"My price was a hundred," I told the flat-faced boy. "How do you like that?"
They all swung around to look, crowding in around me. They looked skeptical, and then they looked angry, and then awed. I pulled my shoulders back and clapped my hands and laughed. "A hundred," I said again. "A hundred!"
To this day I'm proud of that. Someone must have seen merit in me even then.
I HAD BEEN BOUGHT BY THE GUILD OF BEGGARS, MEGALO Kastro Lodge 63. My lodgemaster's name was Lanista, and I shared my cabin with four boys named Kalasiris, Anxur, Sphinx, and Focale. I put their names down here because all of them have been dead for many years and it is a kindness to mention the names of the forgotten dead, even if they were no members of your clan. Lanista was Rom and my four cabinmates were not. I think I fetched such a high price because anyone could see at a glance that I was Rom. The Guild of Beggars is a Gaje enterprise but they get all the Rom they can for it because they regard us as superior beggars. Begging is in our genes, they believe. Not far from the truth, you know.
Although I can remember names and faces and places and all these other details of my being sold away from my family I can't tell you how long it was before it first dawned on me that I was never going to see my home again. Sometimes the very big patterns escape a child's notice completely while the fine ones stick fast. I don't know what I thought of all that was happening to me. Taken out of school, yes; sold, yes; put aboard a starship, yes; going somewhere far away, yes. But forever? Never to return? No more mother, father, brothers, sisters? I don't remember being troubled by any of that, then. All I felt was a wonderful strange sense of floating free. Seed on the wind, drifting in the gusts. Go wherever the wind goes.
But I am Rom, of course. When we stay too long in one place we begin to rust. The slavemasters were simply doing me a favor by plucking me away. Setting me free by sending me off into new slavery. They were the ones who put me on the road I was meant to travel.
There's no world anything like Megalo Kastro in the known-that is, the human-inhabited-part of the galaxy. The name means Great Fortress in Greek, one of the ancient languages of Earth, and indeed there is a great stone fortress there, looming like a colossal crouching beast at the top of a rugged cliff overlooking the sea. But it wasn't built by Greeks. It wasn't built by anyone who could claim kinship to either of the two human races.
You don't have to walk more than a dozen paces down the Equinox Hall of the fortress of Megalo Kastro to realize that. The hall gets its name because twice a year the pulsing golden-red light of the sun comes through an archway and strikes the pommel of an altar at its western end, precisely at the equinoctial moment. Nothing extraordinary about that; paleolithic men were setting up altars like that on Earth twenty thousand years ago.
But the geometry of Equinox Hall takes your breath away. I mean that literally. Walk a few paces along that twisting corridor of roughhewn green stone and you begin gasping a little. It's like walking on the deck of a heaving ship. Everything is disorderly and unstable. You expect the walls to start gliding back and forth. A few paces more and you start to sweat. The vaulted roof twenty meters overhead is undulating, or seems to be. Your eyes are throbbing next, because they can't quite follow the lines of the architecture and keep going in and out of focus. The whole structure is like that: alien, oppressive, fascinating.
No one knows who built it. There it stands, gigantic, terrifying, mysterious, half in ruins, telling us nothing. The archaeologists think it's five or ten million years old. It can't be much older than that, they say, because Megalo Kastro is a young planet and tremendous geotectonic stuff is going on all the time; at the rate continents rise and fall there, the fortress can't be enormously ancient. But it looks a billion years old. In one of the cellar rooms there's the outline of a single large hand in what looks like chalk, but isn't, on the wall, and that hand has seven fingers of equal size and a pair of opposable thumbs, one on each side. Perhaps one of the builders amused himself by sketching it in during his lunch break. Perhaps it was put there as a joke by some member of the exploration team from Earth that first found the place. Who can say? If we could dig up some alien artifacts in the vicinity, that might tell us something, but the only artifact we have is the fortress itself, brooding at the edge of the sea.
And that sea-that nightmare of a sea. There are many life-forms on Megalo Kastro, nearly all of them large, predatory, and nasty. It's a young world, as I say: this is its Mesozoic that's going on now, and everything has fangs and scales. But the biggest life-form of all is one that is, thank God, unique to Megalo Kastro. The sea itself, I mean. Not a true sea at all, but a horrendous vast pudding of pale pink mud, warm, quivering, sinister, unfathomably deep, that stretches across an uncharted gulf ten thousand kilometers wide.
That sea is alive. I don't mean that it's full of living things. I mean that it is a living thing, a single malign entity with some sort of low-level intelligence. Or, for all anybody knows, intelligence on the genius level. It thinks. It perceives. You can actually observe its mental workings: questing ripples on its surface rising in little interrogative quivers, short-lived protuberances like exclamatory worms, puckered bubbling orifices that come and go. God knows what evolutionary process brought it into being. God knows, but no one else does. Scoop a section out to study it and all you have is a lump of watery mud, rapidly growing cool. And the thing from which it was taken lies there with its feet basking in the warmth of Megalo Kastro's subterranean magma and its arms resting on the shores of the far-flung continents, laughing at you. And it will eat you if you give it the chance.
Believe me. I know.
The crust of Megalo Kastro is loaded with all manner of valuable elements that were consumed long ago on older worlds, and a dozen different mining companies operate there. Most of them are looking for transuranics, which fetch a good price in nearly every solar system, but there was also a Rom outfit at work hunting for rare earths, especially the scarcest of them, thulium, europium, holmium, lutetium.
(Those who rarely leave their home worlds are forever surprised to learn that all the planets of the galaxy, no matter how far away or how strange they may be, are composed of the same general bunch of elements. I think they believe that alien worlds ought to be made up of alien elements, and that there's something improper-boring, even -about finding such things as oxygen and carbon and nitrogen on them. As though an atom with the atomic number and weight of hydrogen could be something else besides hydrogen on some other world. Only an idiot would think that every planet has its own periodic table. There's only one set of building blocks in this universe: did you think otherwise?)
Mining on Megalo Kastro is an unpretty business, considering the heat, the humidity, the toothy monsters lurking behind every toothy bush, the frequency of devastating volcanic eruptions, and the various other disagreeable qualities of the place. Nevertheless it's a profitable industry, to say the very least, and the whole planet has a wild boomtown atmosphere where money flows freely from pocket to pocket. Which makes it a fertile sphere of operations for the Guild of Beggars.
It was Lanista who taught me how to beg. Our lodgemaster. He was of the Sinti Rom, twenty years old or maybe thirty, with strangely pale skin and cool eyes set very far apart in his head. "You smile at them," he said. "That's the key thing, to smile. You make your eyes shine. You make yourself look pathetic and appealing all at once. You put out your hand and you break their hearts."
I began to see why the guild had paid a premium price for me. I had the shine in my eyes. I had the smile. I was a choice urchin, winsome, irresistible, clever.