Star of Gypsies

  He is speaking to his people. Not a word that he says can I understand; and yet I feel reassurance emanating from him, I feel his strength, his calmness. He speaks gravely and they listen to him gravely. It is a long speech, and everyone remains perfectly still to the end of it. Then, in silence, one by one, they go to him and they touch their hands to his. The ceremony continues for hours, an endless procession of the people to their monarch. I find it tremendously moving and I am unable to leave; the line edges forward and I edge with it, until I see that I am near the front, that in another moment I will be at its head. There is no way that I can turn away. I am visible to them all. It would be a dire insult to spurn this man's blessing now, whatever it may mean. So I go forward and I stretch out my hands and he touches his hands to them. Even though I am here as a ghost, he touches my hands, just as he has touched those of his own people.

  For all the others, the touch was only a moment. But me he holds, me he detains. I feel the tremendous vitality of him flowing into me. I see the great sadness and wisdom of his spirit shining in his eyes. Yes, he is a true king. There are only a few kings born in any epoch, and they know from birth who they are. I am one, even if I have not always lived up to my kingliness. This man is another. We are of one soul, he and I. I love him for his strength; I love him for his sadness; I love him for his wisdom. I love him as one loves a king. I love him as one loves a father. I love him as one loves one's own self.

  He holds me a long while. It seems like hours.

  He says nothing, but I feel that we are conversing at length. Much is passing from him to me, and from me to him. Behind me no one moves; we could be alone in the hall. In the spark that travels from his hands to mine and from mine to his are all the Rom who ever lived; we bridge the race from end to end, this king and I. Within him is a sense of all our destiny to come, and within me is a sense of all that has befallen us; and we pass these things back and forth between each other. Time past, time future, pointing to one end. Which is always present.

  He offers me courage. Mere death is not the end of anything, he says. It is only an interruption. Men die, women die, planets die: but certain things continue. What matters is to continue; and there are many ways of continuing. We have sent our sixteen ships out into the Great Dark. That is our way of continuing.

  And in return I give him hope. You have achieved what you meant to achieve, I say. You have allowed us to continue; and we have done the job. Look, I am here to show you that we still exist at the far end of time. We are all part of the grand kumpania, all we Rom, your people and mine. One blood, one people. One grand kumpania. We have continued you. We have wandered very far, as was the gods' decree for us, but we have not lost our sense of who we are. And-look-I am here to pledge to you that soon we wanderers will be coming home, to this place that has always been ours.

  I am you, I tell him. And you are me.

  I am you, he tells me. And you are me.

  He releases me. When I walk away, I carry within me the fullness of this great Rom civilization of Romany Star: its grandeur, its tragedy, its wisdom, its poetry. Its grandeur is its tragedy; its wisdom is its poetry. These are people who are waiting to die. I know now when I have arrived. The omens have come, the lottery has been held, the sixteen ships have been built and have gone off into the Great Dark. These are the ones who were left behind. They will die. Everyone dies, and for each it is the end of the world; but for these millions here the death of one will be the death of all. They have made their peace with death. They have made their peace with the end of the world.

  And in their end is their beginning. For I am the emissary from worlds to come, testifying to their continuation down through the passageways of time. I have come to tell them that the circle will be made whole, that the exile will soon be ending, that I am the one who will bring our people home.

  I find myself outside this great building of woven reeds again, this palace of the last king of Romany Star.

  I stare at the red sun that nearly fills the sky, until my eyes begin to throb and ache.

  Ah there, you red sun, you are Romany Star, and I am staring right at you! I tremble. O Tchalai, the Star of Wonder. O Netchaphoro, the Luminous Crown, the Carrier of Light, the Halo of God. There you are hanging in the heavens before me! Star of wonder, star of night. And star of day as well. Star of Gypsies, toward whom we have yearned throughout all our days. There you are.

  I tremble and the red star trembles with me.

  It seems to me that its color has deepened and that eddies and whirlpools are moving on the face of it. This is the last day. The air grows warm. Yes, yes, the red star is warmer now. Swelling. Churning. O Tchalai! O Netchaphoro! This is the moment, yes, the time of the swelling of the sun, the moment of Romany Star! The Rom have come forth from their houses by the thousands, by the millions, and they stand beside me in the streets, joining their arms together, watching. Waiting. Someone begins to sing. Someone else picks up the song. And then another, and another. The language in which they sing is unknown to me, though it must be some grandfather of the Romany that I speak. Nor do I know the words of the song, nor the melody. They are all singing now, and now I join them. I throw my head back, I open my mouth, and my heart gives me the song; and I sing, loud and clear. I can hear my own voice above all the others for a moment, and then it blends with them in a perfect harmony as the red sun grows larger and larger and yet larger in the sky.

  12.

  THEN A WRENCHING, A TWISTING, A PAINFUL SENSE of being torn loose…

  Of movement across time, across space…

  The smell of burning was in my nostrils when I opened my eyes. As though I was breathing ash; as though the air itself was singed. I felt lost. Where was the red glow of Romany Star? Gone. Gone. The sound of the singing on that last day still echoed in my ears; but where were the singers? Where was I? Why had I not been allowed to remain with them for their last moment?

  Perhaps I had, and I had died with them, and I had gone to hell. Had I? Was this hell that I was in now? I had traveled so far, to so many places; why not hell too?

  I was lying down, perhaps in a bed; there were people around me; their faces were indistinct, indistinguishable. Their voices were vague murmurs. My eyes were betraying me. My hearing. Everything was a blur. Romany Star was gone. That was the one certain reality. Romany Star was gone. And that smell of burning-that hideous taste of ashes that came to me with every breath I drew…

  "Yakoub?"

  A gentle voice, far away. I knew that voice. Polarca, my little Lowara horse-trader.

  "Yakoub, are you awake?"

  Not hell, then. Unless Polarca was in hell with me.

  I managed a scowl and a laugh. "Of course I'm awake, idiot! Can't you see that my eyes are open?"

  He was bending close over me, nose to my nose. Seeing him helped me bring into focus the others, those blurred shapes behind him. Damiano my cousin. Thivt. Chorian. And others, farther back, not so easy for me to make out. Bibi Savina? Yes. Was that Syluise? Yes! Biznaga, Jacinto, Ammagante. Was everyone here? Yes, so it seemed. Even Julien. The treacherous one, even him, at my bedside. All right, I would forgive him. He was my friend; let him be here. And who was that? Valerian? Not Valerian's ghost, but the actual Valerian? How could that be? No one ever saw the actual Valerian any more. Was I dreaming that he was here?

  I have been to the morning of time. I have seen Romany Star. And now I have come back.

  "What is this?" I growled. "Why are you all hovering around me? What's going on?"

  "You've been asleep for weeks," said Damiano.

  "Weeks?" I sat up, or tried to, and found myself infuriatingly weak. My arms and elbows refused to obey me. Like strands of spaghetti, they were. Damn them! I pushed myself up anyway. "What world is this?"

  "The Capital," Polarca said.

  I shook my head, letting things sink in. "Asleep for weeks, and this is the Capital. Ah. Ah. How could it be weeks? I was off ghosting-just for a minute or two, ghost
ing never takes very long-"

  I looked around. Medical equipment everywhere.

  "Have I been sick?"

  "A long sleep," Polarca said. "Like a coma. We knew you were in there. We could see your eyes moving. Sometimes you shouted things in strange languages. Once you sang, but nobody could make out the words."

  "I was ghosting. A great many places."

  Syluise came forward and took my hand. She looked as beautiful as ever, but older, more somber, the flash and glitter gone from her beauty. "Yakoub, Yakoub! We were so worried! Where did you go?"

  I shrugged. "Atlantis. Mentiroso. Xamur. All sorts of places. That doesn't matter." I have seen Romany Star. "Why does it smell like this in here? Am I imagining it? Everything smells burned."

  "Everything is burned," Chorian said.

  "Everything?"

  "There's been a great deal of damage," said Polarca. "The lunatic Gaje have smashed their Capital to shards in their lunatic war. But it's done with now. Everything's quiet. You should see what it looks like out there, Yakoub."

  "Let me see."

  "In a little while. When you're strong enough to get up."

  "I'm strong enough to get up now."

  "Yakoub-"

  "Now," I said.

  They were exchanging troubled glances. Trying to figure out some way to prevent me. Not strong enough, was I? To hell with them. I swung my legs out of the bed and put some weight on them. The first pressure against the floor was agony; I thought my feet were on fire, that my ankles were exploding. I didn't let it show. I kept pushing forward, forward, levering myself up. Tottered a little, shifted my weight. Now it was the knees that were screaming. The hips, the pelvis. I hadn't been standing for weeks. Lying here in a coma, dreaming I was in Atlantis, dreaming I was on Romany Star.

  No. Not dreaming. Ghosting. Truly and literally there.

  I have seen Romany Star.

  I walked to the window and switched it to view capacity.

  "My God," I said in awe. "My God!"

  There was a vast rubble-field outside, stretching as far as I could see: broken statuary, sundered pavements, toppled buildings, charred walls. It was an unreal sight, a stage-set of devastation. Here and there a building rose intact out of the ghastliness. Incongruously, unaccountably. It seemed wrong that anything should still be in one piece on this world. The undamaged buildings were out of place in this architecture of destruction. I had not seen anything so frightful in my life.

  I turned away from the sight of it, numbed, shaken.

  "What have they done here?" I asked.

  "It was the war of everybody against everybody," said Polarca. "Three different armies at first, Periandros, Sunteil, Naria. And then a second doppelganger of Periandros broke away from the first and made war on him. And after that it was Naria's forces dividing against themselves; and then there was a new army that didn't seem to belong to anyone. After that, no one could make sense out of anything. The fighting was everywhere and everything was destroyed. We survived because they didn't dare aim at the palace of the Rom baro, and we had your banners out, and your light-spike. But even so we took a few bad hits. One whole wing of the building was gutted. We thought we were going to die. But there was no way to leave the Capital. The starport is closed. No ships are moving anywhere."

  "Gaje," I muttered. "What can you expect?"

  "Somehow you slept through it all. We thought you were never going to wake."

  "The fighting is over now?"

  "All over," Polarca said. "There's no one left to fight."

  "And who ended up as emperor, when all the fighting was over?"

  There was silence in the room. They looked stunned and dazed, all of them. Polarca, Damiano, Chorian, Valerian and the rest, silent, dazed.

  "Well?" I said. "Is that such a difficult question? Who's emperor now? Tell me. Naria, is it, still?"

  "No one," said Damiano.

  "No one?"

  "There is no emperor."

  It made no sense. No emperor? No emperor?

  I said, "How can that be, no emperor? There were three!"

  Damiano said, "Periandros' doppelgangers were destroyed by Periandros' own troops. There was a confrontation, at the headquarters of Periandros, two of the doppelgangers face to face. Everyone could see now that there was no Periandros, that there were only doppelgangers. So they destroyed them both, and then they hunted down the third one and finished it too."

  I nodded slowly. "And Naria? What happened to him? Behind that ring of defenses. His deflector screens, his tanks, his robots. His glass cube."

  "Dead," Polarca said. "A plasma bomb, a direct hit on the imperial palace. Thirty seconds of thousand-degree heat. The palace was hardly damaged but everyone inside died instantly. Naria was cooked in his own glass cube."

  "That leaves Sunteil."

  "He went to take possession of the palace after Naria's death," Chorian said. "Naria had booby-trapped the throne-platform. Three lasers sliced Sunteil into pieces the moment he took the imperial seat. A hidden scanner, coded for Sunteil and only Sunteil, that would respond to no one else's somatic specifications." He looked away. "I was there when it happened," he said quietly.

  "Dead?" I said, not believing it. "The high lords? All three dead? No emperor at all?"

  "No emperor at all," Polarca said.

  "What will they do? There has to be an emperor!"

  "Go back to bed, Yakoub."

  "No emperor-"

  "That's not our problem. Go back to bed. Lie down. Rest," Polarca said.

  I glared. "Who do you think you're ordering around?"

  Syluise took my hand. "Please, Yakoub. You've been seriously ill. It's just a little while since you regained consciousness. You mustn't put a strain on yourself now. Please. Just rest a little more."

  "I was ghosting," I said. "Not ill at all."

  "Please, Yakoub."

  "Do you know where I was? Do you know what I saw?"

  "For me," she murmured. "Lie down again. So I won't worry. We can't afford to lose you too, now. No emperor, no king-"

  I looked around the room. I felt like shouting, raging, blustering. Was I so fragile? Was I so decrepit? Look at them all! Staring, gaping! They were all like pale phantoms to me. Unreal. This whole place seemed unreal. Romany Star still glowed in my mind. That palace of reeds, that long line of quiet citizens, that king in his vast and solemn dignity-that great red sun, swelling, swelling, growing larger and larger and larger-

  "Mon ami, I implore you." Julien. "You will be fine tomorrow. But you must not tax yourself overly, you must not place demands on yourself that you are unable to meet. I implore."

  "You," I said.

  His face colored. "Whoever I may have served in the past, Yakoub, it makes no difference now. Now I serve only you. And I beg you, Yakoub. Rest yourself. The pitiful pretender begs the true king. You need your strength for tomorrow."

  "Tomorrow? What, tomorrow?"

  He glanced toward the others. I saw Damiano nod, and Polarca.

  Julien said, "The audience, tomorrow. The peers of the Imperium, the new ones, those who survived the holocaust here. For days they have hovered about the palace, pleading to speak with you the moment you regained consciousness. A matter of the greatest urgency, they say. You are the king and there is no emperor: they need to see you. They need your help. They're totally bewildered."

  I stared. "Peers of the Imperium? Greatest urgency? Totally bewildered?"

  "Tomorrow may be too soon," Damiano said. Always cautious. "We don't want to overtax you. They've waited this long, let them wait another couple of-"

  "No," I said. "Tomorrow may be too late. They need my help. How can I ignore that? Get them here right away, man!"

  "Mon vieux, mon ami!" Julien cried. "Not today! Not so soon! You have but hardly awakened. Let it wait."

  "Send for them."

  Polarca threw up his hands in despair. Damiano, tight-faced, furious, clenched his fists. Syluise clung close, appeal
ing. I saw the stricken face of Chorian, and even some boy standing beside Chorian, one who I had not even noticed before and that I did not know at all, was shaking his head as though to say, No, no, Yakoub, not so soon, not until you're stronger.

  I was determined. There had been enough anarchy; if I was a king, and I was a king, then I must take up my task. At once. At once.

  "Send for them!" I thundered.

  But it was the last thundering I did that day. Even as the words escaped my throat, the force of my own outcry undid me. I swayed and grew dizzy and sagged down toward the side of the bed. I think for a moment my soul tried to bolt free of my body. I forced it back. Wondering if this was the final moment of Yakoub, stupidly, prematurely, just when so much remained to complete. No! No! By the holy turds of all the saints and demons, not yet, not yet, not yet!

  A bad moment. A foolish moment.

  "Easy, there," Valerian whispered, lowering me to the pillow. "You're all right. Easy, you Yakoub! Give him a drink, fast! No, not the water, you idiot! Here. Here. Sip this, Yakoub. There. Another. Julien's finest cognac. Here."

  I felt life returning, as the rich fiery brandy hit my gullet. But even so it took me an embarrassingly long while to recover a little poise: thirty seconds, perhaps a minute. Then I smiled. I winked. I belched. I made the good Rom sign that says, Not dead yet, cousins, not yet! But I knew that the peers of the Imperium, whoever they might be and whatever they might need to hear from me, would have to wait. I would have to curb my roaring impatience. I was a little frail today. I needed a little more rest. It had been a busy time for me, and I am not young, I suppose. That is the truth: I am in fact not young.

  13.