I was a hundred meters from the ice-bubble and hordes of Mulano ghosts were swarming all around me, orbiting me like furious insects. I must have been putting out enough energy to feed their entire nation for a month.
Chorian, brushing them warily aside, put his face close to mine. "Yakoub? Can you hear me, Yakoub?"
"What do you think? Of course I can, boy."
"I didn't know what was happening to you. I thought you might have been ghosting."
I shook my head. "No, boy, I was being ghosted. It's not the same thing."
"I don't underst-"
"You don't have to. Dinner's ready. Let's go inside and have ourselves that royal feast."
THE BOY STAYED WITH ME FOR ANOTHER FOUR DAYS OR so, and I had to put up with his awe and reverence the whole time. That look of utter adoration, the hushed deferential tone of his voice, the unwillingness to let me do even the simplest task without jumping up to offer to help-it got so I wanted to kick him to bring him to his senses. My very belches were ecstasy for him. Nobody had ever behaved like that toward me when I really was king. The way this boy was carrying on, you'd think I was some frail and pampered lord of the Empire, some pallid decadent Gaje prince, and not true Rom at all.
Well, he was very young. And, Rom though he was, I gathered that he had spent more of his short life in high Imperial circles than he had among his own people. So perhaps he felt that that was how he ought to behave in the presence of the King of the Gypsies. Or maybe-God blight the thought!-maybe that is how deeply the Empire has corrupted and perverted the young Rom these days, so that everybody goes around bowing and scraping and kowtowing to anyone of superior rank and power.
King of the Gypsies! The whole idea was nothing but Gaje nonsense in the first place!
There never was such a thing as a King of All Gypsies in the old days on Earth. That was only a myth, a fable that the Rom folk invented for the sake of befuddling the Gaje, or perhaps the Gaje invented it to befuddle themselves, since that is often their way. We had kings, all right, plenty of them, one for every tribe, every kumpania, every roaming band. There had to be a chief of some sort, after all, someone with intelligence, strength, a sense of what is just, in order to maintain authority within the tribe and hold it together against all challenges as it traveled about through hostile lands with strange laws. But a king.? A single mighty King of the Gypsies to rule over millions of wandering Rom scattered across the six continents of Earth? There never was such a thing.
We were poor people then. Scum of the Earth, that was us, dirty shabby wanderers that no one trusted. Because they feared and mistrusted us so much the Ga e were always prying, bothering us, asking us a host of foolish petty questions. It was their way of trying to make us fit into their foolish petty way of life. When we came into a new place we had to apply for residence permits, for citizenship documents, for passports, for all manner of absurd papers. We had no respect for those requests, for why should we have been bound by Gaje law when we had perfectly good laws of our own? Still, Earth was Gaje territory and they were many and we were few, they were rich and we were poor, they had power and we had nothing, and so we played their game, we answered their questions. We told them what they wanted to hear, because that was the simplest and most efficient way of dealing with their idiocies.
And one of the things they most wanted to hear when one of our caravans came to their town was that we had a leader, a man of high authority who could maintain some sort of control over us and keep us from spreading chaos in the town. If they found out who our leader was, they would have someone to deal with, and in that way they could control us. Or so they imagined.
Who is in charge here, they would ask us. Why, our king, we would say. (Or our duke, or our count, or our marquis, whatever title seemed to please them best.) He is that man right over there.
And the king or duke or count or marquis would step forward and tell them, speaking in their own language, everything they wanted to hear. Usually he wasn't the true chief of the tribe. The real chief tended to keep himself in the background, so that the Gaje couldn't take him hostage or otherwise interfere with him, if that was what they were minded to do, and sometimes they were. Instead we would send forth someone who looked like a king, some tall broad-shouldered Rom with bright eyes and long flowing mustaches, who might have been a nobody in the tribe but who enjoyed strutting about and speaking in a loud voice and playing the part of a great man. He would tell the Gaje everything they wanted to hear. Yes, he would say, we are good lawabiding Christians and we mean no trouble for you. We will just stay here a little while, mending your pots and sharpening your knives, and then we will move along.
So the word got around that the way to deal with a tribe of Gypsies that came to your town was to find the king of the tribe- because every tribe had a king-and deal with him; otherwise it was like trying to deal with the wind, the waves, the sands of the beach. And sooner or later they would think to ask, Is there a king of kings, a king over all your tribes? And we would tell them, Yes, yes, we have a great king. Why not? It pleased them to hear that. They had a powerful need to believe that: that we were a nation scattered among other nations, that we had a king just as they had a king, and his word was law throughout all our tribes in every land. It was exciting and frightening to them to believe that. We were strange, mysterious, we were alien. We had our own customs and we had our own language and we came and went in the night, and we told fortunes and picked pockets and stole chickens and given the chance we would run off with pretty children and turn them into Gypsies. And we had a king who ruled over us and directed us in the secret war that we were waging against all of civilized mankind. So they liked to believe; so they needed to believe.
Give a Gajo a foolish fantasy and he will embrace it and embellish it until it becomes truer than the truth. Whenever five of our tribes came together in the same place for a festival the GaJe would imagine that we were convening to elect a new king. Is that what you are doing, electing a new king? And we would say, pulling long faces, Yes, yes, our old king has died, now we are choosing the wisest and strongest and best among us to rule over us. Sometimes we actually did hold an election of sorts, if we saw something to gain by it. We came forth and told the Gaje, Here is our new king, King Karbaro, King Mijloli, King Porado, whatever his name. Those are all filthy words in the Romany tongue, but what did the Gaje know? The filthier the name we invented the better the joke. And we would find some strong handsome fellow of the tribe with more vanity than brains and we would jump him up to be King of the Gypsies and he would stride around waving and nodding and smiling, and the GaJe would be tremendously impressed. They paid good money to watch the coronation feast, and paid money again to take pictures of us dancing and singing in our quaint tribal costumes, and while all that was going on we moved among them and picked their pockets besides, not because we were criminals at heart but simply to punish them for their silliness.
And the GaJe went away feeling pleased with themselves because they had seen the coronation of the new Gypsy king. And then we also went on our way and nobody among us gave another thought to King Karbaro again. But the Gaje continued to believe that we were the subjects of a supreme ruler whose powers were absolute and whose commands traveled mysteriously across the world by secret couriers.