Star of Gypsies (6 page)

"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.

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.

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.

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 grasp. 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?"