He gave me the Rom sign and the old Rom greeting: "Sarishan, Yakoub."
Then, still speaking Romany, he wished me long life and many sons and the continued favor of the gods and angels, and a few more medieval flourishes of the same sort.
"I speak Imperial, boy," I told him when he seemed to be done. A little gratuitous snottiness is useful, sometimes: it keeps them off balance while you're trying to figure out what they're up to. Although this one looked too innocent to be up to much.
He bit his lip. He had expected me to answer in a patriotic gush of Romany. The Great Tongue and all that.
Staring at me in puzzlement, he said, "You are Yakoub, aren't you?" "What do you think?"
I imagined I could hear the gears going round in his head, clank, gnash, clank. Yes, yes, he might be telling himself, this is Mulano and that is the place where Yakoub has gone, and this man looks like Yakoub and there's nobody else living on this planet, so this must actually be Yakoub. But maybe he wasn't thinking that at all. He was so young and pretty that I tended to underestimate him, I now suspect.
Finally he said, "There were two rumors circulating everywhere, one that you were dead, the other you had gone to some world outside the Empire."
"Which one do you want to believe?"
"There was never any question. Yakoub will live forever."
Oh, Lord! Hero-worship, a bright purple case of it! He was trying hard not to tremble. Quickly he made three of the signs of respect, one after another without pause, including one I hadn't seen for at least forty years. I began to wonder whether he was really all that young, or simply a good remake. But then I saw that he had to be young. There's a look of rapturous awe that comes into a young man's eye in the presence of true masculine power and authority that simply can't be faked and absolutely can't be built back into anyone past the age of thirty by some remake artist. This boy had that look. He knew that he was standing before a king; and that knowledge was melting his bones.
He told me that his name was Chorian and that he came from the world known as Fenix in the Haj Qaldun system and that he was a Rom of the Kalderash stock. That is my branch of the tribe as well. He told me also that he had been trying to find me for three years.
None of that was particularly interesting to me. The first impact of his presence was dying down now. It took a moment or two, but I was calm again. I turned away from him and went on with my fishing.
In this part of the glacier the ice was perfectly clear and you could see the long tubular forms of spice-fish, both the red kind and the superior turquoise variety, gliding serenely through the depths of the frozen river fifty meters down. I had a vibration-net down there, fluttering in the molecular breeze.
He said, "The Lord Sunteil instructed me to find you."
Now that was interesting. Sunteil floated into view in my mind: the emperor's right-hand lordling, the favored successor, smooth and slippery and perhaps a little sinister. I glanced back over my shoulder and gave Chorian a long slow cool look.
"You're in the service of the Empire, are you?"
"No," he said, "I'm in the pay of Lord Sunteil." There was a wink in his voice. "That's not the same thing."
Yes, I definitely had underestimated him. That was a fine distinction, very nicely put: he had allowed himself to be bought, but he hadn't sold them anything. I wanted to hug him for that. The Rom blood may be running thin, I sometimes think, but it hadn't yet turned entirely to water if this boy was any evidence. And of course Fenixi in general have a well-earned reputation for slyness and slipperiness. I had let Chorian's air of seeming naivete mislead me.
I didn't give him so much as a glint of approbation, though. I didn't want him to get too smug too soon. That's a peril to any Rom; you start bamboozling the poor Gaje before you've cut your first teeth, and you find out how easy it is, and it can make you smug, which is just one province away from being careless. We have never been able to afford to be careless. So instead of praising his nice little distinction I simply shrugged. In any case I had my fishing to attend to just then.
My net was nearly in position. The moment was critical and called for all my concentration. It's a ticklish business, lowering a vibrationnet through solid ice. I ran my fingers over the keyboard as if I was coaxing a tune from my zither, and the net dipped and bobbed and billowed.
Down in the ice a turquoise spice-fish picked up the song of the net and swung around to stare at the net's gaping shimmering mouth. Come on, you lovely bastard, wriggle right in! But the fish wasn't about to do that. He looked up through the ice at me and I saw his huge golden-green eyes, wise and solemn, glowing like twin suns. That is one smart fish, I thought. That fish has Romany blood in him. I could hear him laughing at me through fifty meters of ice. That fish is my cousin, I thought.
"You ever do any vibration-fishing?" I asked.
"There's no winter on Fenix. I've never seen ice before." "Ah. I should have remembered that."
"I went a lot of places while I was searching for you. I was on Marajo, I was on Duud Shabeel, I was on Xamur. I never saw any ice in those places either. "
I tickled the keys and swung the mouth of the net away from the turquoise spice-fish. I wasn't eager to catch him any longer, not after the way he had looked at me.
Chorian said, "Xamur is where I finally was able to find out where you had gone."
"God gave you a nose. It's only right that you should use it for smelling things out. Why did Sunteil send you?"
"The Lord Sunteil is afraid that you're planning to return to the Empire," the boy said. "He thinks this abdication of yours is some sort of ruse, that you're just biding your time until you're ready to come back. And when you come back you'll be more powerful than ever before. "
That went right to my gut, those words. In amazement I realized that Sunteil was actually on to me. Even though none of my own people, apparently, had managed so far to figure out my game, somehow Sunteil had.
Which meant not only that Sunteil was smart, which I had known for a long time, but that he might be smarter than I had allowed for. That could cause trouble for us when the old emperor finally died and Sunteil, as most people expected, succeeded him. For I had no doubt at all that I was going to have to deal face to face with Lord Sunteil, I or my immediate successor, concerning matters of the highest importance to the future of the Rom people, when Sunteil became emperor.
But if he had fathomed my strategy, what was the point of his sending Chorian all the way out here to tell me so? There had to be a trick somewhere.
"I don't get it," I said. "The Lord Sunteil sends a young Rom to find out whether the old Rom king means to make trouble? What sense does that make? Does he really think you'll spy on me for him? That's too simple."
"The Lord Sunteil is a subtle man. And devious." "So I have heard, yes."
"Perhaps he thinks you'll tell me things that you'd never tell a GaJo. And maybe he actually does hope that I would tell them to him." "And would you?"
Chorian looked at me in horror.
"I have strong loyalty to Lord Sunteil, and he knows it. But I would never carry the secrets of the King of the Rom to him, not for anything. Never. Never. "
"Even if I wanted you to?" "What?"
"Look," I said, "Sunteil's all wrong about what he thinks I'm up to out here, and it isn't in any way useful to anybody for him to go on believing any of that stuff. I want you to tell him the truth about my abdication. That can't be construed as betraying me. You took Empire money for this job, didn't you? Well, give the Empire what it's paying for. Go and let the Lord Sunteil know that he doesn't need to fret about my coming back to cause trouble. I have completely lost interest in power. Completely. "