"But you don't believe it."
"You do think you can be king and not be king at the same time. I should have realized that from the start. If anybody knows how your mind works, I do."
"What are you trying to say, Syluise?"
"I knew you in Cesaro o Nano's time, before you were king. I remember how you used to insist that you would never accept the throne in a million years, that the whole idea disgusted you, that you'd fling it in their faces if they ever tried to offer it to you. You said that again and again, and then when they did come to you you grabbed it as fast as you could and you didn't let go for fifty years. You think I take anything you say at face value, Yakoub? You're the only man I know who can hold six contradictory ideas at once and feel perfectly comfortable about it."
"I didn't want to be king. I did refuse the throne. Again and again, until I saw that I had to be king, that there was no option about it. And then I let them give it to me."
"And the abdication? Why did you do that?"
There was a sudden astonishing softening in her tone. For an instant she wasn't just dueling with me. She seemed actually to care. I felt myself melting with love. Like a boy, like a Chorian. Like a ninny.
"Do you really want to know?" I asked.
She came closer. The aurora around her died away and she descended until she was almost at ground level and almost within my reach. Just one kiss, I thought. Those rosy nipples hardening against my palms.
"I want to know, yes." Still soft, her voice.
"A tactical move," I told her.
Hot in my mind burned the memory of those last days before I had gone before the great kris to resign. That time of despair and turmoil in my soul, when wherever I looked I saw chaos and decay. The prancing young men and women decking themselves out to look like Gaje, the intermarriages, the star-pilots taking their little detours to do their little smuggling operations, and all the rest: the final decadence of an ancient great race, so it had seemed to me. I had tried to tell myself I was exaggerating, that I was growing crochety and conservative with age. But at last it had all exploded within me, suddenly, uncontrollably: a sense that everything was falling apart and that some desperate measure had to be taken. That was when I called the krisatora together and told them I was abdicating; and if I live ten thousand years I will never forget the looks of utter astonishment on their faces as I gave them the news.
She frowned. Like a cloud crossing the face of the sun.
"A tactical move?" she said. "I don't understand."
I took a deep breath. I had never spoken explicitly about this before, not with Polarca, not with anyone. But I had never been able to withhold anything from Syluise. "It seemed to me that things were going wrong in the Kingdom, that we had lost our direction, that we had forgotten our purpose. I needed to upset people. To shake people up. In order to get the Kingdom back on its course."
"Its course?"
"I'm speaking of Romany Star," I said.
"Oh, Yakoub!"
She sounded sad and loving and patronizing all at once. But more patronizing than anything else.
"Where are the Rom of Romany Star?" I demanded. "Do we want our true world again, or are we willing to live in exile forever? Do we even think of such things any more? The One True Place, Syluise: does that mean anything to you?"
Her aurora flared up again. I could no longer see her face.
"A fat, complacent people, rich and settled: is that who we are, Syluise? Piloting our ships, serving the Gaje, snuggling up to the Imperium? No. No. Once we lose sight of what really matters, we lose sight of our own selves. We become no better than Gaje. Is that what you want, Syluise? Maybe it is. Your beautiful Gaje hair. Your narrow Gaje waist." I felt anger mounting suddenly, rising and rising. "Do you understand? I saw my own people losing their way. And I their king, presiding over the whole catastrophe."
A sharp gust of wind cut across the ice-plain, lifting drifts of snow and hurling them at us. The hard white swirls went through her without her seeming to notice.
"And abdicating, Yakoub?" she said gently. "How is that going to make things better?"
"They need me," I said. "They've already sent one messenger out to urge me to come back. There'll be more. They'll beg me. They'll ask to know my terms. I'll tell them, then. And they'll have no choice. I'll be king again, Syluise. But this time they'll have to follow me wherever I lead them. And where I lead them will be Romany Star."
"Oh, Yakoub," she said again. Her aurora grew dense as the heart of a sun. I could no longer see her, but I heard her. Was she weeping, within that searing blaze of energy?
No. That was laughter, that sound.
Syluise! That heartless bitch. The force of the hatred I felt for her just then could have driven a fleet of starships from one end of the galaxy to the other.
3.
SOMETIMES WHEN I WAS ALONE I COULD FEEL the presence of the Gypsy kings of centuries gone by, crowding close within my soul. I felt Chavula close by, that little hard-edged man who had forced the Gaje to let us aboard their ships. And Ilika, with the flaming red beard, the one who showed how the leap was made, the quick conversion of Rom mind-force into the power of spanning the light-years. Claude Varna the great explorer, the finder of worlds. Tavelara, Markko, Mateo, Pavlo Gitano, all jostling within me, sharing their spirit with me, urging me onward. And there were other kings too, dark figures without names or faces, the kings of time immemorial, kings of the old world, the rough kings of the roads of Earth; and even older kings, kings of Gypsy Atlantis, kings even of Romany Star. On the day I became the high Rom baro they all had entered me and still they rode with me and I felt them within. And was grateful.
And who were these, these others lurking in the mists? I was unable to see them but I could feel them, mysterious, unknown. I had an idea who they were. Kings yet to come is who they were, Yakoub's successors, the kings of the unborn future, stirring in my soul. I knew that I would have to die in order to set them free to live out their destinies, and I felt some pain, knowing that; but it would have to be. That was all right. Give me a chance to live out my destiny, all you kings to come, and then you can have your own!
Syluise had laughed at me. Well, let her laugh. I knew why I had been given the kingship and I meant to accomplish what I had been chosen to bring about. They had chosen me because the vision was stronger in me than in anyone else; and even if all the others had lost sight of the vision now, I had not. I asked only one thing, that I would be allowed to live long enough. That was all I asked. One thing that I feared was that I would die without having given Romany Star back to my people. But what of it, you ask, if I did die too soon? I would be dead: what would anything matter to me then?
If you ask that, you understand nothing.
The power was within me, to achieve what must be achieved. If I had the power and I failed to make use of it, that was contemptible. My people would curse me forever. If there is a life after this life, I would blister and blacken there forever in their scorn. And if not-well, no matter. I must live as though all the Rom yet to be born are watching me. As though I dwell each day in the beacon glare of their scrutiny.
4.
YOU MIGHT THINK I'D HAVE HAD A CHANCE TO ENJOY a reprieve from all this socializing. But it wasn't long before I had company again.
This next visitor was confusing, because he was the Due de Gramont. Or his doppelganger. I wasn't sure which, and that was what was confusing. And disturbing.
Julien de Gramont is an old friend who has managed to tread a very neat line between the overlapping spheres of authority of the Rom Kingdom and the Empire. That's a measure of Julien's cleverness. By way of a profession Julien has set himself up in business as the pretender to the throne of ancient France, France having been one of the important countries of Earth around the year 1600 or so. France got rid of its kings a long time back, but that's all right; I can't see any real harm in claiming a lapsed throne. What I don't exactly understand, even though Julien has
tried to explain it to me seven or eight times, is the point of claiming the throne of a country on a planet that doesn't even exist any more. It has something to do with grandeur, he said. And gloire. That word is pronounced glwahr, approximately. French is a very strange language.
(Just in passing I want to point out, since the notion is not likely to occur to you on your own, that the Due de Gramont's beloved France was a place no bigger than a medium-big plantation would be on an average-size world such as Galgala or Xamur. Nevertheless France had kings of its own, and its own language and laws and literature and history and all the rest. And in fact was a very considerable place, in its time. I know that because I was there once-right around the time they were getting rid of their kings, as a matter of fact. It's an odd and somehow endearing thing about the Gaje of Earth that they found it necessary to divide up their one little planet into a hundred little separate countries. Of course that arrangement was a great pain in the buliasa for us when we lived among them. But all that came to an end a long time ago.)
The first couple of years I lived on Mulano I had had a doppelganger of the Due de Gramont living here with me. Julien had had it made up for me as a going-away gift when he heard of my abdication, because he knows I am fond of French cuisine, a field in which he has great expertise; so he thought I might like to have my own private French chef while I was living in my self-imposed exile.
But doppelgangers generally last only a year or two, or maybe a little longer in a cold climate like Mulano's. Then they fade away. They don't come back to life, either. My Julien doppelganger had vanished in the usual way at the usual time, several years back. When I saw what I took to be the doppelganger of the Due de Gramont picking his way toward me between the wiggling arms of my forest-pausing once or twice to pull off a leaf and pop it into his mouth, as if tasting it to see if it was worth using in some sauce-I couldn't make sense of it at all.
"Alors, mon vieux!" he cried. "Mes hommages! Comment ca va? Sacre bleu, how cold it is here!"
I gave him a blank look and backed away a little. Ghosts I understand, doppelgangers I understand, but the ghost of a doppelganger? No.
In a ragged shred of a voice I said, "Where did you come from?"
"Ah, is this the best greeting you can manage, mon ami?" Speaking to me coolly, from on high, ultra-French, miffed, deeply wounded. "I spend half a dreary interminability in the capsule of relay to get to this dreadful place, and you show no jubilation upon the sight of me, you evince no delight, you merely ask me, brusquely, without the littlest shred of courtesy, Where did I come from? Quel type! Where is the embrace? Where is the kiss on the cheeks?" He threw up his hands and burst into a crazy flurry of random French, like a robot translator gone berserk. "Joyeux Noel! Bonne Annee! A quelle heure part le prochain bateau? J'ai mal de mer! Faites venir le garcon! Par ici! Le voici! II faut payer!" And went capering around like a madman.
After a little while he subsided, as though his gears were winding down, and stood there sadly watching his own breath congeal in front of him.
"So you are not in any way glad to see me?" he said very quietly.
I studied him. Doppelgangers sometimes look a little transparent around the edges. This one didn't. This one didn't really seem like a doppelganger at all. It had Julien's quick darting piercing eyes, Julien's elegant movements. Its little dark mustache and small pointed beard were trimmed precisely in the right way, not a fraction of a hair askew, just as Julien's always were. Doppelgangers lose those small fine touches quickly. Entropic creep sets in and their definition starts to blur.
"You really are you, then?"
"Oui," he said. "I really are I."
"Truly Julien?"
"Sacre bleu! Nom d'un chien! Truly, truly, truly! What is the matter with you, cher ami? Where has your brain gone? Is it that this terrible cold-"
"The doppelganger you gave me," I said. "I couldn't figure out how a doppelganger could come back."
"Ah, the doppelganger! The doppelganger, mon vieux-"
"It faded away long ago, you know. So when I saw it again-when I thought I saw it-"
"Oui. Bien sur."
"How could I know? A doppelganger returning after it had faded? That isn't supposed to be possible. Some kind of trick? Some way of slipping an assassin past my guard? The devil's hairy hole, man! What was I supposed to think?"
"And what do you think now?"
I gave him another long close look.
He grew upset again when I didn't say anything. Waving his hands around, tossing his head in that stylishly frantic way of his. "Cordieu, cher ami! Mon petit Romanichel. Gitan bien-aime. Dear Mirlifiche, esteemed Cascarrot. It is only me! The true Julien! Vraiment, I am not a doppelganger. Nor an assassin. I am merely your own Julien de Gramont. N'est-ce pas? Can you believe that? What do you say, Gypsy king?"
Yes. Of course. How could I doubt it? He was the genuine item. No doppelganger could possibly generate so much heat, so much frenzy, so much exasperated passion.
I felt embarrassed.
I felt contrite.
I felt like a damned fool.
To mistake a man for his own doppelganger may not be a dueling offense, but it certainly isn't much of a compliment. And to do it to poor Julien de Gramont, with his royal pretensions and his excitable Gallic temperament-
Well, I apologized most profusely and he insisted that it was a harmless mistake and I invited him into my bubble and brewed up a batch of steaming coffee for him, the ancient Rom coffee, black as sin, hot as hell, sweet as love, and in five minutes it was all a forgotten matter, no offense intended, none taken. Julien had brought presents for me, two overpockets' worth of them, and he proceeded now to conjure them out of the storage dimension and stack them up in heaps on my floor. Sweet old Julien, still worrying about my gastronomic comfort! "Homard en civet de vieux Bourgogne," he announced, pulling out one of those cunning flasks that will prepare and heat your meal just so if you merely touch your finger to the go-button. "Carre d'agneu roti au poivre vert. Fricassee de poulet au vinaigre de vin. Pommes purees. Les filets mignons de veau au citron. Everything is labeled, mon ami. Everything is true French, no grotesque dishes of the Galgala herdsmen, no foul porridges of Kalimaka, no quivering monstrosities from the swamps of Megalo Kastro. Here. Here. You like kidney? You like sweetbreads? Fricassee de rognons et de ris de veau aux feuilles d'epinards. Eh, mon frere? Coquilles Saint-Jacques? Pate de fruits de mer en croute? Bouillabaisse Marseillaise? I have brought you everything."
"You're much too good to me, Julien."
"I have brought enough so that you can eat like a human being for two years, perhaps three. It is the least I can do for you, in this terrible savage solitude. Two years of the fine French cuisine." He gave me a sly look. "How long more do you think you stay here, mon cher? Two years, is it? Three, four?"
"Is that what you came here to find out, old friend?"
Color rose to his cheeks.
"It is of concern to me, your long absence from the worlds of civilization. I sorrow for you. Your people sorrow for you. You are a man of importance, Yakoub."
"Among the Rom," I told him, "we say 'important' when we mean 'corpulent.' Did you know that? 'A man of importance' means to us a man with a big belly." I looked at the flasks stacked all over the bubble, dozens of them, with any number of their cousins still tucked away in the storage dimension. I patted my middle, which has become kingly indeed in these my later years. "So that's why you brought all this stuff, Julien? You want me to be even more important than I already am?"
"The worlds call out for you, Yakoub." His stagy French accent suddenly was gone; he spoke in the purest Imperial. "There is great chaos out there, because there is no king. Ships are lost in the star-lanes; piracy increases; quarrels of great men are left unresolved. Your people have a great need for you. Even the Empire has a need for you. Do you realize that, Yakoub?"
"I intend no offense, Julien. But I want to know who told you to come here."
; He looked uncomfortable. He toyed with his little pointed beard. He fiddled with his flasks, he fooled with the labels. I left the question lying there in the air between us.
"What do you mean, who told me to come here?" he said finally.
"It's not a very complicated question, is it?"
"I came here because you are missed. You are needed."
"Don't hide behind passive verbs, Julien. Who misses me? Who needs me? Who paid you to stick yourself in a relay-sweep depot and come out to talk to me?"
Glumly he said, after a bit, "It was Periandros."
"Ah. The grand surprise."
"If you knew, why did you ask?"
"To see what you would say."
"Yakoub!"
"All right. So Periandros sent you. Does that mean Naria's man will be here next?"
He frowned. "What do you mean?"
"The three lords of the Imperium is what I mean. Sunteil's man left here a little while ago. Now you're here on behalf of Periandros. It stands to reason that Number Three will want to touch base with me too, and maybe the archimandrite as well, or even, God forbid, the emperor himself. If the emperor's still alive."
"The emperor is still alive," Julien said. "What's this about Sunteil?"
"He sent a Rom boy named Chorian."
"I know Chorian. Extremely young, but very competent. And very tricky, like all you Rom."
"Is he? Are we?"
"What is Sunteil troubled about?"
"That my abdication is some kind of hoax, and that I'll be coming back to the Empire when I'm least expected, to cause the greatest amount of trouble."
Julien beamed serenely. "Of course your abdication is some kind of hoax. The question that should be in Sunteil's mind is why you have perpetrated it, and what can be done to persuade you to give up the game you are playing." To that I made no response, but he didn't seem to have expected any. He watched me for a moment and then, with only the smallest knowing twitch of his exquisite eyebrow, he turned away and began to wander around my bubble, picking up this thing and that, handling my dearest possessions with the practiced touch of a flea-market antiquities dealer, which is one of the professions he has practiced in his time. I let him. He would do no harm. He fondled a bright yellow silken diklo, a Rom scarf that someone had worn in the lost and fabled land of Bulgaria fifteen centuries ago. He caressed the veil of La Chunga. He tapped out a quick rhythm on my ancient tambourine and then he laid his hands reverently on my lavuta, my Gypsy violin, passed down from Rom to Rom like all the rest of this stuff since the time when Earth still was.