Star of Gypsies

  In the depths of the forest she halted and turned to me, and when she rushed into my arms I felt that I had captured a flame. We sank down together on the warm moist soil. She laughed; she raked my bare back with her fingernails; she arched her neck like a cat.

  "Do you want me to make you a king?" she asked.

  Rain was falling, but the heat of our bodies was such that it burned the water away before it could strike us. It was like a fever.

  She laughed again. My hands to her breasts: nipples hot and hard, throbbing against my palms. I stroked her silken thighs and they parted for me. And then she clasped me. Oh, the sweetness of that embrace! I closed my eyes and saw the light of a thousand stars of a thousand colors. And felt the heat of those thousand suns searing me. You might have thought she was my first woman, it was so shattering a moment for me. And me a hundred twenty years old then, more or less. But in that thunderclap of a moment all those who had preceded her in that long life of mine were eradicated from my memory. There was only this one. Who was she? Did it matter? Did I care? I was lost in her.

  As we moved she began to speak, a soft low chanting; and after a moment I realized that she was speaking in Romany, that from those perfect lips was coming an astonishing flow of the vilest words in our tongue. How could she have known those words, this Gaje woman? Well, of course, of course, she was as Rom as I, beneath her assumed facade. As she crooned and murmured that startling filth to me I looked at her in wonder; and then I began to laugh, and so did she. And then she swept me away with her.

  "I am Syluise," she said afterward.

  That was the beginning. When I returned to Galgala she came with me. When I became king a short while later, I thought of making her my wife; but when I went to her to speak of such high matters with her, she had disappeared, and it was a year before I saw her again. That was when I began to understand what Syluise was like. But by then it was too late.

  9.

  BECAUSE MULANO IS NOT AN EMPIRE WORLD, THERE'S no regular starship service. The only way in or out is by relay sweep, which is a little like trying to travel by tossing yourself into the sea with a hook fastened to your collar and hoping that some giant bird will scoop you up and carry you where you want to go. Chorian, having delivered Damiano's message and having had my answer, was ready to leave, but he needed the better part of a week to set up his sweep for departure. So he was my guest all that time. Not that I begrudged it. I had come to take great delight in my solitude, and I wanted it back as fast as I could have it; but a guest is a guest. Maybe the Gaje will turn kinsmen from their door, but a Rom, never.

  It wasn't so bad having him around, really. Aside from overdoing the worship more than slightly-and he couldn't really help that; I was five times as old as he was, and a king besides, or at least a former king, and legendary on fifty or sixty worlds-he was pleasant enough company. He wasn't nearly as naive as he seemed on first encounter; what I had taken for naivete was mostly just his style of wide-eyed innocence, which was probably nothing more than an artifact of his tender years. And it wasn't fair to blame him for being young. That wasn't his fault, and it would wear off soon enough anyway. There was happiness within him, and strength, and a good Rom heart. Besides, he knew all the court gossip. I was surprised how keenly I yearned to be brought up to date on all the petty trivial intrigues of the Capital's inner circle; and he seemed to know everything, the names of the old emperor's current mistresses, the current relative standings of the Lords Sunteil, Naria, and Periandros in the emperor's favor, the latest non-ecclesiastical escapade of the Archimandrite Germanos, and all the rest.

  I asked him how he had come to be in the employ of the Empire in the first place.

  "I was sold into it," he said. "Our kumpania broke up in the years of the great drought on Fenix and I was put out on offer for slavery. I was seven. The Lord Sunteil's phalangarius Dilvimon spotted me and bought me for fifty cerces. I was Sunteil's slave until I was seventeen, and when he gave me my writ he asked me to stay on in the civil service, and I did. He trusts me and he treats me well. And I think it's good for our people for there to be a Rom at the Lord Sunteil's right hand."

  He sounded altogether casual about having been a slave. As well he might; to be sold into slavery is no big disgrace, and, as my own revered mentor Loiza la Vakako put it when I myself was going off to be sold for the second time, it can be a highly educational experience for a young Rom. It is in the water, after all, that you learn how to swim. But I know there are some that don't think as highly of the institution as I do.

  I said, "So you're Empire on the outside but you're still Rom within?"

  Chorian grinned broadly. "What else? True Rom, blood and bones," he said. "The only thing that the Lord Sunteil can buy from me is my time. My soul has never been for sale." We had been speaking in Imperial, but for that last he switched to Romany. Of course. When it's necessary to speak the absolute truth, a Rom speaks it in the language of his own people.

  True Rom he might be, even to knowing the Great Tongue. But Chorian had grown up among the Gaje and there were sad gaps in his education. No one had ever taught him the old songs and the old dances; he knew nothing of conjuring and spells; he had no idea how to ghost. Worse, he hadn't had any opportunity since he was a boy to steep himself in the Swatura, the chronicles of our race, and the course of our history was beginning to grow jumbled in his mind.

  Naturally he was familiar with the events of the past thousand years, how the Kingdom had come into being and the way it had arranged itself in its strange relationship with the Empire. If nothing else, Chorian's responsibilities at the imperial court would have required him to make himself aware of that part of the story. But of the rest of it he knew only the merest hazy outlines, bits and fragments here and there: something of our early days on Romany Star, our going forth into the Great Dark, our wanderings in space and our arrival on Earth. He had some knowledge of the greatness of Romany Atlantis and of the catastrophe that destroyed it. He knew a little about the terrible years of our life as outcasts among the Gaje of Earth. But none of it had any solid meaning for him. It was all cloudy, vague, abstract, mere history, a murky tangle of practically meaningless old migrations and persecutions, long ago and far away. Somebody else's history, at that. He had no sense that any of it had happened to him. But it had; of course it had. Everything that has happened to any Rom has happened to all Rom. If you aren't one with your history, you have no history; and if you don't have any history you aren't anybody at all.

  In the few days he stayed with me I tried to help him. Just before the moment when Double Day was ending, I took him out on the glittering ice-fields and showed him where to find Romany Star. "There," I said. "The great red one. O Tchalai, the Star of Wonder. O Netchaphoro, the Luminous Crown, the Carrier of Light, the Halo of God. You see it up there? Do you see it, you Chorian?"

  "How could I not see it, Yakoub?"

  And he went to his knees before it on the ice.

  "There are sixteen streams of light radiating from it," I told him. "One for each of the sixteen original tribes. You can see that on the banner of the Kingdom, the star of sixteen points. That star has one world, Chorian, and it is the most beautiful world in all the billion galaxies."

  "Have you been there, Yakoub?"

  "In my dreams, yes."

  "But you've never seen it with your own eyes?"

  "How could I? It's holy ground. It's absolutely forbidden for any of us to go there-the worst kind of sacrilege. No Rom has set foot on that world in ten thousand years."

  He had trouble understanding that: why we didn't simply jump into our ships and go zooming off to reclaim our ancient home world. It would be so easy. Who could stop us? We can go wherever we like, can't we? The young are so impetuous. And they have no real comprehension of the nature of the invisible world, of the unseen ties that bind and constrict us. I explained to him that it was a matter of the fulfilling of our long-range destiny, of a plan that was beyond our ability to gr
asp. I told him that we could not go back to Romany Star until we had received a sign, a call, that the time had come.

  And then I said, "But I mean to get there before I die, boy. Why do you think I've lived so long? I've taken an oath. No death for me, boy, until I've touched the soil of Romany Star with both my heels."

  He gave me a peculiar look. "Even though it would be sacrilege?"

  I rounded on him angrily. "What are you saying? I can't go until the call comes, don't you see? But the call will be coming soon. I know that, Chorian. I have absolutely certain knowledge of that. And when it does -the moment it does-"

  "You'll be the first one there."

  "The first, yes. Showing the way for the rest of us. Now do you understand?"

  He nodded. He stared at the black bowl of the sky. Mulano's air is cold and clear and there are no city lights to blur the skyward vision. I have never known another world from which Romany Star can be viewed as readily.

  "If it's so beautiful there, Yakoub, why did we ever leave?"

  "We had to," I said. "A wise mother casts her children forth to make their own way in the universe; and Romany Star was a wise mother to us."

  Was that so? Suddenly, for a moment there, I wondered. To drive us forth from our home with a flaming sword and force us into thousands of years of dismal wandering-this is wisdom? This is motherhood?

  I listened to what I was saying, that glib line about the wise mother who had cast us forth, and for one weird instant my whole sense of the architecture of our destiny wavered and wobbled and shook. Sometimes all this mouthing off of proverbs is just one way of sweeping anguish and pain and even resentment under the rug. But what you sweep under the rug has a way of crawling out again to bite you, and that isn't just a proverb. It's an observation.

  Cast forth by our wise mother. Well, yes. Or our father. Romany Star was our mother and God was our father, and God had noticed us, smug and happy on Romany Star, and He had said to Himself, These fat and sassy Rom are getting complacent. They're getting arrogant. They're starting to forget that this universe is really a vale of tears, a chancy risky place where it's only by great good luck that you get through any given day without some monstrous catastrophe. They've had it good for too long, those Rom. All right. I'll throw them out on their asses. Let them learn what life is really like. And so had He done. And we have been suffering for our ancient good fortune ever since.

  There was a Gaje people on Earth once called the Jews, who thought they were God's special people. He tossed them out on their asses too, just to teach them that He doesn't have any favorites, or, that if He does, He can give His favorites an even rougher time than He does His enemies. It's a very similar story, in its way: suffering, persecution, poverty, exile. But He wasn't as hard on them as He was on us. Them He made into lawyers, doctors, professors. We had to be knife-sharpeners and fortune-tellers. What kind of a lesson was He trying to teach us, anyway? At least He relented a little later on, and gave us some classier occupations. There are still some Jews around but I don't think many of them pilot starships. I'm pretty sure that none of them are kings, either.

  Well, maybe it had all been worthwhile, I told myself. The casting forth into exile, the wandering, the suffering. So I answered my own question with a resounding Yes. Of course it had. Who was I to complain? There was Chorian, looking at me with rapture, me the wise man, me the old king, the embodiment of our race, and he was saying with his eyes, Tell me, Tell me, Tell me, Yakoub. Tell me all our great and wonderful story. How it all happened, how it began. I felt ashamed that I had wavered even for an instant, that I had begun to resent, to question.

  And as we stood there in the darkness and the cold, I told him the old tale, the oldest of all our tales, the Tale of the Swelling Sun, just as my father had told it to me while we were standing together on that steep slope of Mount Salvat one night on Vietoris long ago, and just as I had told it to my many sons over many years on many different worlds.

  10.

  I SPOKE OF OUR ANCIENT DAYS OF GREATNESS, the wondrous cities of Romany Star, the shining palaces and splendid towers, the vast concourses and broad highways, the gleaming columns and plazas. I told him how the sky over Romany Star was forever ablaze with the light of all the heavens. I told him of the eleven moons that were strung like brilliant jewels from horizon to horizon. I told him of rivers that sparkled like new wine, of mountains that challenged the stars, of golden meadows and dazzling lakes. Of the handsome, happy people.

  Then I told him of how we came to learn that the splendor would all be snatched from us. First Mulesko Chiriklo, the bird of the dead, making her nest on the highest battlement of the Great Temple. Then the woman's voice crying the mourning-song in the night, which we heard in every city at once; and then the wind that blew from the south, where the dead souls go to live, and would not stop for fourteen months. And other omens after that: a year when there was no summer, and a day when the sun did not rise, and a night when no stars could be seen anywhere in the world.

  We had no way of understanding these omens, for we had known nothing but happiness on Romany Star. There had never been a drought, nor an earthquake, nor a flood, nor a plague. The seasons came round in their time and the earth was fertile. There was no sickness among us, and when death came to us it was sudden and clean, in great old age. So when the omens began the call went forth for wise ones who could interpret them for us; and from every part of the world the wise ones came, gathering in the great plaza of the capital city. For ninety-nine months they conferred and studied and asked the gods for guidance. Then in the hundredth month the king locked them all in the Long Chamber of the Great Temple, and let them know that they would have neither food nor drink until they told us what was about to befall us and how we should deal with it; and there was no word from them for ninety-nine hours, but in the hundredth hour they signalled that they had been granted a revelation, and then they were allowed to come forth.

  Our sweet Romany Star, they declared, has resolved to cast us forth into the universe to make our own way, and there is no use weeping or wailing or praying, for the time is short and swift action must be taken.

  A change, they said, will soon come upon the sun who is our mother. She will swell and grow huge, and in place of her warm life-giving red glow there will come a savage blaze of blue light bearing terrible heat that no living thing can withstand. In one monstrous murderous noontime, the wise ones told us, deadly fire will march across the fields and meadows, the mountains and valleys, the cities and the plains. The world will turn black and the seas will boil and all life will end on Romany Star. And then the sun will subside as swiftly as she had erupted, and her gentle red light will return, but now it will fall on the charred and shattered ruin of our dear world.

  At once there was weeping and there was wailing and there was praying, and the people cried out to the king to save them; and the king said, "This is something that is fated to come upon us, and we can do nothing to prevent it. But there is one way to save ourselves." And the king proposed that we build as many spacegoing ships as we could, and fill them with people and animals and plants and all the treasures of our world, and go forth into the Great Dark with them and wait out there until the cataclysm had run its course; and then we could return to Romany Star and rebuild our life there. So the weeping ceased, and the wailing and the praying; and the building of the ships commenced. But very soon it became clear that we could not possibly build enough of them. For the time of the cataclysm was almost upon us, and we had hardly enough ships to bear one person in a thousand into space. And then came news that was even worse: that there would be not one swelling of the sun but three, during the course of the next ten thousand years, so there was no point in trying to return to Romany Star; whatever we might rebuild would only be destroyed once more in the next swelling, and again in the one after that.

  So we knew that most of us would die and the rest of us were to be driven forth from our home to dwell a long time in exile
. We could not understand why God had chosen to do this to us, but we knew that it was not our place to find reasons for the doings of God.

  "But only one in a thousand could go?" Chorian asked, horrified.

  "Not even as many as that," I said. "One in five thousand, perhaps. One in ten thousand. We had only sixteen ships. There was a lottery, and names were chosen, and the sixteen ships went off into the Great Dark. And one day they looked behind them and saw a new star in the sky that was blazing a brilliant blue-white, and Romany Star's red glow was nowhere to be seen; and that day they wept and they wailed and prayed, and afterward they turned their faces forward, for they knew there was nothing behind them that they would want to see."

  "And these were the Rom who settled on Earth?"

  "Yes," I said. "Though we went to a few other places first; but Earth was most like Romany Star, and that was where we chose to live."

  "Even though the Gaje were already there?"

  "Because the Gaje were already there. The Gaje were shaped very much like the Rom, you see, so much so that one race could even interbreed with the other; and that was the proof that the Rom would be able to live and thrive on Earth. So there we settled, on a large uninhabited island of our own where the Gaje would not be able to trouble us; for the Gaje were a crude and stupid and backward people and we knew that they would harass us and bother us and make war on us if we tried to dwell in their midst. We took that island-they were helpless to stop us-and in time we built a great city on it and came to live almost as splendidly as we had on Romany Star; but when night fell we would look toward the heavens and we could see the red light of Romany Star shining there, and we dreamed of all that had once been ours, and we told ourselves that some day we would go back to our own world and make it what had been in the time before we had been cast forth."