Now did I truly come to learn the meaning of splendor. The palace of Loiza la Vakako stood on the shore of a sea nearly as strange as the one that had come close to claiming my life on Megalo Kastro, for its water was red as blood, and throbbing heat came from it, almost at boiling temperature. Then there was a beach of pale lavender sand sloping steeply up toward a broad ridge where, amid a dense garden of shrubs and trees from a hundred worlds, the palace rose in airy swoops and arabesques. I never knew how many rooms it had, and very likely the number changed from day to day, for the palace was a thing of billowing fabric and sliding struts, light as a spider's web, forever transforming itself in new and ever more lovely ways as the rays of the hot blue sun waxed and waned through the day. Here I would live as a young Rom prince, dressed in the finest of robes, a new one every day, and dining on delicacies such as I had never imagined before and have never tasted since; here I would discover the meaning of wealth and power and the responsibilities that such things bring; I would have my first understanding of the mysteries of ghosting; here too I would learn a thing or two about the nature of love. But the greatest lesson of all that I would learn on Nabomba Zom had to do with the impermanence of grandeur and pleasure and comfort: for after having lived in the greatest of luxury until I had come to take such things utterly for granted, I was to see it all snatched from me in a moment. And snatched from the lordly Loiza la Vakako as well; but that was far in the future just then.
HE HAD EIGHTDA UGHTERSBUTNO SONS. DAUGHTERSARE a delight-I have had many of them myself, and would gladly have had more-but there is a way that a man feels about his sons that is quite diffierent from the way he feels about daughters, and it has to do with the fact that some day we must die. When a man sees his son he sees the image of himself- himself reborn, himself regenerated, his own replacement, his claim on the future. Through his sons he marches onward into the centuries to come. They bear his face; they have his eyes, his chin, his mustache, his heart and balls. I love my daughters with all my heart but they cannot do that special thing for me that a son can do, and there is a difference in that, and any man who says it is not so is lying to you or to himself or both. At least this is it how it is among the Rom, and has been since the beginning of time. It may be otherwise for the Gaje; I have no way of knowing and no great concern about it.
I would not make too much of this matter. But when a man is as powerful as Loiza la Vakako, and has no sons, and takes in an unknown little dung-splattered boy to live in his home, there might be significance in it. Six of his daughters were married and lived in the far reaches of Nabomba Zom or on its major moons. He treated their husbands as princes but not, I think, as sons. A seventh daughter-Malilini-lived with him at the palace. Nothing was ever said of the eighth, though her portrait hung beside the other seven in the great hall; she had quarreled with her father long before, over what I will never know, and had taken up residence in some far corner of the galaxy.
Loiza la Vakako also had a brother, who ruled two of the outer and less blessed worlds of this solar system. Pulika Boshengro was his name and Loiza la Vakako rarely spoke of him, though he too was in the family portrait gallery, a dark man with a narrow forehead and a long dour face. In the portrait he looked so little like Loiza la Vakako that it was hard for me to believe that they had sprung from the same womb; but when I finally met him, many years later, I was able to see the resemblance instantly: in the bones beneath the flesh, in the soul behind the eyes.
Grand though his palace was, Loiza la Vakako allowed himself surprisingly little time to take joy of it. Even in him, that settled and contemplative man, the Rom restlessness dominated. He was constantly on the move, forever setting forth on journeys of inspection across his far-flung domain. He had to know what was going on everywhere. Though all the overseers of his plantations were capable and loyal, Loiza la Vakako could not allow himself to be a mere absentee master. And also he was Rom baro here, he was head of the Gypsy kumpania of Nabomba Zom, which meant that he had all manner of judicial and ritual responsibilities to carry out among his people.
From the beginning I often rode beside him when he made these tours. And learned more of the art of governing in a single afternoon than six years at a university could have given me.
Nabomba Zom is one of the nine kingly worlds of the galaxy. That is, it is a planet that was especially chosen by the Rorn as their own, when the first settlement of the stars was carried out nine hundred or a thousand years ago. The rulers of the kingly worlds-the others are Galgala, Zimbalou, Xamur, Marajo, Iriarte, Darma Barma, Clard O Msat, and Estrilidis-hold their power, technically speaking, by direct grace of the King of the Rom, and each has the privilege of nominating one of the nine krisatora, the judges of the highest Rom court. Of course I knew very little of all this when I first came to live with Loiza la Vakako, but gradually he educated me in the intricacies of the system by which we hold our sprawling realm together.
As I traveled with him I came to comprehend something I had never suspected as a schoolboy on Vietoris or as a slave on Megalo Kastro: that to rule is a burden, not a privilege. There are certain rewards, yes. But only a fool would accept that burden for the sake of the rewards. Those who hold power do so because they have no choice: it is God's decree that has descended upon their heads and they must obey. Even if Syluise thinks it is not so.
I watched Loiza la Vakako, then, making decisions about the planting of crops or the damming of streams, about the price of grain, about trade with other planets, about taxes and import duties. I watched him holding court and settling the bewildering disputes of petty people in outlying provinces. And I thought of the lesson they had been trying to teach me on my last day at school, about the Thirteenth Emperor and how hard he worked. I had wondered then why an emperor would want to work so hard, when supreme power was his. Why not spend all your days and nights in feasting and singing and sipping fine wine? Now I understood that there was no choice about the work. It was the price of supreme power. It was what supreme power was: the privilege of toil beyond the comprehension of ordinary beings. There had never been any ruler, I realized-not even the famous wicked tyrants, not even the murderous monstrous villains-who had not found himself harnessed to the plow the moment he ascended the throne of office.
Still, there were comforts if you wanted them. A bit of compensation, I suppose. Loiza la Vakako toured his realm in an air-car that was a little palace in itself, a sleek teardrop-shaped vehicle bright as fire that moved with the speed of dreams. When you were aloft you had no sense of motion: you might have been drifting on a magic carpet. And there were soft wondrous draperies fashioned from the black-and-scarlet mantles of the great clam of the Sea of Poets, there were cushions upholstered in the shining leather of sand-dragon skin, there were floating globes of pure cool light. When we dismounted we were greeted by bowing officials who had strewn carpets of petals for us, and servants were waiting with fresh robes, bowls of fragrant juices, ripe fruits, smoked meats of mysterious origin.
Yet despite all this magnificence Loiza la Vakako's private quarters, both aboard the air-car and wherever he stopped to spend the night, were always strangely austere: a thin mattress on the floor, plain white wall-hangings, a pitcher of water by his side. It was as if he accepted the grandeur as something necessary, a requirement of office, but gladly put it all aside when he could be alone. If you would see the truth of a man, look at the room where he sleeps.