God, could I ever lay it on! But just then I believed every word I was saying. That's the first rule of successful lying: believe your own bullshit, or no one else will. Right at that moment I knew as clearly as I knew I had two balls between my legs that I was done with being king. I hadn't felt that way five minutes ago and I probably wouldn't feel that way five minutes later, but what I was saying was what I believed with all my heart, right at that moment.
Chorian stood there listening in that rapt adoring open-mouthed way of his, as though he bought every syllable of the nonsense I was spewing. Grandly I went on, "I've had a bellyful of it, boy, and I'm finishecl with it. The whole power thing has burned out, for me. The time has come for me to step aside for good. Mulano is where I mean to live. If the Lord Sunteil knew how good the fishing is here, he'd understand. "
A nice flourish to finish with, I thought.
But Chorian was more complicated than I had been giving him credit for.
"I'll tell the Lord Sunteil that, yes," the boy said sweetly, when I was done. "And should I tell your cousin Damiano that also?" All innocence, just a good-looking young messenger-lad running errands for his betters. "That you have no plan to return to the Empire? Even though there is great trouble among the Rom, because there has been no king? Even though you are the one who is best able to bring the crisis to an end?"
I WASN'T EVEN REMOTELY EXPECTING THAT IN My amazement I hit the keys so hard that the net turned mouth-downward just as an elegant i-ed spice-fish was becoming curious about it. I should have realized that this was all going to be much less simple than it had seemed at first. Who was this kid really working for, anyway?
"Damiano?" I yelped. "What does he have to do with this? Where did you talk with my cousin Damiano?"
"On Marajo, at the City of Seven Pyramids. I told him that the Lord Sunteil had sent me after you, and he said, Yes, go, find the king and tell him that his throne is waiting for him."
My heart started to pound in a nasty way.
Calmly, calmly. How I hate it, when alarm bells start ringing like that inside my old bones! But between one eyeblink and the next I went into myself and turned down the adrenal flow. Sometimes wisdom is nothing more than proper control of your ductless glands.
"I never had a throne," I said. "I never was king of anything."
Chorian wasn't having any more of that line now, though.
"You were Rom baro," the boy said. "The big Gypsy. The top man." "Never. Absolutely not. Get that whole idea out of your head." My hands were trembling a little. I didn't want Chorian to see that. To distract him I pointed and waved my arms and cried, "Look, there, do you see that fish nosing around the net?"
It was another turquoise one, not as wise-looking as the first. I gave him my full attention. It was a convenient way of changing the subject until I had had a chance to work things out a little in my head.
I could taste the spice-fish's sweet flesh already on my tongue: rosemary, turmeric, cumin, golden pepper. I made the net dance for him. I let it flutter toward him, I pulled it back, I made him beg to be caught. His long nose twitched as he zigged and zagged about. With marvelous agility he swam the crystalline depths, parting the ice as though it were not there.
Come, pretty bastard! Come glide right in!
"What's this crisis you were talking about?" I said carefully. "That there is no king. That ships of exploration are going forth and there is no plan. That disputes are arising and there is no one to settle them."
I stared down at my fish, as though I could snare him by the power of my mind alone.
"There are ways of managing these things even without a king," I said.
"They have. For five years. But things are getting difficult and tense. Damiano says to tell you that now the high ones of the Rom want to elect a new king. They won't wait for you any longer, even the ones who never believed you were serious about abdicating. If you're definitely not going to come back, they're about ready to elect someone in your place."
So that was it!
That had been meant to hook me but good, that quiet statement just now. Push was coming to shove; Sunteil was not the only one who had figured out what I was really up to; and now my cousins of the Rom Kingdom were matching my bluff with one of their own. That was the real message Chorian had come here to deliver. He might be in Sunteil's pay but the one he actually served was Damiano. Which is to say that he served the Rom; which is as it should have been. Sunteil wanted information, yes. But Damiano wanted to make me come back. And this was his way of getting me to do it.
Even now I wasn't going to let myself go for the bait. I couldn't, not now, not yet.
"They need a king? Let them find a king, then." "But you are king!"
"You didn't hear me the first time? How can they elect someone in my place when I never had a place?"
"But that isn't so! How can you say you weren't king when you were king? You are king!"
He was bewildered. He should have been. I had been working hard at bewildering him. I laughed. I left him to puzzle it out and went back to my fishing again. Swiftly, smoothly, I closed the net's mouth and swept it toward the surface of the glacier. The turquoise spice-fish leaped and sprang and writhed. I had him. I pulled the net up until it breached the glacier's skin, and I kept on lifting until it rose twenty meters into the air. The orange sun was high in the east and a streak of scarlet fire ran over the frozen land like a river of molten gold. In that brilliant light my fish changed colors a thousand times, screaming at me from every corner of the spectrum as I held him aloft. Then I sent a quick shaft of force through the rim of the net and the fish was still.
"There," I said. Pride flooded through me. Even an idiot can be a king, and I can list plenty who have, but fishing with a vibration-net is a different story. It takes a quick eye and a pretty wrist. I was years in learning the skill and I doubt that there's anybody better at it. "You see that?" I crowed. "The timing, the coordination? There's real art in what I just did." The boy was gaping, mind still lost in the tangles of interstellar politics. I turned to him. "Boy, you are invited to join me for dinner tonight," I told him expansively. "At least once in your life you should know the taste of spice-fish."
"Your cousin Damiano-"
I glared. "Bugger my cousin Damiano with an ivory tusk! Let him be king, if he wants."
"The kingship belongs by rights to you, Yakoub."
"Where do you get all these idiotic ideas?" I said, sighing. "I never wanted to be king. I tell you ten thousand times: I never was king. I was king in their heads, maybe. All that is behind me. If they need a king, let them find someone else to be their king. Here is where I live. Here is where I'll die."
I said it with real ringing conviction. I would have taken an oath that I was sincere, too. I can remember times when I swore eternal fidelity to Esmeralda with the same throbbing sincerity. And meant it, too. "Yes," I said again, grandiosely. "I have made my farewell to the Imperium. Here is where I'll die!"
"No, Yakoub!"
His eyes were glassy with shock. It went beyond mere love and reverence for me. I had messed up his head completely with my contradictory speeches and with this talk of living out my life on Mulano. Handicapped by his youth, he wasn't able to keep up with my swings and swerves. And when I spoke of dying, it was as if he saw in the mere possibility of my death his own unthinkable extinction sweeping inexorably toward him. If I could die, so could he. He grasped my arm and cried out with the wild silly romantic fervor of the truly young, "You mustn't speak that way. You will never die. Never!"