Star of Gypsies (15 page)

Damiano stood behind me, saying nothing.

"Give me a day and a half to pack my things," I said.

Krishna:

I am come as Time, the waster of the peoples

Ready for that hour that ripens to their ruin.

All these hosts must die; strike, stay your hand-no matter.

Therefore, strike. Win kingdom, wealth and glory.

I NEVER EXPECTED TO BE KING OF ANYTHING THAT'S the truth, no matter what Syluise thinks. Of course the prophecy was on me practically from the time I could blow my own nose, but it was years-a lifetime, really-before I came to understand what Bibi Savina's ghost had been trying to say to me, back there in my infancy on Vietoris. Only by hindsight did I finally penetrate the mysteries of her chanting and magicking. I suppose I could tell you that from the start I was full of the passion to be top man and tell everyone what to do and have my boots licked daily, but it would be a lie. I wasn't like that at all when I was small. Maybe I got that way later, a little, but remember that being king does strange things to otherwise modest men. All I wanted in the beginning was just to live until tomorrow, and then to live until the tomorrow after that, and to make my way down the narrow path between pain on the one side and the end of all pain on the other side, living each day in joy. Even though I might be a slave, even though I was condemned to everlasting exile, yet what I wanted was as simple as that: not a kingdom but only joy.

My father was Romano Nirano, a Rom among Rom, a man who had kingliness in his smallest fingertip. As you know I was sold away from him when I was seven, but I can see him now as if he were standing right beside me, the broad face with heavy cheekbones, the powerful brooding eyes deep in their hoods, the heavy flowing mustache, the grand sweep of black hair streaming across his forehead. It is my face too. We have borne that face down through all the thousands of years since we were driven forth from Romany Star and I think it is a face that will endure to the end of all time. As will we.

He was already a slave when I was born. From
his
father he had inherited such a grand catastrophe of debts that there was no question of paying it off in five lifetimes. The old man had been a speculator in moons and was caught short in the Panic of 2814 when all the heavy metals completely lost their value; and after that we were destined to be paupers for centuries. My father could have wiped it all off by a bankruptcy, but my father thought bankruptcy was cowardly.

So he sold himself and my mother and my five brothers and sisters and me in return for a quit-claim. The family debts were wiped off the books and we became the slaves of Volstead Factors, a great interstellar corporation that was itself an imperial fiefdom.

"There's no disgrace in being a slave," my father told me. I was five years old and I had just discovered that I was different from most other children. I belonged to someone else. "It's a business arrangement, that's all. It may be an inconvenience but it's never a disgrace. It's an arrangement that you want to alter as soon as you can, of course, and if you have the chance and you don't take it then
that's
a disgrace. But aside from that there's no shame involved in it."

He was referring to modern slavery, you must realize. The institution was very different in ancient times. But then everything was. We may use the same name for a thing today that the ancients did-"slave," "king," "emperor," "ghost"-but the meaning that the word contains is not at all the same. The distant past is not simply a foreign country, as someone once said, but another universe altogether.

I learned that I was a slave before I learned that I was Rom. Or to put it more accurately I always knew that I was Rom but it wasn't until I was six that I came to know that most other people were not.

We spoke Romany at home and Imperial outside and we shifted from one to the other without difficulty. I thought that everyone did the same. My mother told us old Rom tales, stories of gods and demons, of sorceries and witchcraft, of heroic journeys by caravan across strange far-off lands. I thought that everyone knew those tales. We kept Rom treasures in our house, gold pieces, musical instruments, brightly colored scarves, sacred icons. I never entered the houses of my playmates and so I never knew that they had no such possessions.

When I was six I went out one day to carve a gloryball from the gloryball tree on the riverbank and when I got there I found my sister Tereina being attacked by a band of other children. Tereina was twelve then and her attackers, both boys and girls, must have been eight or nine years old, so that she towered over them; but there were half a dozen of them and they were tormenting her. "Rom trash, Rom trash, Rom trash!" they were chanting as they circled round and round her. "Rom, Rom, Rom, Rom!"

They were trying to snatch away the necklace at her throat. It was a chain of gleaming wind-scarab shells that my father's brother had brought back as a gift for her from Iriarte and it was the most precious thing she had, pulsing with light of a hundred subtle colors. Tereina slapped frantically at the clutching hands. She was too tall for them, but they had managed to rip open her blouse and her breasts were showing, and I saw long red scratches on her skin.

"Rom trash, Rom trash, Rom trash-"

She saw me and cried my name. And asked me in Romany to help her, and then said in Imperial, "Yakoub, give them the evil eye! Put the spell on them, Yakoub!"

I was only six. But I was big and strong and I had no reason to be afraid of them. And my mother had told me the legends of the evil eye, the black magic that the drabarne, the old Gypsy witches, had used to make their enemies suffer. Some of those legends are pure fantasy and some are real, though at that age I had no way of knowing which was which. To me everything was real then and I thought I could hurl my sister's tormentors into the heart of the sun if only I said the right words and made the right gestures. I think they thought so too; for I made my eyes change and puffed out my cheeks and crooked my arms above my head and marched toward them, chanting, "Iachalipe, iachalipe, iachalipe!"-enchantment, enchantment, enchantment!-and they turned and fled, squealing like frightened pigs. I roared with laughter and screamed curses at them and squirted my urine after them to mock them.

Tereina was weeping and trembling. I comforted her the way a man comforts a woman, reaching up and putting my arms around her, though I was only a child. Then I asked, "Why were they doing that? Because we are slaves?"

"Why would they care that we are slaves? Half of them are slaves too."

"Then why-"

"Because we are Rom, little brother. Because we are Rom."

So that evening it was necessary for my father to explain a great many things to me that I had never known, and after that evening life would always be different for me.

"We call them Gaje," he told me. "Which means, in Imperial, a fool, a bumpkin, a clod-hopper. Their minds are slower than ours and they think in a clumsy plodding way. We go from one to five to three to ten while they are moving slowly along, one two three four. Of course some of the Gaje are quicker than others. The emperor is a Gajo and so are his high lords, and they all have very quick minds indeed. But most of the Gaje are simpletons and we have had to put up with their stupidity ever since we came to live among them. And they know how much quicker we are than they. Which is why they once persecuted and oppressed us, and why even now they fear us and mistrust us, though most of them would deny that they do."

"And are there many of these Gaje?" I asked.

"Ten thousand of them," my father said, "for every one of us. Or maybe more. Who can count the Gaje? They are like the stars in the heavens. And we are very few, Yakoub. We are very few."

My head was swimming with these surprises. My father, when he walked down the street, carried himself like a king; and I had thought we were people of great worth indeed, even though just now we might happen to be slaves. And now to learn that I belonged to a sparse and insignificant race, that we Rom were like scattered flecks of white foam in a vast sea of Gaje, came to me with stunning impact. In the eye of my mind I saw now my father's face and the faces of my father's brothers standing out in a crowd of Gaje and I understood for the first time how different they were, different in the set of their jaws, in the fire of their eyes, in the black luster of their thick strong hair. A race apart, an alien people-more alien even than I could suspect-

"You know there once was a place called Earth, Yakoub?"

"Earth, yes."

"Destroyed long ago, ruined, shattered by Gaje idiocy. We lived there, we and the Gaje, before we all came out into the worlds of the stars. They called us Gypsies then. And a great many other names, Zigeuners, Romanichels, Gitanes, Tsigani, Zingari, Mirlifiches, Karaghi, dozens of names, because they had dozens of languages. Because they were too stupid and quarrelsome to speak only one, and so they befuddled themselves with tongues. We wandered among them, always strangers. Never staying in the same place for long, for what was the point of that? No one wanted us. They despised us and always schemed to harm us; so we stayed put only until we had earned a few coins by begging or telling fortunes or sharpening their knives, or until we had stolen enough to eat for a few days more, and then we moved along."

"Stolen?" I said, shocked.

He laughed and put his huge hands on my shoulders, gripping me in that firm loving way of his, and he gently rocked me back and forth as I stood before him. "
They
called it stealing. We called it harvesting. The fruits of the earth belong to all men, eh, boy? God gave us appetites and put into the world the means to satisfy those appetites; when we take what we need, we are simply obeying God's commandment."

"But if we took things that didn't belong to us-" I said, thinking of those clutching Gaje fingers reaching for my sister's precious necklace.

"This was long ago and life was harsh. They would have let us starve, so we took what we needed, grass for our horses, wood for our fires, some pieces of fruit from the trees, perhaps a stray chicken or two. How could they deny us the things that were in the world to use when we were hungry, when we were thirsty?"

And my father sketched a picture for me of Rom life on the Gaje Earth that left me dazed and chilled. A race of shabby unkempt people, vagabonds, charlatans, beggars, thieves, weavers of spells, charmers of snakes, dancers and blacksmiths and tinkers and acrobats, traveling in rickety caravans from land to land, making their camps on the outskirts of towns amid terrible filth and squalor, keeping themselves together by an endless juggling act of trickeries and improvisations. Forced into a life of lying and cheating, of begging, of all manner of desperate struggles. Scorned and despised, feared, whispered about. Even put to death-put to death!-for no crime other than that of being unlike the dreary settled folk among whom they roamed. I began to see this lost world of Earth as a kind of hell where my ancestors had undergone a torment for thousands of years.

As he spoke I began to cry.

"No," he said, and he shook me, hard. "There's nothing to sniffle about. They made us suffer but they never broke our spirit. We had our life and the Gaje had theirs, and perhaps theirs was more comfortable, but ours was truer. Ours was the right life. We were kings of the road, Yakoub! We soared on the high winds. We tasted joys that were altogether unknown to them. And we still do. Look what has become of us, Yakoub: the former thieves, the former beggars, the raggle-taggle Gypsies! Kings of the road, yes, and now it is the road between the stars! Down through the years we have kept to our ways. Maybe some of us slipping away from them now and then, sure, but always coming back, always bringing the Rom way back to life. And that way has brought us great comfort and goodness, with even greater things yet to come. We speak the Great Tongue. We live the Great Life. We travel the Great Road. And always the One Word guides us."

"The One Word?" I said. "What is that?"

"The One Word is:
Survive
!"

OF COURSE I STILL UNDERSTOOD VERY LITTLE of the full tale. He had told me nothing of how the Rom had led the way into the stars, of how the Imperium had come into being, or how we founded a Rom kingdom and wove it betwixt and between the fabric of the Imperium to become the true force that governed mankind. Pointless to try to explain all that to a child of six, even a Rom child. Nor did he tell me then of Romany Star and why it was that the Rom were a people apart from the Gaje; for it would have been cruelty to have me know so soon that we were set apart from the Gaje in a secret way that could admit of no compromise, that there was no kinship at all, that we were of a wholly alien blood. Not just different by customs and languages, but by the blood itself. There would be time for that dark knowledge later on.

All this took place in the city of Vietorion on the world Vietoris. I have not set eyes on that planet since I was taken from it by my second owners, more than a hundred sixty years ago, but it is forever bright in my memory: the first home, the starting point. The dazzling sky streaked with gold and green. The great sprawl of the city like a black shawl across the crumpled ridges of the vast plain. The astounding jagged red spear of Mount Salvat rising with the force of a trumpet-blast in an overwhelming steep thrust above us. Perhaps nothing was as immense as I remember it but I prefer to remember it that way. Even our house seems palatial to me: white tiles flashing in the sunlight, rooms beyond rooms, soft music far away, heavy musky-scented yellow flowers everywhere in the courtyard. Was it truly like that? On Vietoris we were slaves.