But she looked old, my childhood ghost. Her face was seamed and wrinkled and I think there were gaps in her teeth and her nose was sharp as a blade. Out of her lean and parched Gypsy face blazed her eyes, two dark stars lit by fiery mysterious furnaces. She was something out of fairy-tales, the witch-woman, the magical crone, the old Gypsy fortune-teller. Hobbling into my little room, putting her claw of a hand on my little wrist. Muttering magical names to me:
"You are Chavula," she whispered. "You are Ilika. You are Terkari."
The names of kings. Great names, names that went booming and roaring down the corridors of time.
I was never afraid of her. She was the old wise woman, the mother of mothers, the seeress. What we call in our Romany language the phuri dai. How could I fear the phuri dai? And I was too young to fear anything, after all.
"You are the chosen one," she sang to me. "You will be the great one."
What could I say? What did I understand? Nothing. Nothing. "You were born at the midnight of noon," she said. "That is the hour of kings. You are Terkari. You are Ilika. You are Chavula. And they are you. Yakoub Nirano Rom, Yakoub the king! You have the sorcery in you. You have the power."
She was chanting prophesy at me, and I thought it was a game. She was laying my life's destiny upon me, weaving the inescapable web of my future around me, and I laughed in wonder and delight, comprehending nothing of the burdens she was giving me. There was a glow around her, a magical shimmer of electricity. Her feet never touched the floor. That was the best of it for me, the way she floated. But of course I was very young. I had never seen a ghost before. I understood nothing of the principles. All magic explains itself, if only you live long enough to let the answers come to you, and later I understood everything. Later I knew that in truth she was prophesying nothing, but only telling me the things that she had already seen come to pass. That is what it means to go ghosting: to carry the future, the absolutely delimited and altogether unchangeable future, backward into the past. I would meet the old woman again much later. When I became king she would be my wise adviser, my phuri dai indeed. But for now I was only a child struggling with the perplexities of my knives and forks, and she was the magical floating woman who came to me by day or by night in a shining aura of sparkling light and touched her hand to mine and whispered, "You will be the one who brings us home."
WHEN I WENT TO MULANO I WASN'T TRYING To ESCAPE from my destiny, however it may seem to you. Believe that or not, as you choose. I know what I was doing. How can you escape your destiny? That's like saying, I was trying to escape my skin, I was trying to escape my breath, I was trying to escape my thoughts. On Mulano I wasn't trying to escape anything: I was trying to fulfill that great design of destiny which I had known all my life I was meant to fulfill. Sometimes it's necessary to run very hard in what seems like the wrong direction if you hope ever to get where you need to go.
Of course the whole universe sent emissaries to bother me when I was on Mulano. Nobody can stay hidden for long in a galaxy as little as this. The first one who came was Rom, naturally. I would have been surprised and probably sore as blazes if he had been Gaje. Rom are always quicker than anyone when it comes to picking up the signs of a trail. You know that already, if you are Rom; or at least you should know that, and I pray to whatever god is closest at hand that you do. And if you are not Rom-if you are of the other kind, if you are Gaje - read and learn. Read and learn!
Four or five years earlier, however many it was, when I decided to put the worlds of the civilized Empire behind me and headed out to lose myself in the snowy wastes of Mulano, I took good care to leave a trail. It was only common sense. Even when you've gone off by yourself to think, or to heal your wounds, or simply to hide for a while, you want to leave the patrin behind you, the trail-signs. If you don't, how will your family find you? And if your family can never find you, who are you?
In the old days on lost Earth the patrin-signs spoke of simple things, and they were posted in simple ways. We were a lot simpler people then. A few marks scratched in the ground, or some charcoal strokes on a walclass="underline" that was sufficient. When your path took you far from the wagons of your kumpania, you left the signs behind you to show where you had gone and also to guide your kin as they traveled the same path. There was the sign like this - (D-that meant, "There are very generous people here who are friendly to Gypsies," and there was the one like this- + -that meant, "Here they don't give you a thing," and the one like this- /// -that meant, "We have already robbed this place." And then there were signs that said that water was available for the horses, or that there were pigs and chickens for the taking, or that in this town lived many stupid people who wanted their fortunes told. And also you could leave clues to be used in the fortune-telling by those who followed you: "This woman wants a son," or "They are very greedy for gold here," or "The old man will die soon."
All this I know not only because it is the tradition but because I have walked the trails of old Earth myself, the Earth that existed a thousand or two years ago, when I used to go ghosting around to see what was to be seen.
Do you doubt me? But why would you doubt me?
Believe me. I know whereof I speak. How could it be otherwise? When I tell you something it's because I know it to be true. I'm too old to lie, at least to lie to myself; and what I say here I have to say to myself before I can say it to you. I would lie to you in a flash if I saw anything to gain by it. But not here. Here I can only gain what I want to gain by telling the absolute truth.
(Maybe a little lie once in a while. I'm only human. But no big ones. Believe me.)
When I went to live on Mulano I left my own patrin behind me in fifty places. Of course my patrin wasn't just a matter of charcoal marks scrawled on walls. These are the days of the Empire, after all, when everyone has magic at his fingertips. So I marked my trail in signs of fire in the sunset sky over Galgala, and I wrote it in gleaming blue and gold on the shells of a tribe of wind-scarabs on Iriarte, and I buried it in the nasty dreams of a smelly little thief on Xamur. And I posted it in other ways in other places here and there about the Imperium as well. I had no doubts that I would be found. Only let them not find me too soon, is what I prayed.
The first one who found me, as I say, was Rom. That was gratifying, that a Rom would be the first. You want your own kind to confirm your prejudices about them. He was young and very tall and he was wearing his skin midnight-dark, with glittering white eyes and teeth and a mane of shining black hair tumbling about his shoulders. Because he was so long and slender there was a kind of beauty and fragility about him that made him look almost like a woman, but I could tell he was strong enough to crush rocks in his hands.
He came up to me while I was spice-fishing on the western lip of the Gombo glacier. It was so long since I'd seen another real living human being, not a ghost, not a doppelganger, that for a moment I was really taken aback. I almost wanted to run. I could feel powerful waves of life-vibration emanating from him, clanging off my soul with the impact of a thousand gongs.
But I held my ground and pulled myself together. Whatever he wanted, he wasn't going to get it from me, and if push came to shove I was going to do both the pushing and the shoving. Kings are like that. You don't have to be a son of a bitch to be a king, but you don't usually get to be king by being a patsy, either.