He was a chef of miracles. I caught a spice-fish for him and instinctively he knew it needed nothing more than poaching in its own broth; but with the other things he worked wonders using only the little collection of herbs and spices I had brought with me from the Empire. It was astonishing, the effects he achieved. On a wintry world like Mulano where there isn't much in the way of vegetation the animal life is pretty sparse also. Except for the ghosts, of course, which feed on electromagnetic energy and don't give a damn whether there's any grass. Such creatures as there are to be had had never seemed to have much flavor to me. The spice-fishes are splendid, certainly. But the other things were bland at best. Even so, Julien made something spectacular out of a netful of ice-runners. Flat little beastly things, with half a dozen bright blue eyes on the top of their round bodies and an infinity of scuttling legs underneath. He made a ragout of them; and it was awesome. He turned a basket of leopard-snails into something fit for the gods. And what he was able to do with cloud-eels defied belief. I think he might have been seriously thinking of trying his hand at cooking snow-serpents, too. Until I told him that I wouldn't countenance the hunting of scavengers. Julien probably would have cooked up a batch of ghosts if he could have figured out some way of catching them. Once when I was busy elsewhere he went out and snipped some young tender tendrils from the trees near my bubble to use in a salad. That bothered me. I imagined the wounded trees whipping about in pain beneath the snow. But the salad was amazing.
Now and then we spoke of the old times we had spent together on this world or that, Xamur, Galgala, Iriarte. We talked of women, Syluise, Esmeralda, Mona Elena. And women of his. That was pleasant enough. Julien made all his women sound like goddesses. I imagine he made them feel like goddesses, too: there are men with that skill, though there should be more. He talked of feasts of years gone by, sweet friends also gone by, the changes that time brings. But never again did Julien mention the imperial succession or the problems that my abdication had caused. I loved him for that, his willingness to relent. He had relented too late, though. That first night he had put something under my skin with his Romany prayer of forgiveness, and it was burrowing through my flesh without mercy.
I thought he was going to make one last effort to get me to end my exile on the day he left Mulano. The words were there, just behind his teeth, I could tell; but he kept them caged and would not release them.
For a long time we looked at one another without saying anything. And I felt a great rush of pity for him. I saw in his burning eyes the piercing desperate loneliness of the man whose race is gone, whose nation is a fantasy. For Julien it was all la cuisine, la belle langue Francaise, la gloire, la gloire; but France was no more likely to come again than a river is to flow backward to its source, and what a secret crucifixion that knowledge must have been to him! So he busied himself in the affairs of realms that were, and perhaps it seemed to him that by his diplomatic shuttling about he was somehow maintaining the memory of the realm that had been. Poor Julien!
We embraced in silence and in silence he went away, trudging off due east through the forest of tentacles toward the rendezvous point where he would wait for his relay-sweep. The last I saw of him he had paused by one of the trees and was patting its rubbery trunk, as though commending it for the sweet flavor of its succulent tips.
I WAS ALONE A LONG WHILE AFTER THAT I WENT QUIETLY through my days and my evenings, thinking more of the past than of the future. Death was on my mind much of the time. That was strange. I had never given much thought to death. What use is that, to ponder death? Death is something to defy, not something to think about. I had been close to death many times but never once had I believed that it would take me, not even that time when the mud of Megalo Kastro, which is alive and loves to eat life, was sucking at my skin. Perhaps that is because there have always been ghosts about me, telling me my own future, though telling it in their tricky ghostly way. Not in the way we used to use fool the Gaje, no cards, no crystal balls. When a ghost tells you your future, you taste the certainty that you will have one. Through much of my early life one of those protective ghosts that sometimes visited me was my own. He never said so, but I came to recognize myself in him, for he was booming and uproarious with a laugh that could shatter worlds. That is me; that is how I have always been, even when I was young, constantly unfolding toward that kind of overwhelming vigor. How I relished seeing him, that big barrel-chested wide-shouldered man with the thick black mustache and the fiery eyes, drifting toward me out of the fog and mist of time! As long as he was with me what did I have to fear?
But there were no Yakoub-ghosts visiting me now, nor had I seen any for a great long while. I began to wonder why. Was my time almost up? The devil it was! Still, I let myself imagine it. It is a dirty pleasure, imagining your own death. I saw myself coming in from a day on the ice, sweating and struggling under the burden of some animal I had caught. And lying down just a moment, and feeling something within my body seeking suddenly to get out. They teach us the One Word when we are young, and the One Word is: Survive! But to everyone and everything there comes a time when that word no longer applies and the striving no longer is proper, and when that time comes it is folly to oppose it. Even for me, that time must come, try as I do to deny it. It maddens me, knowing that it must come even for me. Yet here in my imaginings I felt calm as it arrived. What is this, the death of Yakoub? Here on this bleak snowy world? Ah. I see. I see. Well, then, this is the time. No more struggling against it. What a philosopher a man can become, suddenly, when he knows at long last that he has no choice! So then I rose and went outside, and dug a grave for myself in the snow, and lay down under the light of Romany Star. And buried myself, and said the words over myself, and wept for myself, and danced and got drunk for myself, and spilled my drink out on the white breast of the ice-field as a libation, and at the very last I sang the lament for the dead over my own grave, the mulengi djili, the tale of my long life and magnificent deeds. And as I played all this out in my head I heard the voice of Yakoub the Rom asking me, What is this nonsense, Yakoub? Why are you playing with yourself this way? But I could give him no answer, and again and again I found myself letting such thoughts as these invade my mind, and I confess I took pleasure in it, a dirty pleasure, pretending that I no longer cared, that I no longer held life by the balls in a grip that could not be broken, that I was ready to lie down, that I had had enough at last.
Then I had the third of my visitors. This one came at noon, which for all Rom is the strange time, the dark time, the most mysterious moment of the day.
This was noon of Double Day, you understand, and so a doubly strange moment, when both the suns of Mulano are at their highest at once and the light of one erases the shadows of the other. A shadowless instant, a dead moment in time. When that moment comes I halt wherever I am and seal my nostrils against the air, for who knows what spirits travel freely in that instant?
On the day of the third visitor the air was curiously warm-warm for Mulano, I mean-as though a springtime might actually be on its way. There was a faint glaze on the surface of the ice, a sort of millimeter-thick melting, and indigenous ghosts by the thousand clustered overhead, crackling and buzzing with peculiar excitement.
I had been out for a long walk that Double Day morning, to the edge of the glacier and halfway up its slow fluid side, carving my way with an ice-axe like some prehistoric huntsman. There was a cave I liked on the glacier's slope. It was deep and low-roofed, with glassy walls that glowed with vermilion fire when the light of both suns came striking down through its ceiling, and far in the back was a spiraling tongue of ice that ramped up from the cave floor as though it were some sort of ancient altar, though I doubted that it was anything more than an'dental formation. I would often go to it, lay my gloved hands on ccia its sleek curves, and close my eyes and feel all the stars in their courses go spinning through my brain.