Of course the whole universe sent emissaries to bother me when I was on Mulano. Nobody can stay hidden for long in a galaxy as little as this.
The first one who came was Rom, naturally. I would have been surprised and probably sore as blazes if he had been Gaje. Rom are always quicker than anyone when it comes to picking up the signs of a trail. You know that already, if you are Rom; or at least you
should
know that, and I pray to whatever god is closest at hand that you do. And if you are not Rom-if you are of the other kind, if you are Gaje-read and learn. Read and learn!
Four or five years earlier, however many it was, when I decided to put the worlds of the civilized Empire behind me and headed out to lose myself in the snowy wastes of Mulano, I took good care to leave a trail. It was only common sense. Even when you've gone off by yourself to think, or to heal your wounds, or simply to hide for a while, you want to leave the patrin behind you, the trail-signs. If you don't, how will your family find you? And if your family can never find you, who are you?
In the old days on lost Earth the patrin-signs spoke of simple things, and they were posted in simple ways. We were a lot simpler people then. A few marks scratched in the ground, or some charcoal strokes on a wall: that was sufficient. When your path took you far from the wagons of your kumpania, you left the signs behind you to show where you had gone and also to guide your kin as they traveled the same path. There was the sign like this - O - that meant, "There are very generous people here who are friendly to Gypsies," and there was the one like this - + - that meant, "Here they don't give you a thing," and the one like this - /// - that meant, "We have already robbed this place." And then there were signs that said that water was available for the horses, or that there were pigs and chickens for the taking, or that in this town lived many stupid people who wanted their fortunes told. And also you could leave clues to be used in the fortune-telling by those who followed you: "This woman wants a son," or "They are very greedy for gold here," or "The old man will die soon."
All this I know not only because it is the tradition but because I have walked the trails of old Earth myself, the Earth that existed a thousand or two years ago, when I used to go ghosting around to see what was to be seen.
Do you doubt me? But why would you doubt me?
Believe me. I know whereof I speak. How could it be otherwise? When I tell you something it's because I know it to be true. I'm too old to lie, at least to lie to myself; and what I say here I have to say to myself before I can say it to you. I would lie to you in a flash if I saw anything to gain by it. But not here. Here I can only gain what I want to gain by telling the absolute truth.
(Maybe a
little
lie once in a while. I'm only human. But no big ones. Believe me.)
When I went to live on Mulano I left my own patrin behind me in fifty places. Of course my patrin wasn't just a matter of charcoal marks scrawled on walls. These are the days of the Empire, after all, when everyone has magic at his fingertips. So I marked my trail in signs of fire in the sunset sky over Galgala, and I wrote it in gleaming blue and gold on the shells of a tribe of wind-scarabs on Iriarte, and I buried it in the nasty dreams of a smelly little thief on Xamur. And I posted it in other ways in other places here and there about the Imperium as well. I had no doubts that I would be found. Only let them not find me too soon, is what I prayed.
The first one who found me, as I say, was Rom. That was gratifying, that a Rom would be the first. You want your own kind to confirm your prejudices about them. He was young and very tall and he was wearing his skin midnight-dark, with glittering white eyes and teeth and a mane of shining black hair tumbling about his shoulders. Because he was so long and slender there was a kind of beauty and fragility about him that made him look almost like a woman, but I could tell he was strong enough to crush rocks in his hands.
He came up to me while I was spice-fishing on the western lip of the Gombo glacier. It was so long since I'd seen another real living human being, not a ghost, not a doppelganger, that for a moment I was really taken aback. I almost wanted to run. I could feel powerful waves of life-vibration emanating from him, clanging off my soul with the impact of a thousand gongs.
But I held my ground and pulled myself together. Whatever he wanted, he wasn't going to get it from me, and if push came to shove I was going to do both the pushing and the shoving. Kings are like that. You don't have to be a son of a bitch to be a king, but you don't usually get to be king by being a patsy, either.
He gave me the Rom sign and the old Rom greeting:
"Sarishan, Yakoub."
Then, still speaking Romany, he wished me long life and many sons and the continued favor of the gods and angels, and a few more medieval flourishes of the same sort.
"I speak Imperial, boy," I told him when he seemed to be done. A little gratuitous snottiness is useful, sometimes: it keeps them off balance while you're trying to figure out what they're up to. Although this one looked too innocent to be up to much.
He bit his lip. He had expected me to answer in a patriotic gush of Romany. The Great Tongue and all that.
Staring at me in puzzlement, he said, "You
are
Yakoub, aren't you?"
"What do you think?"
I imagined I could hear the gears going round in his head, clank, gnash, clank. Yes, yes, he might be telling himself, this is Mulano and that is the place where Yakoub has gone, and this man looks like Yakoub and there's nobody else living on this planet, so this must actually
be
Yakoub. But maybe he wasn't thinking that at all. He was so young and pretty that I tended to underestimate him, I now suspect.
Finally he said, "There were two rumors circulating everywhere, one that you were dead, the other you had gone to some world outside the Empire."
"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?"