Polarca. Is it really you?"

"No, you antiquated piss-in-bed, it's my other ghost."

I grinned. "Don't you call me names, you slippery mirage."

He radiated love and warmth. "I'll call you what I like, you old ball of grease."

"Pig-poisoner!"

"Gajo-licker!"

"Chicken-stealer! Pocket-picker!"

"Hah! Oh, you Yakoub!"

"You Polarca, you!"

We laughed and hugged and slapped each other's cheeks. We grabbed each other, wrist by wrist, and cavorted up and down the hallways in a wild crazed dance, singing at the top of our lungs. Two roaring bellowing old fossils is what we were, with more life in us than any fifty snotnosed boys. We made so much noise that the robots came to see what the matter was. They looked alarmed and dismayed. Maybe they thought an assassin was in the house. But they are Rom robots at heart; as soon as they saw that this was all friendly, that this was my phral here, my brother, my Polarca, they relaxed.

I told them to fetch us a flagon of my rarest and best brandy, a loaf of palm-tree bread, a cluster of Iriarte grapes. We sat down to table and he opened his overpocket and pulled out the gifts he had brought me. Polarca always brings plenty of gifts and they are always things you might have wanted a year ago or perhaps will want next year, but rarely anything you would want at the moment. This time he came out with an ornate pair of double-vented air-shoes, a magnifying pen, half a dozen ceramic ear-spools, and the complete text of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius inscribed on the eye-tooth of a sanguinosaur. I thanked him most solemnly, as I always did when Polarca loaded me down with oddities and superfluities of that sort. He had also brought with him something that was actually worth bringing: a slab of the wind-dried beef from Clard Msat, which is a delicacy I had longed for with a keen ultraviolet longing during my years on Mulano. Splendid Polarca! How had he known I was yearning for that?