Star of Gypsies

by Robert Silverberg

  "Which one do you want to believe?"

  "There was never any question. Yakoub will live forever."

  Oh, Lord! Hero-worship, a bright purple case of it! He was trying hard not to tremble. Quickly he made three of the signs of respect, one after another without pause, including one I hadn't seen for at least forty years. I began to wonder whether he was really all that young, or simply a good remake. But then I saw that he had to be young. There's a look of rapturous awe that comes into a young man's eye in the presence of true masculine power and authority that simply can't be faked and absolutely can't be built back into anyone past the age of thirty by some remake artist. This boy had that look. He knew that he was standing before a king; and that knowledge was melting his bones.

  He told me that his name was Chorian and that he came from the world known as Fenix in the Haj Qaldun system and that he was a Rom of the Kalderash stock. That is my branch of the tribe as well. He told me also that he had been trying to find me for three years.

  None of that was particularly interesting to me. The first impact of his presence was dying down now. It took a moment or two, but I was calm again. I turned away from him and went on with my fishing.

  In this part of the glacier the ice was perfectly clear and you could see the long tubular forms of spice-fish, both the red kind and the superior turquoise variety, gliding serenely through the depths of the frozen river fifty meters down. I had a vibration-net down there, fluttering in the molecular breeze.

  He said, "The Lord Sunteil instructed me to find you."

  Now that was interesting. Sunteil floated into view in my mind: the emperor's right-hand lordling, the favored successor, smooth and slippery and perhaps a little sinister. I glanced back over my shoulder and gave Chorian a long slow cool look.

  "You're in the service of the Empire, are you?"

  "No," he said, "I'm in the pay of Lord Sunteil." There was a wink in his voice. "That's not the same thing."

  Yes, I definitely had underestimated him. That was a fine distinction, very nicely put: he had allowed himself to be bought, but he hadn't sold them anything. I wanted to hug him for that. The Rom blood may be running thin, I sometimes think, but it hadn't yet turned entirely to water if this boy was any evidence. And of course Fenixi in general have a well-earned reputation for slyness and slipperiness. I had let Chorian's air of seeming naivete mislead me.

  I didn't give him so much as a glint of approbation, though. I didn't want him to get too smug too soon. That's a peril to any Rom; you start bamboozling the poor Gaje before you've cut your first teeth, and you find out how easy it is, and it can make you smug, which is just one province away from being careless. We have never been able to afford to be careless. So instead of praising his nice little distinction I simply shrugged. In any case I had my fishing to attend to just then.

  My net was nearly in position. The moment was critical and called for all my concentration. It's a ticklish business, lowering a vibration-net through solid ice. I ran my fingers over the keyboard as if I was coaxing a tune from my zither, and the net dipped and bobbed and billowed.

  Down in the ice a turquoise spice-fish picked up the song of the net and swung around to stare at the net's gaping shimmering mouth. Come on, you lovely bastard, wriggle right in! But the fish wasn't about to do that. He looked up through the ice at me and I saw his huge golden-green eyes, wise and solemn, glowing like twin suns. That is one smart fish, I thought. That fish has Romany blood in him. I could hear him laughing at me through fifty meters of ice. That fish is my cousin, I thought.

  "You ever do any vibration-fishing?" I asked.

  "There's no winter on Fenix. I've never seen ice before."

  "Ah. I should have remembered that."

  "I went a lot of places while I was searching for you. I was on Marajo, I was on Duud Shabeel, I was on Xamur. I never saw any ice in those places either."

  I tickled the keys and swung the mouth of the net away from the turquoise spice-fish. I wasn't eager to catch him any longer, not after the way he had looked at me.

  Chorian said, "Xamur is where I finally was able to find out where you had gone."

  "God gave you a nose. It's only right that you should use it for smelling things out. Why did Sunteil send you?"

  "The Lord Sunteil is afraid that you're planning to return to the Empire," the boy said. "He thinks this abdication of yours is some sort of ruse, that you're just biding your time until you're ready to come back. And when you come back you'll be more powerful than ever before."

  That went right to my gut, those words. In amazement I realized that Sunteil was actually on to me. Even though none of my own people, apparently, had managed so far to figure out my game, somehow Sunteil had.

  Which meant not only that Sunteil was smart, which I had known for a long time, but that he might be smarter than I had allowed for. That could cause trouble for us when the old emperor finally died and Sunteil, as most people expected, succeeded him. For I had no doubt at all that I was going to have to deal face to face with Lord Sunteil, I or my immediate successor, concerning matters of the highest importance to the future of the Rom people, when Sunteil became emperor.

  But if he had fathomed my strategy, what was the point of his sending Chorian all the way out here to tell me so? There had to be a trick somewhere.

  "I don't get it," I said. "The Lord Sunteil sends a young Rom to find out whether the old Rom king means to make trouble? What sense does that make? Does he really think you'll spy on me for him? That's too simple."

  "The Lord Sunteil is a subtle man. And devious."

  "So I have heard, yes."

  "Perhaps he thinks you'll tell me things that you'd never tell a Gajo. And maybe he actually does hope that I would tell them to him."

  "And would you?"

  Chorian looked at me in horror.

  "I have strong loyalty to Lord Sunteil, and he knows it. But I would never carry the secrets of the King of the Rom to him, not for anything. Never. Never."

  "Even if I wanted you to?"

  "What?"

  "Look," I said, "Sunteil's all wrong about what he thinks I'm up to out here, and it isn't in any way useful to anybody for him to go on believing any of that stuff. I want you to tell him the truth about my abdication. That can't be construed as betraying me. You took Empire money for this job, didn't you? Well, give the Empire what it's paying for. Go and let the Lord Sunteil know that he doesn't need to fret about my coming back to cause trouble. I have completely lost interest in power. Completely."

  God, could I ever lay it on! But just then I believed every word I was saying. That's the first rule of successful lying: believe your own bullshit, or no one else will. Right at that moment I knew as clearly as I knew I had two balls between my legs that I was done with being king. I hadn't felt that way five minutes ago and I probably wouldn't feel that way five minutes later, but what I was saying was what I believed with all my heart, right at that moment.

  Chorian stood there listening in that rapt adoring open-mouthed way of his, as though he bought every syllable of the nonsense I was spewing.

  Grandly I went on, "I've had a bellyful of it, boy, and I'm finished with it. The whole power thing has burned out, for me. The time has come for me to step aside for good. Mulano is where I mean to live. If the Lord Sunteil knew how good the fishing is here, he'd understand."

  A nice flourish to finish with, I thought.

  But Chorian was more complicated than I had been giving him credit for.

  "I'll tell the Lord Sunteil that, yes," the boy said sweetly, when I was done. "And should I tell your cousin Damiano that also?" All innocence, just a good-looking young messenger-lad running errands for his betters. "That you have no plan to return to the Empire? Even though there is great trouble among the Rom, because there has been no king? Even though you are the one who is best able to bring the crisis to an end?"

  4.

  I WASN'T EVEN REMOTELY EXPECTING THAT. In my amazemen
t I hit the keys so hard that the net turned mouth-downward just as an elegant red spice-fish was becoming curious about it. I should have realized that this was all going to be much less simple than it had seemed at first. Who was this kid really working for, anyway?

  "Damiano?" I yelped. "What does he have to do with this? Where did you talk with my cousin Damiano?"

  "On Marajo, at the City of Seven Pyramids. I told him that the Lord Sunteil had sent me after you, and he said, Yes, go, find the king and tell him that his throne is waiting for him."

  My heart started to pound in a nasty way.

  Calmly, calmly. How I hate it, when alarm bells start ringing like that inside my old bones! But between one eyeblink and the next I went into myself and turned down the adrenal flow. Sometimes wisdom is nothing more than proper control of your ductless glands.

  "I never had a throne," I said. "I never was king of anything."

  Chorian wasn't having any more of that line now, though.

  "You were Rom baro," the boy said. "The big Gypsy. The top man."

  "Never. Absolutely not. Get that whole idea out of your head." My hands were trembling a little. I didn't want Chorian to see that. To distract him I pointed and waved my arms and cried, "Look, there, do you see that fish nosing around the net?"

  It was another turquoise one, not as wise-looking as the first. I gave him my full attention. It was a convenient way of changing the subject until I had had a chance to work things out a little in my head.

  I could taste the spice-fish's sweet flesh already on my tongue: rosemary, turmeric, cumin, golden pepper. I made the net dance for him. I let it flutter toward him, I pulled it back, I made him beg to be caught. His long nose twitched as he zigged and zagged about. With marvelous agility he swam the crystalline depths, parting the ice as though it were not there.

  Come, pretty bastard! Come glide right in!

  "What's this crisis you were talking about?" I said carefully.

  "That there is no king. That ships of exploration are going forth and there is no plan. That disputes are arising and there is no one to settle them."

  I stared down at my fish, as though I could snare him by the power of my mind alone.

  "There are ways of managing these things even without a king," I said.

  "They have. For five years. But things are getting difficult and tense. Damiano says to tell you that now the high ones of the Rom want to elect a new king. They won't wait for you any longer, even the ones who never believed you were serious about abdicating. If you're definitely not going to come back, they're about ready to elect someone in your place."

  So that was it!

  That had been meant to hook me but good, that quiet statement just now. Push was coming to shove; Sunteil was not the only one who had figured out what I was really up to; and now my cousins of the Rom Kingdom were matching my bluff with one of their own. That was the real message Chorian had come here to deliver. He might be in Sunteil's pay but the one he actually served was Damiano. Which is to say that he served the Rom; which is as it should have been. Sunteil wanted information, yes. But Damiano wanted to make me come back. And this was his way of getting me to do it.

  Even now I wasn't going to let myself go for the bait. I couldn't, not now, not yet.

  "They need a king? Let them find a king, then."

  "But you are king!"

  "You didn't hear me the first time? How can they elect someone in my place when I never had a place?"

  "But that isn't so! How can you say you weren't king when you were king? You are king!"

  He was bewildered. He should have been. I had been working hard at bewildering him. I laughed. I left him to puzzle it out and went back to my fishing again. Swiftly, smoothly, I closed the net's mouth and swept it toward the surface of the glacier. The turquoise spice-fish leaped and sprang and writhed. I had him. I pulled the net up until it breached the glacier's skin, and I kept on lifting until it rose twenty meters into the air. The orange sun was high in the east and a streak of scarlet fire ran over the frozen land like a river of molten gold. In that brilliant light my fish changed colors a thousand times, screaming at me from every corner of the spectrum as I held him aloft. Then I sent a quick shaft of force through the rim of the net and the fish was still.

  "There," I said. Pride flooded through me. Even an idiot can be a king, and I can list plenty who have, but fishing with a vibration-net is a different story. It takes a quick eye and a pretty wrist. I was years in learning the skill and I doubt that there's anybody better at it. "You see that?" I crowed. "The timing, the coordination? There's real art in what I just did." The boy was gaping, mind still lost in the tangles of interstellar politics. I turned to him. "Boy, you are invited to join me for dinner tonight," I told him expansively. "At least once in your life you should know the taste of spice-fish."

  "Your cousin Damiano-"

  I glared. "Bugger my cousin Damiano with an ivory tusk! Let him be king, if he wants."

  "The kingship belongs by rights to you, Yakoub."

  "Where do you get all these idiotic ideas?" I said, sighing. "I never wanted to be king. I tell you ten thousand times: I never was king. I was king in their heads, maybe. All that is behind me. If they need a king, let them find someone else to be their king. Here is where I live. Here is where I'll die."

  I said it with real ringing conviction. I would have taken an oath that I was sincere, too. I can remember times when I swore eternal fidelity to Esmeralda with the same throbbing sincerity. And meant it, too.

  "Yes," I said again, grandiosely. "I have made my farewell to the Imperium. Here is where I'll die!"

  "No, Yakoub!"

  His eyes were glassy with shock. It went beyond mere love and reverence for me. I had messed up his head completely with my contradictory speeches and with this talk of living out my life on Mulano. Handicapped by his youth, he wasn't able to keep up with my swings and swerves. And when I spoke of dying, it was as if he saw in the mere possibility of my death his own unthinkable extinction sweeping inexorably toward him. If I could die, so could he. He grasped my arm and cried out with the wild silly romantic fervor of the truly young, "You mustn't speak that way. You will never die. Never!"

  I shrugged. "Be that as it may. If ever I was king, I'm king no more. Clear?"

  "And the succession-"

  "Bugger the succession. The succession doesn't interest me. I don't care an ox's foreskin about the succession. That's why I'm here instead of somewhere else. That's why I mean to-"

  Chorian gasped. His eyes went very wide. He made a little strangled gargling sound.

  It didn't strike me as likely that the web of confusions I had spun around him could have shaken him so profoundly. And I was right. Chorian gasped and gaped and gargled some more, and finally he managed to point past my shoulder, and I looked backward and saw what was really bothering him.

  Three snow-serpents had arrived on the scene.

  Death's lovely handmaidens, beautiful chilly ribbons of emerald green streaked with ruby and sapphire and speckles of gold leaf. They must have looked horrific to him, even though these were only small ones, no more than eight or ten meters long, each one melting a wide glistening track for itself as it slithered in easy curving glides toward the place where we stood.

  They had their eyes on my spice-fish. They were zeroing in on it from three different directions.

  "Oh, no, no, cousins," I murmured.

  Suddenly there was an imploder in Chorian's hand and he was fiddling with the focus. A vein stood out thick as a finger on his forehead. The grand gesture, again. I sighed. You have to be very patient with young men.

  "Don't," I told him, reaching up and pushing the weapon back into his pocket. "They're only scavengers. They won't harm us and it's a crime against God to harm them. But I'm not going to let them have my fish." I walked out to meet them. They wriggled down against the ice and became very still, like whipped dogs. The heat and throb of life bothers them. I could have kill
ed them with a touch: I have a lot of heat in me. "Sorry, cousins," I said gently. "This is a matter of me or you, and you ought to know how that has to come out. He's my fish, not yours. I worked damned hard for him."

  They wriggled a little. They looked sad and disconsolate. My heart went out to them.

  "I tell you what. Tonight let the king enjoyed his royal feast, cousins. Whatever's left will be yours in the morning. Is that all right?"

  Plainly it wasn't. But there wasn't much they could do about it. They looked to the fish, to me, to the fish again. They made little mournful sounds. My soul wept for them. This was a hard season. But I held my ground and after a moment they turned tail and went slithering away.

  Chorian was staring at me with that look of awe again.

  "They aren't dangerous," I said. "Big, yes, but sweet as pussycats and not half as ferocious. They're strictly carrion-eaters. You know that carrion-eaters are sacred, don't you? For they restore life to the worlds."

  But he had forgotten about the snow-serpents already. Something I had said was agitating him now.

  "You've been telling me over and over that you never were king. But just now you spoke of yourself as the king. The king will enjoy his royal feast tonight, is what you said. I don't understand you. Are you king or aren't you?"

  "I am not the king," I said. "But I am kingly."

  He looked at me, baffled.

  "You spoke of yourself as the king. I heard you."

  "A figure of speech."

  "What?" He was lost.

  "I have kingliness about me, and so I can speak of myself as the king, if it pleases me. And I can say I have been king, or I can say I have never been king, as it pleases me. Because the kingliness remains forever. The kingship may go, but not the kingliness, not ever, boy, not ever. Once you've taken on that burden and learned how to stand up underneath it, that strength never leaves you, even if the burden does." I slung the spice-fish over my shoulder. It must have weighed fifty kilos, but I wasn't going to let that trouble me. "So tonight you dine with the king, boy, and what you'll eat will be royal fare. And in a day or two you go back to wherever you came, is that understood? And you tell them that Yakoub meant it when he said he was tired of being king. Yakoub has abdicated. Permanently. Absolutely. Retroactively. You tell that to Sunteil. You tell that to Damiano. You can tell it to the emperor himself. It would be a mistake to doubt me."