Выбрать главу

And Syluise-golden hair flying in the wind as she rides in the chariot of some Atlantean lord. No woman in my life has held such power over me as Syluise. For better, for worse. I can never escape her spell. That infuriates me, that power of hers over me, and yet if I could change the past and remove all trace of her from my life, God knows I would not do it.

Estrilidis is where I met her. Fifty years ago? Something like that. Cesaro o Nano was still king and I was a diplomatic envoy. A hot humid world, Estrilidis, dense unspoiled forests, all kinds of strange creatures. The cats have two tails there, that I remember. And the insects-ah, the insects, what amazing things they are! Like rubies on legs, like emeralds, like blue diamonds. I was watching them one night marching up the walls of my lodging-place, an astounding procession of great gaudy bugs, when suddenly I saw something even more astounding: a golden woman, bare as the dawn, floating past my window. Perfect pink breasts, swelling hips, long supple legs. Shining like wildfire, shimmering like a ghost, she was. But how could she be a ghost? She was plainly no Rom, not with that glistening yellow hair, not with those startling blue eyes. And only Rom can ghost. Of course she was Rom, for vanity's sake totally transformed to that lustrous Gaje form. I found that out afterward. But even so, not a ghost. This was the real Syluise that I saw, magically holding herself aloft. She beckoned. I followed her into the night. She floating like the will-o'-the-wisp, I running behind her. She smiling, I staring. Gaping. Awed.

In the depths of the forest she halted and turned to me, and when she rushed into my arms I felt that I had captured a flame. We sank down together on the warm moist soil. She laughed; she raked my bare back with her fingernails; she arched her neck like a cat.

"Do you want me to make you a king?" she asked.

Rain was falling, but the heat of our bodies was such that it burned the water away before it could strike us. It was like a fever.

She laughed again. My hands to her breasts: nipples hot and hard, throbbing against my palms. I stroked her silken thighs and they parted for me. And then she clasped me. Oh, the sweetness of that embrace! I closed my eyes and saw the light of a thousand stars of a thousand colors. And felt the heat of those thousand suns searing me. You might have thought she was my first woman, it was so shattering a moment for me. And me a hundred twenty years old then, more or less. But in that thunderclap of a moment all those who had preceded her in that long life of mine were eradicated from my memory. There was only this one. Who was she? Did it matter? Did I care? I was lost in her.

As we moved she began to speak, a soft low chanting; and after a moment I realized that she was speaking in Romany, that from those perfect lips was coming an astonishing flow of the vilest words in our tongue. How could she have known those words, this GaJe woman? Well, of course, of course, she was as Rom as I, beneath her assumed facade. As she crooned and murmured that startling filth to me I looked at her in wonder; and then I began to laugh, and so did she. And then she swept me away with her.

"I am Syluise," she said afterward.

That was the beginning. When I returned to Galgala she came with me. When I became king a short while later, I thought of making her MY wife; but when I went to her to speak of such high matters with her, she had disappeared, and it was a year before I saw her again. That was when I began to understand what Syluise was like. But by then it was too late.

BECAUSE MULANO IS NOT AN EMPIRE WORLD, THERE'S NO regular starship service. The only way in or out is by relay sweep, which is a little like trying to travel by tossing yourself into the sea with a hook fastened to your collar and hoping that some giant bird will scoop you up and carry you where you want to go. Chorian, having delivered Damiano's message and having had my answer, was ready to leave, but he needed the better part of a week to set up his sweep for departure. So he was my guest all that time. Not that I begrudged it. I had come to take great delight in my solitude, and I wanted it back as fast as I could have it; but a guest is a guest. Maybe the Gaje will turn kinsmen from their door, but a Rom, never.

It wasn't so bad having him around, really. Aside from overdoing the worship more than slightly-and he couldn't really help that; I was five times as old as he was, and a king besides, or at least a former king, and legendary on fifty or sixty worlds-he was pleasant enough company. He wasn't nearly as naive as he seemed on first encounter; what I had taken for naivete was mostly just his style of wide-eyed innocence, which was probably nothing more than an artifact of his tender years. And it wasn't fair to blame him for being young. That wasn't his fault, and it would wear off soon enough anyway. There was happiness within him, and strength, and a good Rom heart. Besides, he knew all the court gossip. I was surprised how keenly I yearned to be brought up to date on all the petty trivial intrigues of the Capital's inner circle; and he seemed to know everything, the names of the old emperor's current mistresses, the current relative standings of the Lords Sunteil, Naria, and Periandros in the emperor's favor, the latest non-ecclesiastical escapade of the Archimandrite Germanos, and all the rest.

I asked him how he had come to be in the employ of the Empire in the first place.

"I was sold into it," he said. "Our kumpania broke up in the years of the great drought on Fenix and I was put out on offer for slavery. I was seven. The Lord Sunteil's phalangarius Dilvimon spotted me and bought me for fifty cerces. I was Sunteil's slave until I was seventeen, and when he gave me my writ he asked me to stay on in the civil service, and I did. He trusts me and he treats me well. And I think it's good for our people for there to be a Rom at the Lord Sunteil's right hand."

He sounded altogether casual about having been a slave. As well he might; to be sold into slavery is no big disgrace, and, as my own revered mentor Loiza la Vakako put it when I myself was going off to be sold for the second time, it can be a highly educational experience for a young Rom. It is in the water, after all, that you learn how to swim. But I know there are some that don't think as highly of the institution as I do.

I said, "So you're Empire on the outside but you're still Rom within?"

Chorian grinned broadly. "What else? True Rom, blood and bones,' he said. "The only thing that the Lord Sunteil can buy from me is my time. My soul has never been for sale." We had been speaking in imperial, but for that last he switched to Romany. Of course. When it's necessary to speak the absolute truth, a Rom speaks it in the language of his own people. at Tongue. But True Rom he might be, even to knowing the Gre Chorian had grown up among the Gaje and there were sad gaps in his education. No one had ever taught him the old songs and the old dances; he knew nothing of conjuring and spells; he had no idea how to ghost. Worse, he hadn't had any opportunity since he was a boy to steep himself in the Swatura, the chronicles of our race, and the course of our history was beginning to grow jumbled in his mind.

Naturally he was familiar with the events of the past thousand years, how the Kingdom had come into being and the way it had arranged itself in its strange relationship with the Empire. If nothing else, Chorian's responsibilities at the imperial court would have required him to make himself aware of that part of the story. But of the rest of it he knew only the merest hazy outlines, bits and fragments here and there: something of our early days on Romany Star, our going forth into the Great Dark, our wanderings in space and our arrival on Earth. He had some knowledge of the greatness of Romany Atlantis and of the catastrophe that destroyed it. He knew a little about the terrible years of our life as outcasts among the GaJe of Earth. But none of it had any solid meaning for him. It was all cloudy, vague, abstract, mere history, a murky tangle of practically meaningless old migrations and persecutions, long ago and far away. Somebody else's history, at that. He had no sense that any of it had happened to him. But it had; of course it had. Everything that has happened to any Rom has happened to all Rom. If you aren't one with your history, you have no history; and if you don't have any history you aren't anybody at all.