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flowered meadows of Romany Star and now I stand in the Plaza of the Thousand Columns in Atlantis and now I advance toward the throne of the Fifteenth Emperor, and now I sharpen the blades of the Frankish swordsmen who will take Jerusalem from the Saracens in the morning, and now I sit in the royal council of the Rom on golden Galgala with old Bibi Savina the phuri dai beside me, and now I am with my father in the city of Vietorion as he points toward a red star in the sky. Sometimes my lady Syluise is by my side, and sometimes it is someone else, and sometimes I am alone. I see crystal temples and bridges that span the skies. The visions will not end. A thousand thousand souls crowd in on me, Rom souls, Gaje souls, the souls of creatures that are not at all human; and they are all my own. There is an infinity of worlds and I am everywhere. I writhe in the mud and I soar between the stars. And wondrous laughter rings out. filling the heavens so that there is scarcely room for anything else. The laughter is mine.
    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."
    6.
    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 Gaje 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