Star of Gypsies (20 page)

As it happened I had suffered a little accident just a few moments earlier. The snail I was following had suddenly gone into high gear, and in my effort to keep up with him I had slipped on a patch of the red-leafed moss and gone skidding belly-down into a mound of dung the size of a small asteroid.

"I need to wash first," I told the foreman. "I'm all covered with-"

"Now," he said.

"But I'm-"

"
Now
."

They brought me before a man of astounding presence and power, who might have been fifty years old, or eighty, or a hundred fifty. I never knew, and he never seemed to grow a day older in all the years I was with him. He was slender for a Rom, almost slight, with narrow sloping shoulders and a shallow chest, and he wore no mustache. In his left ear were two silver rings, an ancient style just coming back into favor among us then. There was wondrous shrewdness in his face: a quick sly smile, just a wry twitch of his cheek, really, that warned potential adversaries to beware. He was no one you would want to try to best in a bargain. To say he looked shrewd was like saying that water looks wet. His eyes were ferociously penetrating. I felt transparent before those eyes: he was seeing my guts and my bones. As I stood before this formidable regal man all splattered and plastered and encrusted with snail-slops, he reached out his hand toward me.

"Closer."

"Sir, I-"

"Closer, boy. What's your name?"

"Yakoub. My father is Romano Nirano of Vietoris."

"Romano Nirano, eh?" He seemed impressed, or so I imagined. "How old are you?"

"Going to be thirteen, I think."

"You think. Runaway slave, are you?"

"A traveler, sir."

"Ah. A traveler. Of course. The grand tour of the universe, beginning with the celebrated snail-honey farms of Nabomba Zom. What are you, Kalderash Rom?"

"Yes, sir."

"Are you good with machines, as all the Kalderash are supposed to be?"

"My father is the greatest mechanic in the staryard of Vietorion."

"Your father is, yes." He nodded and pondered a moment. Then he turned and beckoned into another room. "Malilini? Is this the one you meant?"

A woman came out, or a girl; I was never sure. She might have been sixteen, or twenty-six, or thirty-six. Her age would always be her secret. She was unusually beautiful, and beautifully unusual. Her hair was an azure cloud, her eyes were warm and dark and set very far apart, her lips were full and inviting. I had seen that face before, but where? One of the whores in the mining town? No, none of them had been as beautiful as this. Some passenger on the starship? No. No, I remembered now: it was the face of the lovely ghost who had come to me several times on Megalo Kastro, both at the beggars' lodge and when I lay drifting on the living sea. She had never spoken to me, only stared and smiled. We looked at each other now as though we had known each other a long while.

"Yakoub," she said. "At last."

I was bitterly ashamed, standing before such beauty in my dung-stained work-clothes.

"My daughter Malilini," said the kingly man. "I am Loiza la Vakako." He gestured to his robots. "Clean him. Dress him." They stripped me naked in an instant. I felt less ashamed being naked before her, before him, than I had been in my dreadful filth. They sprayed me and dried me and trimmed my hair and to my amazement they even ran a shaving-beam over my downy cheeks, and then they wrapped me in a pearly gray robe with a red sash and a high collar of deep rich blue. One of the robots spun a mirror out of air molecules in front of me to let me inspect myself. I was lovely. I was lost in admiration of myself. All this had taken only minutes. Malilini was glowing with pleasure at my transformation. Loiza la Vakako came close and examined me. He was scarcely any taller than I was. He studied me, nodding, obviously satisfied.

Then he took my elegant collar in both his hands and with one quick yank he ripped it halfway loose on the left side. I was stunned and appalled.

Loiza la Vakako laughed, a great whooping Rom laugh.

"May all your clothes rip and wear out like that! But may you live in health to a great old age!"

I realized that he was speaking to me in Romany. It was one of his Lowara customs, this ceremonial tearing of my new finery. He clapped me on the back and led me outside. By this time I understood that he was the Rom baro here, the great man of this planet, and I was going to live with him. I was not allowed to go to my hut for my things; but when we arrived at his palace after a three-hour flight across the shimmering wonder of that magnificent continent, my few pitiful little possessions were waiting for me in my suite of rooms, along with a host of lavish new belongings whose uses I was barely able to comprehend.

Now did I truly come to learn the meaning of splendor. The palace of Loiza la Vakako stood on the shore of a sea nearly as strange as the one that had come close to claiming my life on Megalo Kastro, for its water was red as blood, and throbbing heat came from it, almost at boiling temperature. Then there was a beach of pale lavender sand sloping steeply up toward a broad ridge where, amid a dense garden of shrubs and trees from a hundred worlds, the palace rose in airy swoops and arabesques. I never knew how many rooms it had, and very likely the number changed from day to day, for the palace was a thing of billowing fabric and sliding struts, light as a spider's web, forever transforming itself in new and ever more lovely ways as the rays of the hot blue sun waxed and waned through the day. Here I would live as a young Rom prince, dressed in the finest of robes, a new one every day, and dining on delicacies such as I had never imagined before and have never tasted since; here I would discover the meaning of wealth and power and the responsibilities that such things bring; I would have my first understanding of the mysteries of ghosting; here too I would learn a thing or two about the nature of love. But the greatest lesson of all that I would learn on Nabomba Zom had to do with the impermanence of grandeur and pleasure and comfort: for after having lived in the greatest of luxury until I had come to take such things utterly for granted, I was to see it all snatched from me in a moment. And snatched from the lordly Loiza la Vakako as well; but that was far in the future just then.

HE HAD EIGHT DAUGHTERS BUT NO SONS. DAUGHTERS are a delight-I have had many of them myself, and would gladly have had more-but there is a way that a man feels about his sons that is quite different from the way he feels about daughters, and it has to do with the fact that some day we must die. When a man sees his son he sees the image of himself: himself reborn, himself regenerated, his own replacement, his claim on the future. Through his sons he marches onward into the centuries to come. They bear his face; they have his eyes, his chin, his mustache, his heart and balls. I love my daughters with all my heart but they cannot do that special thing for me that a son can do, and there is a difference in that, and any man who says it is not so is lying to you or to himself or both. At least this is it how it is among the Rom, and has been since the beginning of time. It may be otherwise for the Gaje; I have no way of knowing and no great concern about it.

I would not make too much of this matter. But when a man is as powerful as Loiza la Vakako, and has no sons, and takes in an unknown little dung-splattered boy to live in his home, there might be significance in it. Six of his daughters were married and lived in the far reaches of Nabomba Zom or on its major moons. He treated their husbands as princes but not, I think, as sons. A seventh daughter-Malilini-lived with him at the palace. Nothing was ever said of the eighth, though her portrait hung beside the other seven in the great hall; she had quarreled with her father long before, over what I will never know, and had taken up residence in some far corner of the galaxy.

Loiza la Vakako also had a brother, who ruled two of the outer and less blessed worlds of this solar system. Pulika Boshengro was his name and Loiza la Vakako rarely spoke of him, though he too was in the family portrait gallery, a dark man with a narrow forehead and a long dour face. In the portrait he looked so little like Loiza la Vakako that it was hard for me to believe that they had sprung from the same womb; but when I finally met him, many years later, I was able to see the resemblance instantly: in the bones beneath the flesh, in the soul behind the eyes.

Grand though his palace was, Loiza la Vakako allowed himself surprisingly little time to take joy of it. Even in him, that settled and contemplative man, the Rom restlessness dominated. He was constantly on the move, forever setting forth on journeys of inspection across his far-flung domain. He had to know what was going on everywhere. Though all the overseers of his plantations were capable and loyal, Loiza la Vakako could not allow himself to be a mere absentee master. And also he was Rom baro here, he was head of the Gypsy kumpania of Nabomba Zom, which meant that he had all manner of judicial and ritual responsibilities to carry out among his people.

From the beginning I often rode beside him when he made these tours. And learned more of the art of governing in a single afternoon than six years at a university could have given me.

Nabomba Zom is one of the nine kingly worlds of the galaxy. That is, it is a planet that was especially chosen by the Rom as their own, when the first settlement of the stars was carried out nine hundred or a thousand years ago. The rulers of the kingly worlds-the others are Galgala, Zimbalou, Xamur, Marajo, Iriarte, Darma Barma, Clard Msat, and Estrilidis-hold their power, technically speaking, by direct grace of the King of the Rom, and each has the privilege of nominating one of the nine krisatora, the judges of the highest Rom court. Of course I knew very little of all this when I first came to live with Loiza la Vakako, but gradually he educated me in the intricacies of the system by which we hold our sprawling realm together.

As I traveled with him I came to comprehend something I had never suspected as a schoolboy on Vietoris or as a slave on Megalo Kastro: that to rule is a burden, not a privilege. There are certain rewards, yes.

But only a fool would accept that burden for the sake of the rewards. Those who hold power do so because they have no choice: it is God's decree that has descended upon their heads and they must obey. Even if Syluise thinks it is not so.

I watched Loiza la Vakako, then, making decisions about the planting of crops or the damming of streams, about the price of grain, about trade with other planets, about taxes and import duties. I watched him holding court and settling the bewildering disputes of petty people in outlying provinces. And I thought of the lesson they had been trying to teach me on my last day at school, about the Thirteenth Emperor and how hard he worked. I had wondered then why an emperor would want to work so hard, when supreme power was his. Why not spend all your days and nights in feasting and singing and sipping fine wine? Now I understood that there was no choice about the work. It was the price of supreme power. It was what supreme power was: the privilege of toil beyond the comprehension of ordinary beings. There had never been any ruler, I realized-not even the famous wicked tyrants, not even the murderous monstrous villains-who had not found himself harnessed to the plow the moment he ascended the throne of office.

Still, there were comforts if you wanted them. A bit of compensation, I suppose. Loiza la Vakako toured his realm in an air-car that was a little palace in itself, a sleek teardrop-shaped vehicle bright as fire that moved with the speed of dreams. When you were aloft you had no sense of motion: you might have been drifting on a magic carpet. And there were soft wondrous draperies fashioned from the black-and-scarlet mantles of the great clam of the Sea of Poets, there were cushions upholstered in the shining leather of sand-dragon skin, there were floating globes of pure cool light. When we dismounted we were greeted by bowing officials who had strewn carpets of petals for us, and servants were waiting with fresh robes, bowls of fragrant juices, ripe fruits, smoked meats of mysterious origin.

Yet despite all this magnificence Loiza la Vakako's private quarters, both aboard the air-car and wherever he stopped to spend the night, were always strangely austere: a thin mattress on the floor, plain white wall-hangings, a pitcher of water by his side. It was as if he accepted the grandeur as something necessary, a requirement of office, but gladly put it all aside when he could be alone. If you would see the truth of a man, look at the room where he sleeps.

Nabomba Zom is a world that lends itself to magnificence. I have never seen any place more beautiful except for Xamur the matchless, which no world could surpass. But Nabomba Zom comes close. There is the amazing scarlet sea, which at sunrise reverberates as though struck by a hammer when the first blue rays of morning fall upon it. There are the pale green mountains soft as velvet that run down the spine of the great central continent, and the chain of lakes known as the Hundred Eyes, black as onyx and just as glistening, that lies east of them. The Viper Rift, that serpentine chasm five thousand kilometers long, whose walls shine like gold as they descend an unmeasurable distance to the fiery river in its remote depths. The Fountain of Wine, where invisible creatures carry out natural fermentation in a subterranean basin and a geyser sprays their delightful product into the air every hour. The Wall of Flame… the Dancing Hills… the Web of Jewels… the Great Sickle…

And all the fertile fields, from which every manner of crop pours forth. There is no world more bountiful. Even the dung of the giant snails, as I had already had occasion to discover, was of no little value.

Of course I didn't spend all my time touring this planet of wonders in Loiza la Vakako's air-car. There was the rest of my education to consider. I could read and write, more or less, but that was all the formal learning that I had arrived with. Loiza la Vakako had reasons-sound ones, as I would discover-for wanting me frequently to travel by his side as he carried out his official functions, but he also brought in tutors for me at the palace and he required me to take them seriously. Which I did; I have many appetites, and one of them is for knowledge. There is more to life than belching. I applied myself to my studies with zeal and dedication.