But the longer I stay in Prince Ram’s mind, the better I get to know him and the more I admire him. He is a strong, capable, intelligent, determined, disciplined, princely fellow. He has his flaws—who doesn’t?—but he’s basically a very good person who is going to be a great king some day. And the more I get to like him, the less I like myself for skulking here, invisible and imperceptible, inside his head. I’m coming to hate the sneakiness of it: eavesdropping on his conversations and even his most private thoughts, and putting him into trances that he doesn’t in any way suspect so that I can use him to write these letters for me.
I want to let him know that I’m here—a visitor from the remote future who has come to study the great and glorious Athilantan empire in its heyday. I want to ask his permission, I guess, for continuing to occupy my hidden perch within his mind.
Don’t worry. I haven’t given him even the slightest hint so far. But in the past week I’ve come close, a couple of times, to making actual conscious-level contact with him. And the temptation isn’t going away. If anything, it’s getting stronger.
For the time being, I’m being very cautious about the degree of mind-entry I’m allowing myself with the Prince. Mostly I limit myself to low-level passive observation, simply monitoring minute-by-minute sensory information: what he sees, what he hears, and so forth.
I’m not trying to do any digging into the deeper stored data of his mind. That’s the easiest way, of course, to make your host suspicious that something peculiar is going on in his head. And what I’m afraid of is that if he expresses any sort of suspicion that he has been possessed or inhabited or somehow taken over by an alien spirit, I’m going to blurt out the whole truth to him in a wild rush of confessional zeal. I don’t dare risk that.
This is creating some serious disadvantages for me.
For example, without taking a deeper look into his mind, I have no way of understanding the significance of the unusual and apparently very important ritual that the Prince and his father performed last night.
In late afternoon a messenger came to the Prince and said, “It is the night of Romany Star.”
I’m sure that’s what he said: Romany Star.
The Prince, who had been relaxing after a strenuous workout on horseback, immediately called for his slaves, who bathed him, sprinkled him with some kind of aromatic oil, and clothed him in a shining scarlet robe (which looked very much like silk. Is the silkworm native to Athilan, or do their ships travel as far as China?) and a little silver coronet. Then he went to the uppermost floor of the palace, where there is a staircase leading to a roof-top garden.
King Harinamur was waiting for him up there in the garden, wearing a silken robe even showier than the Prince’s, and a beautifully worked golden coronet. There was nobody else present, no priests, no slaves.
Darkness began to fall. Father and son, working quickly, took long slender twigs and branches of some delicately colored aromatic wood from a storage chest against the wall, and arranged them on a little altar of green stone (jade?). Then they waited, standing stock still, staring rigidly at the sky. They were both looking at the same sector, almost directly overhead. I could feel Prince Ram slipping into a kind of trance of his own accord. His pulse rate rose, his eyes were dilated, his skin temperature dropped.
The stars were appearing, now. The unfamiliar constellations of the Paleolithic sky blazed above us. Ram’s head was thrown back, his eyes were fixed. He scarcely even blinked.
“I see it,” he said after a time, in a strange throaty voice, like a man talking in his sleep.
“Do you, so soon?” said the King. “Yes, young eyes would.”
“Above the Great Whale. To the left of the Spear.”
“Yes. Yes. I see it too. Hail, Romany Star!”
“Hail,” murmured the Prince. “Romany Star!”
And then they began to chant, slowly, solemnly, in the ancient priestly language.
I was too awed—frightened, even—to try to penetrate Ram’s mind and seek the meaning. They were like two statues, motionless but for their lips, staring up at that star and uttering their prayer to it. I think I know which star they were looking at: a brilliant one, a giant. It seemed to be of a reddish color. I’m no astronomer and I couldn’t even begin to guess which star it was, and in any case the sky over Athilan is nothing like the sky we see back in Home Era.
Ram dropped deeper and deeper into trance. He seemed scarcely conscious now, and his father the same. The prayer went on and on, slow, somber, profoundly moving even though I couldn’t comprehend a syllable of it. It was like some long, intricate poem. No: it was more like a prayer for the dead. Tears were quietly rolling down Ram’s cheeks as he spoke.
Now they knelt and lit the twigs they had placed on the stone altar, and curling wisps of fragrant smoke rose above them. Calmly Ram began to rip his splendid silken gown to shreds; and calmly the King did likewise. They tore those gowns to ribbons, and cast the ribbons into the flame, so that they stood naked by the altar, wearing nothing but their coronets of gold and silver. And then they removed the coronets too, and crushed them in their bare hands, and tossed them on the fire.
The rite, whatever it was, was over.
Naked, still entranced, the King and the Prince turned and slowly made their way back into the palace. No one dared look at them. They parted, without a word, in the grand hallway, each going to his own suite. Ram went to his bedroom, lay down without bothering with the usual evening prayers, and fell instantly asleep. And that was the rite of Romany Star.
I don’t have any idea what it was all about. But it was obviously more important than any of the other religious rites the Prince has taken part in since I’ve been here. He treated all the other ones simply as mere tasks, part of the job of being a prince. This one moved him deeply. This one shook him to his depths. I need to know why. If I were in better shape myself, I’d scout around in his mind until I found out. But right now I don’t dare make any sort of contact with him at that level. I simply don’t dare.
—Roy
7.
Day 11, Western Wind, Great River.
A big day for me.
The first letter from you in Naz Glesim came in today, with the regular diplomatic packet! I must have read it a dozen times. It was such an incredible joy, hearing from you after all this time, these weeks and weeks of being cooped up by myself inside Prince Ram’s mind.
I have to confess it now; I was getting a little paranoid about not hearing from you. I know, I know, it takes forever for couriers to get from one end of the empire to the other. So I couldn’t really have expected an answer from you any sooner than this. But here I was, sending off pages and pages of stuff to you and never getting even a postcard back, so to speak, and the time was passing—passing very slowly, let me tell you—and it seemed like years had gone by. I wondered if you were too busy to write. Or just didn’t want to bother. And various other unworthy thoughts. It also occurred to me that something terrible might have happened to you. The time-travel process isn’t absolutely safe, after all.
I kept all these worries to myself when writing to you. Or tried to, at least. But now none of it matters, because I know that you’re all right, that you still care, that you’ve been answering my letters as soon as you could. And so on and so forth. And how glad I am!
The officials who sort through the stuff that Provincial Governor Sippurilayl sends to the capital from Naz Glesim must have been very puzzled indeed to unroll a scroll addressed to Prince Ram and discover that the whole thing was in some unknown kind of writing. But they came to the only logical conclusion—that it must be written in code, and therefore very important—and they brought it to the Prince right away.