Star of Gypsies (36 page)

"Do you want to know how we steal chickens?" Rom boy teases wide-eyed Gajo. "Use a horsewhip, that's best. A quick flick of the whip and you lift her right out of the yard, not even a squawk out of her. Or else tie a bit of corn to a string and dangle it where the hen can swallow it. One yank and you have her."

"You still do these things?"

"Oh, that and plenty more!"

"Tell him how to drab the bawlo, Hojok!"

A blink, a smile. "What's that?"

"It means poisoning the pig. A sponge dipped in lard: feed it to some farmer's pig. The lard melts, the sponge gets big, the pig dies of the blockage in his gut. Then go to the farmer. Will you give us that dead pig? We can feed the meat to our dogs. Farmer doesn't know why the pig died, doesn't dare use the meat. Gives it to us. Roast pork at the feast!"

"Is that how it's done?"

"We steal small children, too. Bring them up as Gypsies."

"I think you're just having fun with me."

"Oh, no, sir, no, no. Authentic tales of Gypsy folkways. You spare a hundred francs, maybe? Fifty?"

Sara-la-Kali in the church, the black image. Servant-girl to the sisters of the Virgin Mary, Mary Jacob and Mary Salome, when they fled the Holy Land. A Gypsy girl, devout and good, daughter of a great Rom long ago. The sea cast the sisters up on the coast of Julien's France and Sara, because a vision had told her to do it, made a raft from her dress and went out to save them. And afterward the sisters baptized her and she taught the gospel among the Gaje and the Rom. "You know of the Black Virgin?" I once asked him. "Our Gypsy saint? Her statue in an old church in France?" But no, he knew nothing about her. Not a Catholic saint, I explained. Just our saint. But they kept her in a Catholic church all the same. Visited regularly-a big pilgrimage every year. He knew nothing. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I had been there, to his France, to see the pilgrimage of Sara-la-Kali. More than once, even. Poor Julien, almost a Rom at his soul, but ghosting will always be beyond his abilities. And so I have seen the very France, that burns so brightly in his dreams, that he will never see.

The long night's vigil in the crypt. On the left the old pagan altar, on the right the statue of Sara, in the center a Christian altar almost two thousand years old. All gone now, of course, all vanished when Earth ended. Not a trace left. But I can still go there, ghosting. To see my forefathers at their devotions. Put pieces of clothing on the hooks as offerings to Sara. Rub the holy medals and photographs and be healed, if you are sick. Then the march to the sea, carrying the holy images into the surf. Dip yourselves in too, pour the water over each other's heads, even dip your fortune-telling cards in the water to make them holier. Guitars. Violins. Candle-smoke. Crowds. All of us Rom marching together, and the Gaje looking on, awed and frightened. So long ago. I go there and I march with them. No one questions my right to be there.

"Mandi Angitrako Rom?" someone asks me. "Are you an English Gypsy?"

"No," I said. "Not English. Much farther away."

"Ah, yes. From America. From New York! From Romville in America! Sarishan, cousin! Sarishan!"

Just names to me. America. New York. All so long ago. My people. And I their king to be, walking among them, the man from the stars, laughing, weeping, singing.

THIS CASTLE IS GREAT IDA. STONE BATTLEMENTS, LOFTY arches, deep moat green with age. I see a ghost myself on an earlier visit glimmering on the far wall as the cannons boom. Here and there other Rom ghosts flicker in and out of sight like candleflames along the ramparts. There must be as many ghosts here as there are defenders.

Down in the trenches at the foot of the hill the invading Austrians roar insults at us. From on high in the castle the Gypsy defenders roar right back. The Austrians roar in one language and the Gypsies in another, but to me it is just noise. Hootchka! Pootchka! Hoya! Zim!

Polarca appears at my elbow. "Some fun, eh, you Yakoub?"

"But it always ends the same way."

"Still, how brave we are, yes?"

Yes. How brave. A thousand Gypsies in the service of Ferenc Perenyi, the Hungarian lord of the keep. When the Austrian army came he couldn't find any of his own people to defend his castle; but there were the Gypsies. Look at them! Twenty days under siege, and how they battle! We are always loyal when we are asked to fight. We never run away under attack. Except, of course, when it would be crazy to stay. Perenyi is long gone, out the back gate and fled, leaving his castle to its fate. So it is a Gypsy castle now. If we save it, we can keep it. But of course we have no way of saving it. The Austrians are unrelenting.

"Keep on fighting!" Polarca yells. "You're going to win!"

Sweaty men in grimy rags load the big guns and touch lights to them. Far below, the landscape erupts in flame and the Austrians scatter. The Gypsies reload. I would take a hand in it myself if I could. Reload, aim, fire. Reload, aim, fire. Polarca capers from battlement to battlement. The other Yakoubs run madly about, grinning, shouting, encouraging the fighters. We will save Ferenc Perenyi's castle from the Austrians for him, and if Perenyi never comes back the castle will be ours. Fire! Fire! The Austrians are fleeing!

But the cannons of the castle begin to fall silent.

"Shoot! Why don't you shoot?" Polarca screams.

No one can understand what he says. The din of the battle blots him out. The howling of the wind, the cries of the wounded. And who would understand the Romany of a Rom of the Kingdom, anyway, here on Earth sixteen centuries in the past? But still he tries to rally the fighters.

"Shoot! Shoot!"

"They're out of gunpowder," I say quietly in his ear.

So they are. The Gypsy leader stands on the battlements, shaking his fists. "You bastards!" he cries at the Austrians. That must be what he's saying. "You bastards! If we had any more powder we'd finish you off!"

The attackers are starting to realize, now, that the firing has stopped.

"Come on!" Polarca screams. "Bare hands! Knuckles and fists!"

The Austrians come racing up the hill. We can do nothing against them. Here and there a rifle fires a single shot; but our powder is gone and they sweep over the rim of the castle walls. The battle is lost. The castle is lost.

One lovely moment right at the end. The Austrian troops close in on the brave Gypsies, who are fighting to the last, clubs, knives, fists, anything. And the attackers see that there are no Hungarians here, that only Gypsies remain to defend the castle. The Austrian general appears. He makes a sweeping gesture with both his arms. And calls out. "Run, Gypsy, run as fast as you can!" There will be no attempt to take prisoners. The defeated Gypsies quickly slip away, and the Austrians let them do it, and Great Ida is lost. Only a few Rom ghosts remain. There is Polarca, far off up there. There is another Yakoub, and yet another, high in the battlements. And there? Valerian? Familiar faces everywhere. It was a glorious defeat and we have all come to see it. Some of us many times. That is what all our history is like, I suppose. One glorious defeat after another. Always defeats, alas. But always glorious.

Sit on the bank of a river and wait. Sooner or later the corpse of your enemy will come floating by.

YOU UNDERSTAND THAT DUNGEON LIFE WASN'T ALL simply a lot of merry ghosting around. You can ghost only so much, and then you start getting sick of it. Up and out, far and away, enough and too much: the ectoplasmic life has its joys but eventually they can pall on you.

Of course, life in a dungeon palls too, and faster. But it's less strenuous. Ghosting takes a lot out of you at any age. (I think it took more out of me when I was twenty than it does a hundred fifty-odd years later.) So the trick is to hold a balance between the boredom of not ghosting at all and the exhaustion of doing too much of it. That's the trick in every aspect of life. You commit this excess and then you commit that excess and everything averages out in the middle, if you're lucky. If you survive long enough you can say that you've led a nice moderate life. The theory of countervailing excesses. In the long run all forces come into balance and all extremes cancel out. This is known as the process of regression to the mean. It makes for a very happy life, in the long run. Of course, in the short run you can go out of your fucking mind.

Nothing as drastic as that happened to me in Shandor's oubliette. I ghosted here, I ghosted there, and in the intervals between ghosting I counted the flagstones in the floor, I counted the stones making up the walls, I calculated the quantity of gold that must be scattered atom by atom through the floors and the walls, I played with my snakes, I told stories to my slime mold, I tried to catch my protozoa by their whirling tails, and when the rats came out to dance I made speeches to them in several languages and dialects.

All in all it was much like taking a very long relay-sweep journey, but somewhat more interesting, because on a relay-sweep journey you don't get snakes and slime molds and protozoa and rats to divert you from the colossal boredom of the journey. Or anything else. On the other hand, you
are
on a journey, and you will eventually get somewhere. One thing that was beginning to occur to me as the hours turned into days and the days tied themselves into skeins of indeterminable length was that I might not get anywhere at all down here. This was an oubliette, after all. And what is the traditional use of an oubliette? Why, to file away and forget an inconvenient prisoner. Forever, if necessary.

My intuition had said that it would be a useful move, politically speaking, to allow Shandor to incarcerate me. Ordinary people wouldn't think so. They would say that it's lunacy to hand yourself over to a monstrous wicked villain like Shandor. Well, of course it is. Any simpleton can see that. But I'm not a simpleton and I'm not ordinary people, and I perceive life as a chess game. The good player learns to look five or six moves ahead. Which is what I had done. And thereby had landed myself in this dismal oubliette, precisely as I expected. Now I was starting to think that I might just have outsmarted myself.

Fortunately, I'm not given to long spells of brooding and despair. Instead I gave myself long spells of counting flagstones and making speeches to rats. And ghosting hither and yon on any number of worlds in all accessible eras. It passed the time.

And one day Shandor paid me a visit.

There was the usual clanking and creaking outside that told me that one of the robot jailers was bringing me the evening tray of mush and weak tea. Then I heard some
un
usual clanking and creaking and the front section of the wall began to slide back. Shandor stood there, glowering in at me. He was wearing a preposterous red robe and a yellow scarf, and he had the seal of office mounted on his breast, going full blast all up and down the spectrum.

"You're too early for dinner," I said. "But sit down anyway and make yourself at home. Would you like some champagne?"

He didn't smile. He looked tense and mean, even more so than he generally did. Pulling himself up tall in what he must have hoped was a kingly way, he stalked around the cell like a conqueror.

The seal of office was blindingly bright in the dimness of the cell. "Do you mind turning that thing off?" I asked. "You're scaring the snakes. You aren't entitled to be wearing it anyway, you know."

"Don't start in with me, Yakoub."

"Who started with whom? I was sitting down here minding my own business when you barged in. Scattering all that goddamned noisy light around. I have a right to peace and quiet in my own cell."

Sourly he said, "You're really a madman."

"I don't think so."

"Why are you making this much trouble for me?"

"Me? Trouble?"

"And for the entire Rom nation."

I sat up, all attention. "What's this? Strange words out of Shandor's mouth! You express concern for the welfare of the Rom nation, my son? You?"

"You are determined to make me angry, aren't you?"

"Am I?"

"This time you're not going to succeed. I've come to offer you a deal, father."

"
Father
. When did I last hear
that
word from you?"

"I will not let you goad me." He sat down on the stone bench facing me, close enough so I could grab him and slap him around again if I felt like it. Slapping him had driven him berserk, that other time. He seemed to be daring me. For a long while he stared at me as though trying to read my mind. Finally he said, "You abandoned the Kingdom. Everyone agrees on that. You announced your abdication and you disappeared, leaving us all in the lurch. For five years there was no king. The whole Rom nation cried out for a new king. Even the
Empire
called for one. You should have heard Sunteil bitching and moaning. The emperor's a zombie, he said, and the Rom don't have a king either. The whole governmental structure is going to disappear down the power vacuum. What's wrong with you people, Sunteil said. Why don't you elect a new king? So finally we did."

"The election was invalid," I said mildly.

His eyes flashed fire, but he kept himself under tight control.

"Why?"

"Because the krisatora never ratified my abdication. A Rom king
can't
abdicate. There's no tradition of abdication."

"I tell you they did ratify. I was there when they did it."

"The day they elected you?"

"Yes," he said.

"You're the son of a king. A king's son can't be king."

"Just because it's never happened before doesn't mean it can't ever be done."

"A convicted criminal has never been elected king either."