Star of Gypsies

Give a Gajo a foolish fantasy and he will embrace it and embellish it until it becomes truer than the truth. Whenever five of our tribes came together in the same place for a festival the Gaje would imagine that we were convening to elect a new king. Is that what you are doing, electing a new king? And we would say, pulling long faces, Yes, yes, our old king has died, now we are choosing the wisest and strongest and best among us to rule over us. Sometimes we actually did hold an election of sorts, if we saw something to gain by it. We came forth and told the Gaje, Here is our new king, King Karbaro, King Mijloli, King Porado, whatever his name. Those are all filthy words in the Romany tongue, but what did the Gaje know? The filthier the name we invented the better the joke. And we would find some strong handsome fellow of the tribe with more vanity than brains and we would jump him up to be King of the Gypsies and he would stride around waving and nodding and smiling, and the Gaje would be tremendously impressed. They paid good money to watch the coronation feast, and paid money again to take pictures of us dancing and singing in our quaint tribal costumes, and while all that was going on we moved among them and picked their pockets besides, not because we were criminals at heart but simply to punish them for their silliness. And the Gaje went away feeling pleased with themselves because they had seen the coronation of the new Gypsy king. And then we also went on our way and nobody among us gave another thought to King Karbaro again. But the Gaje continued to believe that we were the subjects of a supreme ruler whose powers were absolute and whose commands traveled mysteriously across the world by secret couriers.

  Eventually came a time when they stopped believing it. This was in the twentieth or perhaps the twenty-first century, when all knowledge became available at the push of a button and every jackass began to think that he knew everything.

  This is the modern world, all the jackasses told each other solemnly. And they all felt very proud of themselves for living in the modern world. Nobody was ignorant any more, nobody was superstitious, nobody could be fooled by glib mumbo-jumbo. Among the things that everybody knew now was that there never had been such a thing as a Gypsy king, that the whole notion was nothing but a hoax, one of the innumerable frauds that those wandering rogues the Gypsies had dreamed up to confuse and delude the poor credulous yokels on whom they preyed.

  Not only did those well-informed people who lived in the modern world stop believing in the King of the Gypsies, I think they stopped believing in Gypsies altogether. There was no room in that shiny modern world of theirs for Gypsies. Gypsies were ragged and unkempt and untamable; Gypsies were unpredictable; Gypsies were simply an untidy concept.

  So they began to think we were extinct. That we were mere antiquarian folklore, the raggle-taggle Gypsies, O! Oh, yes, there had been Gypsies once upon a time, yes, the way there had been smallpox and public hangings and bitter wars over religion; but all that was done with now. This was the modern world, after all. The Gypsies, they said, have all settled down in ordinary houses and married ordinary people and live ordinary lives. They vote and pay taxes and go to church and speak nothing but the language of the land. The Gypsies of old are all gone, swallowed up in modern civilization, they said. What a pity, they said, that the quaint old picturesque Gypsies are no more.

  And right about that time, when we had become all but invisible to the whole Gaje society because we had come to seem to belong to it, when we had vanished clear out of sight-that was the time when we understood that we needed to organize ourselves properly and come forth as a true nation. That was when we really did begin to form our Gypsy government-no fantasy, this time, but the genuine item-and elect our first real Gypsy kings.

  We had to. Invisibility has its advantages, but sometimes it can be a drawback. The world was changing very fast. Those were the years when the Gaje first were starting to leave their little Earth and go off to nearby planets. Before long, we knew, they would be voyaging to the stars. If we stayed invisible we would be left behind. So we had to emerge from our Gaje camouflage. In that lay our only hope of getting home again. Earth was not our home, though we had never dared tell the Gaje that; our true home was far away, and the one thing we longed for was to return to it and give up our wandering life at last.

  So it came to pass that we began to have kings. That was a thousand years ago, on Earth, in the earliest days of star travel, before anyone knew that we would be the ones to lead mankind upward from Earth into the heavens. Chavula was the first king, and after him Ilika, and then Terkari, and then-well, everyone knows the names of the kings. They were the men who took us to the stars and made us what we are today, masters of many worlds, lords of the roads of night.

  And eventually in the fullness of time they came to me and said, "The king is dead, Yakoub. Will you be our king?"

  What could I say? What could I do? No one in his right mind wants to be a king; and whatever else I am, I have always been in my right mind. Trust me on that score. But I am also a man of my people, and, powerful as we now may be, we are nevertheless a people in exile. That imposes certain responsibilities on you. I was born in exile and so was my father and so were my father's fathers for fifty generations back. If I was the man who could bring that long exile to an end, how could I dare refuse? In any case I had lived all my life under the lash of the knowledge of my fate; and it was my fate to be the king.

  When I was a small boy my father took me to the lookout point near the steep summit of Mount Salvat on Vietoris, which is the world where I was born, and he said, "Where is your home, boy?" And I told him that my home was on such-and-such a street in the city of Vietorion on the world Vietoris. Then he showed me the bright red eye of Romany Star blazing in the black forehead of the sky and he said, "You think this place here is home? No, boy. That place is home. And some day our king will lead us there again." And he looked at me and the look in his eyes told me, more clearly than any words could have done, that he hoped I would be that king. I had never told him of the visions I had had when I was very small, the ghost of the old woman coming to me and planting the seed of the future in my soul; and I found myself unable to tell him now, so I had no way of saying. Yes, father, yes, I will be that king, I will be the one to lead us home, there can be no doubt of it: the ghost of an old woman told me so, bringing the word to me out of the future. I wish now that I had had a chance to tell him that. But I never told him or anyone else. I suppose that is every Rom father's hope, that his son would be the one. He was a slave then and so was I, and not long afterward I was sold away from him in the marketplace of Vietorion and I never saw him again. But I have seen Romany Star every night of my life from whatever world I found myself on, and I feel the warmth of its light on my cheeks no matter how cold the night; for it is the light of the star of home. And when they came to me and said, "Will you be our king, Yakoub?," how could I say no, when I might be that very king who would lead us home again? So I let the kingship come upon me, which in time also I relinquished, and which I know will come again, as it must, for there are great fulfillments that have to be worked out and I know that I am the vehicle of their doing.

  7.

  WHILE THE BOY CHORIAN WAS STILL STAYING WITH ME, Polarca's ghost came around to visit. Chorian was out on the ice at the time hunting cloud-eels with my loop and trident: he was young and agile and energetic, and sending him off to hunt was one good way of getting him out of my hair when I grew weary of all that endless adulation.

  There was a hum and a buzz and a crackle in the air and Polarca said, out of the mantle of green radiance that he liked to affect when he went ghosting around, "Is he bothering you? I'll scare him away."

  "He'll leave soon enough on his own."

  "A pretty boy. What did he come here for?"

  "To tell me to get myself back to Galgala and be king again, I think."

  Polarca considered that. He and I have known each other better than a hundred years, since we were galley slaves together in Nikos Hasgard's synapse pit on Mentiroso. Polarca is Rom of the Lowara stock and he claims t
o come from a long line of emperors, popes, and horse-traders on Earth. I believe only the part about horsetraders but I would never voice suspicion about the rest. He does more ghosting than anyone I know; he is a very restless man.

  "You aren't going to go," Polarca said finally.

  "Are you asking me or telling me?"

  "Both, Yakoub."

  "I'm not going to go," I said. "That's right."

  "Even though Damiano says that a new king will be elected if you don't."

  "You overheard that, did you?"

  Polarca smiled. When a ghost smiles, it's more like a tiny flash of lightning. "I was standing right next to you. You didn't see me?"

  "If they need a new king, let them have a new king," I said. "I'm going to stay here."

  "Absolutely, Yakoub. Beyond any doubt that's the wisest thing."

  The trouble with Polarca's ghost is that he doesn't speak with punctuation, so that half the time I can't tell a question from a statement, and he doesn't speak with inflection, so I can't tell sarcasm from sincerity. That isn't a characteristic of all ghosts; it's just Polarca's. Polarca is a smartass and so is his ghost.

  "You think it's wise, do you?" I said.

  "Of course it is. Just like it was wise for Achilles to go sulk in his tent."

  I still couldn't tell if I was being needled or supported. There aren't many people who can keep me off balance the way Polarca does.

  "Don't give me Achilles," I said. "He isn't relevant and you goddamned well know it." Then I said, "I actually saw him once. He was nothing at all."

  "Achilles? You saw him?"

  "A hoodlum. Little mean eyes and thick lips like chunks of meat. A natural-born sulker. Big and strong but there wasn't an ounce of nobility in him."

  "Maybe you saw somebody else," Polarca suggested.

  "They said Achilles."

  "Ghosting that far back, how can you be sure? There's mist all over everything."

  "I saw his shield," I said. "It was the right shield, a real masterpiece of art. But he was nothing but a hoodlum. What I'm doing, it isn't the same thing that Achilles was doing in his tent." I was silent a moment, wondering if I might be fooling myself about that. After a time I said, "Sunteil is mixed into this also. Did you know that?"

  "The boy is in the service of Sunteil, yes."

  "No," I said. "He's in the pay of Sunteil. There's a difference. Didn't you hear him say that? You've been skulking around here all week."

  "I went away for a time. I was in Babylon when he said that. I was listening to Hammurabi proclaim the code of laws."

  "I bet you were. Sunteil sent him because he thinks my abdication is phony and that I'm probably up to something suspicious by hiding out here on Mulano."

  "Aren't you?"

  "And so he sent the boy around to spy on me. That's what the boy says, anyway."

  Polarca's mantle crackled and hummed and leaped up-spectrum a few notches. "Send a Rom to spy on the Rom king? Sunteil's not that silly, Yakoub."

  "I know that. Then what is Sunteil doing?"

  "He misses you, Yakoub. This is his way of asking you to come back."

  "Sunteil misses me?"

  "The balance of the Empire is askew. The Gaje emperor needs a Rom king as a counterpoise to keep things steady, and right now there isn't any king."

  "Do you know this or are you just saying it, Polarca?"

  "What's your guess?"

  "Don't play guessing games with me, you bastard. That's my trick. You've got me at an unfair advantage already because you're a ghost. How far in the future do you come from, anyway?"

  "You think I'm going to tell you that?"

  "You pig, Polarca!"

  "Do you tell, when you go ghosting around?"

  "That's different. I'm the king. I'm not required to tell anybody anything. And if I request information from one of my subjects-"

  "One of your subjects? I'm not anybody's subject. I'm a ghost, Yakoub."

  "You're the ghost of a subject, then."

  "Regardless," he said. "What you're trying to get from me is privileged information."

  "And I make a privileged request. I'm the king."

  "Bullshit, Yakoub. You abdicated five years ago."

  "Polarca-" I sputtered. I was getting exasperated.

  "Besides, no ethical ghost ever reveals the point in time from which he's ghosting from. Not even to his king."

  "Even when the welfare of the Rom nation is at stake?"

  "What makes you think it is?"

  "You're trying to drive me crazy," I said.

  He laughed. "I'm trying to keep you on your toes, Yakoub. Look, just be patient and everything will make sense to you, all right? Trust me. I see wonderful things ahead for you. Here-let me show you. The truth lies plainly visible in your palm, if only you have eyes to see. For a small fee, no more than a couple of little coins, the wise old Gypsy will pull back the mysterious veils of the future, he will reveal to you-"

  "Get the hell out of here," I told him.

  And he did, in the twinkling of an eye. I sat there blinking at the place where he had been. A dozen or so native Mulano ghosts, attracted by the little zone of negative energy that Polarca had left behind, came roaming in to feed. They hung in the cold air in front of me like a cloud of shining gnats. And then Polarca came back, sending the Mulano ghosts frantically scrambling out of his interpolation zone.

  "Where'd you go?" I asked.

  "None of your business."

  "Is that the way you talk to your king?"

  "You abdicated," he reminded me again.

  "I think you're enjoying this."

  "I went to Atlantis," he said. "For six weeks. They had just dedicated the Temple of the Dolphins and there were golden flower-petals strewn half a meter deep all along the Concourse of the Sky. I thought I saw your lady Syluise there, riding in the chariot of one of the great princes. I would have given her your regards, but you know how misty everything gets when you go ghosting that far back."

  "You saw Syluise in Atlantis? Are you serious?"

  "I am if you want me to be."

  I love Polarca, but I hate dealing with his ghost. You expect your fellow Rom to tickle and poke you a little once in a while, especially if he's known you a hundred years or so and thus is an expert on the right places to tickle and poke. And he expects you to tickle and poke back at him. But Polarca, when he's ghosting, holds all the cards. A ghost knows not only past and present, but a good chunk of the future too. I've told Polarca many times that he takes unfair advantage. A lot he cares. He boxes me in on six different sides at once. He makes me feel like a simpleton, sometimes, and I'm not accustomed to that. He makes me feel like a Gajo trying to deal with a Rom. And yet I know he loves me. Even when he plagues me like this, he says he does it out of love.

  8.

  AGAIN POLARCA DISAPPEARED. I WAS LEFT WITH a residue of uneasiness and irritation. He had seen Syluise, he said. In Atlantis, no less. It was a long time since I had even thought about Syluise. I wished Polarca hadn't taken the trouble to bring her to my mind now.

  I could just see her, riding around in chariots back there in Atlantis. Driving the ancient lords of that great city berserk, and probably the ladies too. What would they have made of her there, with her golden hair and all? They would never have seen anyone with golden hair before, those swarthy dark-haired Atlanteans: she would have glittered among them like a goddess. Like a Venus, a bright shimmering Venus.

  Atlantis was a Rom city, you know. Whatever other fables you may have heard, the real truth is that we founded it, we created its wondrous grandeur, we were the ones who suffered when it sank beneath the sea. It was our first settlement on Earth, long ago, when we came there after the destruction of Romany Star. Later on the Greeks tried to claim it as their own, but you know what Greeks are like: a shady bunch, half ignorance and half lies. Atlantis was ours. Not for five thousand years after it was destroyed did the Gaje of Earth build anything that even remotely approached
it in architectural splendor. It was Earth's first city. And I don't just mean magnificent buildings and marble colonnades. We had sewers and flush toilets while the rest of the population of Earth was still dressing in animal hides and hunting with throwing-sticks.

  A great city, yes. Too good to last. Anyway it was never our fate to be a settled people. Maybe it was presumptuous of us to build anything as wonderful as Atlantis. It had to be taken away from us. The volcano roared, the Earth heaved, the sea ate Atlantis, and we went forth in ships, poor battered survivors, to follow our luck on the highways of the world. (That's where the notorious Gypsy aversion to travel by sea came from, you know: the horrendous sufferings we experienced during the escape from Atlantis.) But it was wondrous while it lasted, and those of us who know the secret of ghosting go back there often to stare in awe. Getting there takes some work: Atlantis, we found out long ago, lies just about at the limit of our ghosting range. And it's hard for us to see things in much detail there, because as you've heard the farther back you ghost, the more deeply everything gets shrouded in mist. But we go all the same.

  And Syluise… golden hair flying in the wind as she rides in the chariot of some Atlantean lord…

  No woman in my life has held such power over me as Syluise. For better, for worse. I can never escape her spell. That infuriates me, that power of hers over me, and yet if I could change the past and remove all trace of her from my life, God knows I would not do it.

  Estrilidis is where I met her. Fifty years ago? Something like that. Cesaro o Nano was still king and I was a diplomatic envoy. A hot humid world, Estrilidis, dense unspoiled forests, all kinds of strange creatures. The cats have two tails there, that I remember. And the insects-ah, the insects, what amazing things they are! Like rubies on legs, like emeralds, like blue diamonds. I was watching them one night marching up the walls of my lodging-place, an astounding procession of great gaudy bugs, when suddenly I saw something even more astounding: a golden woman, bare as the dawn, floating past my window. Perfect pink breasts, swelling hips, long supple legs. Shining like wildfire, shimmering like a ghost, she was. But how could she be a ghost? She was plainly no Rom, not with that glistening yellow hair, not with those startling blue eyes. And only Rom can ghost. Of course she was Rom, for vanity's sake totally transformed to that lustrous Gaje form. I found that out afterward. But even so, not a ghost. This was the real Syluise that I saw, magically holding herself aloft. She beckoned. I followed her into the night. She floating like the will-o'-the-wisp, I running behind her. She smiling, I staring. Gaping. Awed.