Eventually came a time when they stopped believing it. This was in the twentieth or perhaps the twenty-first century, when all knowledge became available at the push of a button and every jackass began to think that he knew everything.
This is the modern world, all the jackasses told each other solemnly. And they all felt very proud of themselves for living in the modern world. Nobody was ignorant any more, nobody was superstitious, nobody could be fooled by glib mumbo-jumbo. Among the things that everybody knew now was that there never had been such a thing as a Gypsy king, that the whole notion was nothing but a hoax, one of the innumerable frauds that those wandering rogues the Gypsies had dreamed up to confuse and delude the poor credulous yokels on whom they preyed.
Not only did those well-informed people who lived in the modern world stop believing in the King of the Gypsies, I think they stopped believing in Gypsies altogether. There was no room in that shiny modern world of theirs for Gypsies. Gypsies were ragged and unkempt and untamable; Gypsies were unpredictable; Gypsies were simply an untidy concept.
So they began to think we were extinct. That we were mere antiquarian folklore, the raggle-taggle Gypsies, O! Oh, yes, there had been Gypsies once upon a time, yes, the way there had been smallpox and public hangings and bitter wars over religion; but all that was done with now. This was the modern world, after all. The Gypsies, they said, have all settled down in ordinary houses and married ordinary people and live ordinary lives. They vote and pay taxes and go to church and speak nothing but the language of the land. The Gypsies of old are all gone, swallowed up in modern civilization, they said. What a pity, they said, that the quaint old picturesque Gypsies are no more.
And right about that time, when we had become all but invisible to the whole Gaje society because we had come to seem to belong to it, when we had vanished clear out of sight-that was the time when we understood that we needed to organize ourselves properly and come forth as a true nation. That was when we really did begin to form our Gypsy government-no fantasy, this time, but the genuine item-and elect our first real Gypsy kings.
We had to. Invisibility has its advantages, but sometimes it can be a drawback. The world was changing very fast. Those were the years when the GaJe first were starting to leave their little Earth and go off to nearby planets. Before long, we knew, they would be voyaging to the stars. If we stayed invisible we would be left behind. So we had to emerge from our Gaje camouflage. In that lay our only hope of getting home again. Earth was not our home, though we had never dared tell the Gaje that; our true home was far away, and the one thing we longed for was to return to it and give up our wandering life at last.
So it came to pass that we began to have kings. That was a thousand years ago, on Earth, in the earliest days of star travel, before anyone knew that we would be the ones to lead mankind upward from Earth into the heavens. Chavula was the first king, and after him Ilika, and then Terkari, and then-well, everyone knows the names of the kings. They were the men who took us to the stars and made us what we are today, masters of many worlds, lords of the roads of night.
And eventually in the fullness of time they came to me and said, "The king is dead, Yakoub. Will you be our king?"
What could I say? What could I do? No one in his right mind wants to be a king; and whatever else I am, I have always been in my right mind. Trust me on that score. But I am also a man of my people, and, powerful as we now may be, we are nevertheless a people in exile. That imposes certain responsibilities on you. I was born in exile and so was my father and so were my father's fathers for fifty generations back. If I was the man who could bring that long exile to an end, how could I dare refuse? In any case I had lived all my life under the lash of the knowledge of my fate; and it was my fate to be the king.
When I was a small boy my father took me to the lookout point near the steep summit of Mount Salvat on Vietoris, which is the world where I was born, and he said, "Where is your home, boy?" And I told him that my home was on such-and-such a street in the city of Vietorion on the world Vietoris. Then he showed me the bright red eye of Romany Star blazing in the black forehead of the sky and he said, "You think this place here is home? No, boy. That place is home. And some day our king will lead us there again." And he looked at me and the look in his eyes told me, more clearly than any words could have done, that he hoped I would be that king. I had never told him of the visions I had had when I was very small, the ghost of the old woman coming to me and planting the seed of the future in my soul; and I found myself unable to tell him now, so I had no way of saying, Yes, father, yes, I will be that king, I will be the one to lead us home, there can be no doubt of it: the ghost of an old woman told me so, bringing the word to me out of the future. I wish now that I had had a chance to tell him that. But I never told him or anyone else. I suppose that is every Rom father's hope, that his son would be the one. He was a slave then and so was I, and not long afterward I was sold away from him in the marketplace of Vietorion and I never saw him again. But I have seen Romany Star every night of my life from whatever world I found myself on, and I feel the warmth of its light on my cheeks no matter how cold the night; for it is the light of the star of home. And when they came to me and said, "Will you be our king, Yakoub," how could I say no, when I might be that very king who would lead us home again? So I let the kingship come upon me, which in time also I relinquished, and which I know will come again, as it must, for there are great fulfillments that have to be worked out and I know that I am the vehicle of their doing.
WHILE THE BOY CHORIAN WAS STILL STAYING WITH ME, Polarca's ghost came around to visit. Chorian was out on the ice at the time hunting cloud-eels with my loop and trident: he was young and agile and energetic, and sending him off to hunt was one good way of getting him out of my hair when I grew weary of all that endless adulation.
There was a hum and a buzz and a crackle in the air and Polarca said, out of the mantle of green radiance that he liked to affect when he went ghosting around, "Is he bothering you? I'll scare him away."
"He'll leave soon enough on his own."
"A pretty boy. What did he come here for?"
"To tell me to get myself back to Galgala and be king again, I think." Polarca considered that. He and I have known each other better than a hundred years, since we were galley slaves together in Nikos Hasgard's synapse pit on Mentiroso. Polarca is Rom of the Lowara stock and he claims to come from a long line of emperors, popes, and horsetraders on Earth. I believe only the part about horsetraders but I would never voice suspicion about the rest. He does more ghosting than anyone I know; he is a very restless man.
"You aren't going to go," Polarca said finally. "Are you asking me or telling me?"
"Both, Yakoub."
"I'm not going to go," I said. "That's right."
"Even though Damiano says that a new king will be elected if you don't."
"You overheard that, did you?"
Polarca smiled. When a ghost smiles, it's more like a tiny flash of lightning. "I was standing right next to you. You didn't see me?" "If they need a new king, let them have a new king," I said. "I'm going to stay here."
"Absolutely, Yakoub. Beyond any doubt that's the wisest thing." The trouble with Polarca's ghost is that he doesn't speak with punctuation, so that half the time I can't tell a question from a statement, and he doesn't speak with inflection, so I can't tell sarcasm from sincerity. That isn't a characteristic of all ghosts; it's just Polarca's. Polarca is a smartass and so is his ghost.