We drank and ate in silence for a time. The brandy was from Ragnarok, a hundred years old, eighty cerces the flagon. You could buy a good slave for less. We talked then of his travels. Incurable wander-itch has afflicted him all his life. Lately he had been to Estrilidis, to Tranganuthuka, to Sidri Akrak. He had ghosted to Earth five times in the last six months, and Mulano on and off maybe a dozen times to check up on me, and some other places besides, an itinerary that would have brought an ox down with apoplexy. There is restlessness in any Gypsy's soul, but Polarca carries it to a lunatic extreme. When he had run through all his travel tales he fell silent again, and we ate and drank some more.
Then he said, "So you came back after all."
"So it would seem."
"What day did you return?"
"What
day
?"
"The day of the month." Patiently, as though to a child.
"I think it was the fifth of Phosphorus," I said.
"The fifth! Good! Good!" His eyes gleamed wildly. "I win a thousand cerces from Valerian, then!"
"How so?"
"A bet," Polarca said casually. "That you'd be back in the Empire within five years. It was a very close thing, Yakoub. You skipped out originally on the ninth of Phosphorus, you know."
"Did I?" I shrugged. "You two had a bet, did you? Did he think I wasn't coming back at all?"
"He said ten years. I said five. There wasn't anybody who felt you'd never come back."
"You yourself said I wouldn't come back. That time on Mulano, when you were giving me all that bullshit about Achilles in his tent. You said that I was going to stay on Mulano, that that was the wisest thing for me to do."
"So I lied," Polarca said. "Sometimes you need to be pulled around a little by the ears, Yakoub. For your own good." He reached into his tunic and pulled out a deck of cards. They sparkled and hummed on the table between us. "A little klabyasch?" he suggested.
"For money?"
"What else? For the exercise? Five tetradrachms a point."
"Make it a cerce," I said. "I'll relieve you of the pile you've won from Valerian."
He smiled sadly. "Poor Yakoub. You never learn, do you?" He put the cards on autoshuffle and they jumped around like frogs on the table. Then he clapped his hands and they formed themselves into a deck in front of me.
"Your deal," Polarca said.
He hunched forward, eyes gleaming crazily. Polarca plays cards like Attila the Hun. I put the deck on manual and dealt them out, and he pulled them in as if each one was the passport to heaven. And of course the game was a rout. Though he is a small man his hands are huge, and those cards came flying out of them like angry mosquitos. He slapped them down with furious zeal, shouting, "Shtoch! Yasch! Menel! Klabyasch!" and I was done for before I knew it. He took me for a fortune. Well, it makes him happy to murder me at klabyasch, and it makes me happy to make Polarca happy.
As the echoes of the game died away I said, "And tell me how it is, in the Imperium."
"Pah. The usual Gaje lunacy. The Emperor will hang on forever. He's only a shadow. The high lords are behaving like fools and villains. You can see them circling each other, waiting to pounce, and meanwhile the administration goes to hell. The Empire is running on autopilot. Taxes are down. Corruption is up. Whole solar systems are dropping out of the communications and transportation nets and nobody seems to notice. This is an ugly time, Yakoub."
"And Shandor?" I asked, and held my breath.
Polarca looked up at me. His burning red-rimmed eyes held firm on mine a long moment. Then he laughed softly and shook his head and waved his hand, brushing aside my concern the way you might brush aside a mosquito. "Shandor!" he said, chuckling as if he found the name itself amusing. For him, he seemed to be saying, Shandor was a topic hardly worth discussing, a trifle, an absurdity. "He is nothing, Yakoub. Nothing!" Polarca reached for the brandy. The flagon was empty. He tapped its side. "This stuff isn't half bad, you know?"
6.
OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS THE REST OF THEM SHOWED up. My dear ones, those who had been my rod and my staff in the days when I was king. One by one they arrived on the starships that came to Xamur from every part of the galaxy. My cabinet, the inner circle of my court in the days when I had a court. And two others besides, two unexpected guests.
Jacinto and Ammagante came in together, from Galgala. Those two always traveled together, though they could scarcely have been more unalike: Jacinto small and wizened, like some dark hard nut that could not possibly be cracked, and Ammagante tall, big-boned, with the easy open face of a sunny-souled child. In my reign Jacinto had been the money-man, the studier of trends and the manipulator of forces, the one who guided our investments, patiently spinning the web of Rom holdings that stretches from world to world to world. Ammagante was his wizard of communications, through whose long arms flowed the instantaneous impulses that brought Jacinto the information he had to have. There is strange power in that woman. She speaks in tongues. In his infinite wisdom my son Shandor had dismissed them both, and-so Polarca gave me to understand-Jacinto and Ammagante were scraping along now in private scams of their own, earning the odd cerce here and there, managing to eke out some sort of pittance. I could imagine what sort of pittance it was, knowing them as I did.
The same ship that brought them from Galgala brought that cunning old woman Bibi Savina. Our phuri dai, the mother of the tribe. Who would surely have been a king among us, if things had been otherwise. (We can't have women as kings-it isn't done, it has never been done-but in her way the phuri dai is as important as the king. And sometimes more so. Woe betide the Rom king who ignores her advice or denies her her high place. There have been some who have tried, and they have regretted it.)
I think of Bibi Savina as being incredibly old, ancient beyond measure. That is because of the visits she made to me when I was a trousers-pissing babe and she a ghost, ages and ages ago. But in fact she is younger than I am by thirty years or so, though she elects to look like a crone. I greeted her with deep respect, even a little awe: me, awe! But she deserves it. She is a fount of power and sagacity. Of course the change in government on Galgala had had no effect on her authority: the phuri dai is chosen not by the king but by the will of the tribe itself, and once she is in office no king can remove her. Even rash Shandor had enough sense not to try to butt horns with Bibi Savina. But the fact that she had come to Xamur at my beckoning told me where her loyalties must lie.
Biznaga arrived next: my envoy to the imperial court, my link to the galactic government. Elegant and supple, he was, with a diplomat's grace and poise, and a diplomat's fine wardrobe: I never knew anyone who dressed himself as finely as Biznaga. He came in from the Capital, where he had been living in retirement. Shandor had pensioned him off too. He must not have trusted any of my people. I wonder why.
From Marajo, where he had gone to look after his own business interests after his journey to my snowy world of exile, came my cousin Damiano. With him, to my surprise, was young Chorian-the first of the two uninvited guests.
Polarca didn't like that at all. He drew Damiano and me aside and said, "What in the name of Mohammed is
he
doing here?"
"I thought he would be useful," Damiano said. "He sees things with clear eyes and he has the true Rom fire. And he has served me well on more than one occasion."
Polarca was unimpressed by that fine speech. "He's Sunteil's man, isn't he? Do you want the things we say here to get back to Sunteil?"
"The same sun will rise twice in a single day before that happens," Damiano replied, giving Polarca that coiled-spring look of his. "Maybe he draws his pay from Sunteil, but his heart is with us. May all my sons die in this hour if I have told you anything but the truth."
Damiano will bury you under his Rom dignity and his Rom rhetoric when he wants to win an argument. Polarca threw up his hands in despair. But I was with Damiano, this time. I touched Polarca's shoulder lightly. From a distance, Chorian was staring at me with that puppyish adoration and utter awe that I detested and that I understood so well. I think Polarca was jealous of that. He's human too, as much as any of us can be called human; he didn't want anyone to be here who worshipped me more intensely than he did himself. But of course Polarca shows his adoration in peculiar ways.
"I don't see any risk in having Chorian here," I told him quietly. "The boy is one of us. I came to know him very well when he was on Mulano with me."
"But Sunteil's own private Rom-"
"He isn't Sunteil's. He just lets Sunteil think he is."
"Maybe he just lets you and Damiano think he isn't."
"Polarca," I said, smiling easily, massaging his arm. "Ah, you Polarca. This is nothing but paranoid shit and you know it."
"Yakoub, I tell you-"
"Polarca," I said, a little less gently.
Even then there was another round or two of grumbling out of him. But in the end he had to yield, and he did. Chorian was beside himself with relief and gratitude: he knew that a debate had been going on over allowing him to remain. And he was practically frothing with joy at seeing me again. Yet for all his callow ways he seemed less naive, somehow more seasoned, than he had on Mulano. He was beginning to take on a little swagger. Some of that naivete had probably been just camouflage, anyway; but beyond question he was gaining swiftly in confidence these days and must have felt less of a need to hide behind his boyishness. He was going to be useful. Damiano had done well to bring him. Now and then during the conferences of the next few days I saw Polarca still brooding as though he was still absolutely certain we had invited a spy of the Imperium into our midst; but even he stopped worrying about Chorian after a time.
In due course Valerian appeared. Or rather Valerian's ghost, I should say: Valerian didn't dare set foot himself on any world of the Empire, not with that bounty of ten thousand cerces posted on him. Even a Rom might have gone for that. Valerian has plenty of enemies among us, after all: the Gaje aren't the only victims of his piracies. But Valerian or Valerian's ghost, it made no great difference, for Valerian's ghost has such vigor that it isn't easy to distinguish it from Valerian. Except that the ghost, like most ghosts, has a way of drifting a little above the ground, and of emitting a bit of electrical crackle now and then.
Valerian is an extremely theatrical man. There's an aura of high drama about him that precedes him by a hundred meters wherever he goes. He preens, he roars, he gesticulates, he flashes his eyes and strikes poses. He has tremendous style and presence, but it's a style and presence that come out of some grand opera fifteen hundred years old. Valerian sees himself as the direct ideological heir of Blackbeard and Sir Francis Drake and Captain Kidd and Robin Hood and any other buccaneer who ever lifted a penny from someone else, and like most of them he has the same fine lofty resounding justifications for his depredations. Of course he's really just a criminal. Get one layer down inside him beneath the idealism and you'll find that what he loves is danger and the thrill of living outside the law. Get below that and you discover that secretly he sees himself as nothing but a businessman, an entrepreneur of the star-lanes concerned mainly with risk-to-reward ratios. If you could get below
that
I think you'd find pure chaos at the heart of his soul.
He is a completely unscrupulous man. But I've never had reason to doubt his loyalty to me. I saved his ass, or at the very least his neck, when he was brought up on serious charges before the great kris of Galgala, and he will always be grateful to me for that.
After him came Thivt, who is the great anomaly in my life and possibly the great anomaly of the galaxy. I regard Thivt as my cousin and at times, like Polarca, a blood brother. He is deeply versed in Rom ways and Rom lore, and I accept him unhesitatingly as Rom. But he isn't Rom, not really. I don't mean that he's a Gajo, either. I'm not sure he's human at all.
He is a changeling, who actually was taken by Rom in childhood and raised by them, just as Gaje folklore would have you believe was our regular custom all during medieval times. An exploration party found him wandering around by himself on a planet in the Thanda Banadareen system. He looked to be five or six years old. The only word he could speak was the one that was assumed to be his name. No parents in sight, no crashed spaceship, no trace of relay-sweep gear to be found, no nothing. Somehow the notion took hold, nevertheless, that he was the only survivor of an unrecorded free-lance expedition. When the explorers left Thanda Banadareen they took him along, back to Iriarte, which is where I encountered him a hundred years or so later. By then he was high in Rom councils and he spoke Romany like a true phral of the blood. He even had learned how to ghost: so far as I know, the only non-Rom who has ever mastered that. Thivt had achieved the rare trick, almost unique in history, of becoming Rom by adoption. There are those who think that he must really be Rom by birth, because he can ghost. I don't know about that. Thivt looks Rom and he sounds Rom and he lives Rom, and Rom trust him like one of themselves; but I sense an aura about him, a vibration, that is something else entirely, something very strange. I'm not the only one who has felt it, either.
Can it be that there are alien beings hiding in the still uncharted wilderness of Thanda Banadareen, and that they sent Thivt to us in human guise as some sort of observer, or even an emissary? No one, so far as I know, has ever returned to the world where Thivt was found to take a second look. It doesn't seem to have been a particularly inviting or useful sort of world. The galaxy is very large and we are very few; the course of exploration has moved elsewhere, to places that are considered more promising. I wonder about that world sometimes. I wonder about Thivt.