I shrugged. "Be that as it may. If ever I was king, I'm king no more. Clear?"
"And the succession-"
"Bugger the succession. The succession doesn't interest me. I don't care an ox's foreskin about the succession. That's why I'm here instead of somewhere else. That's why I mean to-"
Chorian gasped. His eyes went very wide. He made a little strangled gargling sound.
It didn't strike me as likely that the web of confusions I had spun around him could have shaken him so profoundly. And I was right. Chorian gasped and gaped and gargled some more, and finally he managed to point past my shoulder, and I looked backward and saw what was really bothering him.
Three snow-serpents had arrived on the scene.
Death's lovely handmaidens, beautiful chilly ribbons of emerald green streaked with ruby and sapphire and speckles of gold leaf They must have looked horrific to him, even though these were only small ones, no more than eight or ten meters long, each one melting a wide glistening track for itself as it slithered in easy curving glides toward the place where we stood.
They had their eyes on my spice-fish. They were zeroing in on it from three different directions.
"Oh, no, no, cousins," I murmured.
Suddenly there was an imploder in Chorian's hand and he was fiddling with the focus. A vein stood out thick as a finger on his forehead. The grand gesture, again. I sighed. You have to be very patient with young men.
"Don't," I told him, reaching up and pushing the weapon back into his pocket. "They're only scavengers. They won't harm us and it's a crime against God to harm them. But I'm not going to let them have my fish." I walked out to meet them. They wriggled down against the ice and became very still, like whipped dogs. The heat and throb of life bothers them. I could have killed them with a touch: I have a lot of heat in me. "Sorry, cousins," I said gently. "This is a matter of me or you, and you ought to know how that has to come out. He's my fish, not yours. I worked damned hard for him."
They wriggled a little. They looked sad and disconsolate. My heart went out to them.
"I tell you what. Tonight let the king enjoyed his royal feast, cousins. Whatever's left will be yours in the morning. Is that all right?" Plainly it wasn't. But there wasn't much they could do about it. They looked to the fish, to me, to the fish again. They made little mournful sounds. My soul wept for them. This was a hard season. But I held my ground and after a moment they turned tail and went slithering away. Chorian was staring at me with that look of awe again.
"They aren't dangerous," I said. "Big, yes, but sweet as pussycats and not half as ferocious. They're strictly carrion-eaters. You know that carrion-eaters are sacred, don't you? For they restore life to the worlds."
But he had forgotten about the snow-serpents already. Something I had said was agitating him now.
"You've been telling me over and over that you never were king. But just now you spoke of yourself as the king. The king will enjoy his royal feast tonight, is what you said. I don't understand you. Are you king or aren't you?"
"I am not the king," I said. "But I am kingly." He looked at me, baffled.
"You spoke of yourself as the king. I heard you." "A figure of speech."
"What?" He was lost.
"I have kingliness about me, and so I can speak of myself as the king, if it pleases me. And I can say I have been king, or I can say I have never been king, as it pleases me. Because the kingliness remains forever. The kingship may go, but not the kingliness, not ever, boy, not ever. Once you've taken on that burden and learned how to stand up underneath it, that strength never leaves you, even if the burden does." I slung the spice-fish over my shoulder. It must have weighed fifty kilos, but I wasn't going to let that trouble me. "So tonight you dine with the king, boy, and what you'll eat will be royal fare. And in a day or two you go back to wherever you came, is that understood? And you tell them that Yakoub meant it when he said he was tired of being king. Yakoub has abdicated. Permanently. Absolutely. Retroactively. You tell that to Sunteil. You tell that to Damiano. You can tell it to the emperor himself. It would be a mistake to doubt me."
I heard laughter in the distance. I knew, without looking around, that it was the laughter of ghosts. Mulano is a place of many ghosts. There are the native ghosts and then there are the visiting ghosts, and the two are not at all the same sort of thing. The native ghosts are life-forms that happen not to be flesh-life; there are billions of them and they are everywhere, glowing at you in mid-air like little lanterns, a friendly presence but not much for conversation. Those are the ghosts that gave this world its name. Mulo, ghost, a fine Romany word. Mulano, place of ghosts. It was a Rom who named this world, for all the ghosts that live there. But since I came to Mulano a good many ghosts of the more familiar kind had taken to visiting it, my cousins, drifting across the void of space and the gulfs of time to this icy place to keep me company: Polarca, Valerian, sometimes Thivt, who is also my cousin even if he is not Rom, and various others now and then. You don't need to know who they are, just yet. Old friends, coming to visit: that's enough for now. A dozen times a day I felt the electric crackling of their auras on the air and the lilting of their laughter drifted towards me, and I knew that someone close and dear to me was hovering nearby. I could feel their presence now. They were laughing now. These were cousin ghosts. The other kind don't laugh.
I knew why they were laughing.
"Don't any of you doubt me either," I told them.
I HUNG MY FISH UP TO STEW IN A GRAVITY-GLOBE, WHERE the juices would circle round and round and baste all sides equally. Some Mulano ghosts attracted by the electromagnetic stresses of the cooking process came nosing around to see if there was anything for them to eat. They weren't after my fish, only the fish-flavored infrared waves that were emanating from it. It's possible to impart flavor to energy anywhere along the spectrum, you know, simply by cooking something interesting in it. Maybe you aren't able to detect it, but just ask any Mulano ghost.
While the fish was cooking the yellow sun began to crawl into the western sky and Double Day began. The usual auroras of Double Daybreak started to jump around behind the mountains, and the ghosts immediately lost interest in my fish: there were much better things for them to eat outside. Chorian stared at the amazing lighting effects in disbelief.
"What's going on?" he asked.
"Happens every day about this time. Go and watch." "Can't I help you do anything in here?"
"Go and watch," I said. "You don't see stuff like this on Empire worlds."
He went out. I love cooking but I hate having an audience. For other things, yes, but not when I'm trying to put a meal together. Cooking, like lovemaking, needs to be done in private. I went on bustling around inside the ice-bubble, calling up items for dinner, a flask of chilled Marajo wine and a bunch of gleaming black Iriarte grapes and a platter of Galgala oysterines, out of the various dimensional pockets where I stored such things. When everything was organized I stuck my head out of the bubble to call the boy. Gaudy winding-sheets of sinuous color were flapping like tremendous electric banners overhead and the broad ice-fields were ablaze with a million subtle shifting shades of aquamarine and emerald and jade, ruby and burgundy and scarlet, citron, cobalt, amethyst, magenta, gold.
The lights hit me all at once and I felt a torrent of ghost-force come rushing toward me out of the past, tumbling over me like an avalanche. I hadn't done any ghosting around since I had come to Mulano. It wasn't that I was too old or had lost interest; it was simply that it seemed more important for me to remain rooted in present time here than it did to cut myself loose and go floating through other epochs. But that didn't mean that other epochs wouldn't go floating through me. There's no escaping the past. Either you ghost it or it ghosts you; and that night in the sudden dazzle of the aurora the walls of time swung back and a million yesterdays engulfed me in a wild crimson surge.