Star of Gypsies

Since the whole concept of dungeons and oubliettes sounds medieval as hell, you may be wondering how it came to pass that such up-to-date people as we modern high-tech stargoing Rom happened to include one in our royal headquarters. The answer is that I don't know; and the secondary answer is that we are not as modern and high-tech and up-to-date as some of us like to pretend we are. In fact we really are medieval types, when you come right down to it. We live by all sorts of traditions thousands of years old. We are tribal. We have kings. We cast spells. We say ancient prayers in an ancient language. We sing out loud when something moves us and we are not too shy to dance on the tops of tables in the fine old uninhibited manner at our tribal celebrations. We believe in things like duty and family and the sanctity of oaths. We are a people of fierce loyalties and strong passions. In short, we are absolutely medieval, triumphantly medieval. Even me. Even you, for all your modernist pretensions. Why not have a dungeon or two? You never can tell when a dungeon might be useful, even in this modern era. Especially in this modern era.

I settled into mine as though it was the finest hotel suite on any of the kingly worlds. It felt almost like coming back to an old, familiar nest. The very first time I had laid eyes on it, decades earlier, it had seemed that way. I had known right away, all the way back then, that this dungeon was going to be my home one day. A presentiment. A little leap, not unusual among us, across the boundaries of time. So when I found myself at long last taking possession of the premises it was with a sense of closing a transaction that had been carried on the books unfinished for a long time.

Not that my dungeon was a great place to live. Dungeons rarely are. This one was about two and a half inches above the water table, and appropriately moist and clammy. An underground stream runs below the king's house on Galgala. The oubliette had its feet right in it. A slick little trickle of water ran across the stone floor at the lower end of the room. Even in the dimness the water had a nice shimmer to it. It was shot through with dissolved gold, like everything else on Galgala. The very walls of my little prison cell were full of gold. I suppose that if this were medieval Earth instead of fantastic futuristic Galgala I might have been able to bribe my way out of the dungeon after spending thirty years or so extracting the gold from the walls by the heat of my candle, or something like that. But this was, after all, fantastic futuristic Galgala where gold is everywhere, and my guards were no more likely to be bought with the pretty yellow metal than they would be with a cupful of air.

Shandor had promised me snakes and riptoads as my companions down there. He didn't deliver on the riptoads, which was just as well. They have unpleasant little barbed teeth and they make nasty roommates. But I did get a family of snakes, as promised. They were slender and green with large golden eyes-the Galgala touch-and they lived in a niche in -the wall, coming out now and then to glide around. They didn't look dangerous or even unfriendly, though I suspect that the rats who lived in the passageways behind the walls thought otherwise about them. Once in a while one of my snakes would show up with a ratshaped bulge in his belly. The rats, in fact, which Shandor hadn't threatened me with, were a considerable nuisance. They had six little jointed legs like some sort of crustacean and beady little black eyes and nasty luminous needle-shaped teeth that gleamed blue-violet in the dark. Occasionally one would go scuttering across me while I was trying to sleep, and I would open an eye to see that hideous tiny glow piercing the blackness. I figured that if I was friendly enough to the snakes, they would discourage the rats from coming around, and that worked pretty well most of the time. I stroked and tickled them, offered them bits of my dinner, told them tales out of the Swatura, sang mournful ballads to them in my most beautiful voice. Even so, my nights weren't totally rat-free and there were a few disagreeable moments.