Curiosity was raging at my gut. But I wasn't going to ask. Damiano smiled in an angular, off-center way. "It isn't certain yet, about Sunteil, you know. And we have no reason to think that all will be well for the Rom, either."
"Because of the new king, you mean?" "Because of the new king, yes."
I sat absolutely still, staring at him. And Damiano, for all the flush of wine burning in the deep-hued folds of his heavy skin, sat just as still, stared back at me just as stolidly. I felt the great strength of him. Truly he had the blood of my fathers in his veins. Was he the new king? No, no, he could never have gone so far from Galgala this soon after the election, if that were the case.
"All right," I said. "Who is he, Damiano?" "You care?"'
"You know I care."
"You have taken yourself far from it all. You live beyond the Imperium now, in a place of ice and ghosts and shining fishes."
"Who is he?"
"Why did you do this to us, Yakoub?" "A time comes when a change is needed." "For the Rom, or for Yakoub?"
"Yakoub is who I was thinking of," I said. "I had to leave, or I would have choked on my office."
"Well, so you left, and there has been a change. Not only for you but for all of us."
"Who is he, Damiano?" He gave me a terrible look. "Shandor," he said.
"My son Shandor is King of the Gypsies?" "Shandor, Yes."
It was like a giant blade twisting and churning through my entrails, that one simple statement. I could feel rivers of my own blood rising and surging and spewing forth. It was with the greatest effort of my life that I kept myself from leaping across the table and digging my hands into Damiano's throat, to throttle the words back into him and make him not have said them. But I did not move and I did not speak. It was a calamity beyond all measure, and I had been its unwitting architect.
Into my stunned and shattered silence my cousin Damiano said, "Well, Yakoub?"
"I never foresaw that. In all my dreaming and planning I never foresaw that." I shook my head again and again. "How long ago was it done?"
"Very recently."
"If any of this is untrue, Damiano, what you have told me here today-"
"Shandor is king. May my sons die within this hour if I have told you any untruths."
"My God. My God."
Wild angry Shandor, the one man in the universe I had never known how to control! Shandor the red, Shandor the murderous. Him? King? I should have taken him from his cradle and hurled him down into the dark sizzling heart of the Idradin crater. There might still have been the chance to halt him, back then. How could I not have seen that this would happen?
"And are the worlds accepting him?" I asked.
"They flock to him. They rush to him. There is such hunger to have a king again, Yakoub. Even a king like Shandor."
"My God," I said again. "Shandor!"
"Is this what you wanted when you went away, Yakoub?"
"They are not supposed to give the kingship to the son of a king." My voice was leaden. "It is against the custom. It is not hereditary, the kingship."
"He asked. He forced them." "Forced the krisatora?"
"You know what Shandor is."
"Yes," I said. "I know what Shandor is." I felt an earthquake beginning in my soul. Great boulders were breaking loose from my spirit and tumbling down upon me, and I was being crushed by them. Now I saw the full immensity of the mistake I had made by leaving Galgala. I had left an open place for him, never suspecting the reach of his ambitions, or that he could ever realize them. And he had rushed in to fill that place. What a fool I had been, and telling myself all the while that I was being supremely clever! To be shrewd and invulnerable for a hundred seventy-two years, and then to play one final card, thinking it was the shrewdest play of all, and in that way to destroy in one moment of misplaced cleverness all that I had worked to build. I have never known such shame as I did in that moment. Damiano must have seen it in my face, some outward show of the horror and anguish I felt, for it was reflected in his own; he looked into my eyes and he seemed startled and shaken by what he saw there. I could not face that. I turned my back on him and went to the door of my bubble and kept on going, out into the bitter night. Double Day had ended while we talked, and the searing light of the stars bore down on me from every corner of the heavens. It was about to start snowing again. The first few flakes spiraled past my head. I stood alone in the midst of the ice-field, aware that there were ghosts around me everywhere, Mulano ghosts and perhaps Polarca's or Valerian's also: their chilly laughter was everywhere in the night. But I knew I would not be hearing that laughter much longer. The game was up for me here, sooner than I had thought, and without my winning what I had hoped for. The question now was one of salvage, not one of victory.
Damiano stood behind me, saying nothing.
"Give me a day and a half to pack my things," I said.
3. I Am Come As Time
Krishna: I am come as Time, the waster of the peoples Ready for that hour that ripens to their ruin.
All these hosts must die; strike, stay your hand-no matter.
Therefore, strike. Win kingdom, wealth and glory.
- Bhagavad-Gita
I NEVER EXPECTED TO BE KING OF ANYTHING. THAT'S THE truth, no matter what Syluise thinks. Of course the prophecy was on me practically from the time I could blow my own nose, but it was years -a lifetime, really-before I came to understand what Bibi Savina's ghost had been trying to say to me, back there in my infancy on Vietoris. Only by hindsight did I finally penetrate the mysteries of her chanting and magicking. I suppose I could tell you that from the start I was full of the passion to be top man and tell everyone what to do and have my boots licked daily, but it would be a lie. I wasn't like that at all when I was small. Maybe I got that way later, a little, but remember that being king does strange things to otherwise modest men. All I wanted in the beginning was just to live until tomorrow, and then to live until the tomorrow after that, and to make my way down the narrow path between pain on the one side and the end of all pain on the other side, living each day in joy. Even though I might be a slave, even though I was condemned to everlasting exile, yet what I wanted was as simple as that: not a kingdom but only joy.
My father was Romano Nirano, a Rom among Rom, a man who had kingliness in his smallest fingertip. As you know I was sold away from him when I was seven, but I can see him now as if he were standing right beside me, the broad face with heavy cheekbones, the powerful brooding eyes deep in their hoods, the heavy flowing mustache, the grand sweep of black hair streaming across his forehead. It is my face too. We have borne that face down through all the thousands of years since we were driven forth from Romany Star and I think it is a face that will endure to the end of all time. As will we.
He was already a slave when I was born. From his father he had inherited such a grand catastrophe of debts that there was no question of paying it off in five lifetimes. The old man had been a speculator in moons and was caught short in the Panic of 2814 when all the heavy metals completely lost their value; and after that we were destined to be paupers for centuries. My father could have wiped it all off by a bankruptcy, but my father thought bankruptcy was cowardly.
So he sold himself and my mother and my five brothers and sisters and me in return for a quit-claim. The family debts were wiped off the books and we became the slaves of Volstead Factors, a great interstellar corporation that was itself an imperial fiefdom.
"There's no disgrace in being a slave," my father told me. I was five years old and I had just discovered that I was different from most other children. I belonged to someone else. "It's a business arrangement, that's all. It may be an inconvenience but it's never a disgrace. It's an arrangement that you want to alter as soon as you can, of course, and if you have the chance and you don't take it then that's a disgrace. But aside from that there's no shame involved in it."