Star of Gypsies

IT WAS INEVITABLE, OF COURSE. THE DROPPING OF THE third shoe. Periandros and Sunteil had been heard from, and finally the last of the high lords was putting in his bid for my support. Or so I assumed. I was requested-and Naria's adjutant had sounded pretty damned urgent about it, according to Damiano, who had taken the call -to come at once and to bring with me not only Polarca but the phuri dai. Shrewd Naria, angling for Bibi Savina's backing as welclass="underline" maybe my seat on the Rom throne might be a little wobbly, but Rom everywhere revered the phuri dai, without exception.

We held a conference on the advisibility of my accepting Naria's invitation and I got a mixed response. Jacinto and Ammagante, cautious as ever, wondered if it might be some sort of trap, a ploy designed to give Naria control over the entire Rom high command in one swoop. Damiano and Thivt agreed that that was a possibility but they thought the notion was far-fetched. Polarca, plainly itching to get out of this palace in which we had hidden ourselves for what was starting to seem like weeks, didn't care: he was willing to take the risk, such as it was, rather than remaining holed up here any longer.

I looked toward Bibi Savina. "What does the phuri dai say, then?" She looked at me and through me, into realms far, far away. "Does the Rom baro refuse the summons of the emperor?" she asked. "But is Naria the emperor?" Jacinto said.

"He holds the palace," said Bibi Savina. "One of the other two is dead and the third one is in hiding. If Naria is not emperor, no one is. Go to him, Yakoub. You must. And I will go to him with you."

I nodded. The phuri dai and I generally have seen things the same way over the years. To Damiano I said, "Tell him we'll be there in an hour or less."

"He's promised to send an imperial car for you."

"No," I said. "The last thing I want is to go driving around the Capital today in a car that bears the imperial crest. We'll take one of our own cars. Three cars, in fact. Nobody's going to try to get in the way of the Rom baro if they see a whole cavalcade of Rom vehicles."

Bold words. But in fact we were fired on five times during the thirty-minute ride to the imperial palace. There were no hits: our screens were good. Still, it wasn't a good sign. All this artillery action was twentieth-century stuff, and it felt out of place, a thousand years out of place and then some. I hadn't thought that a little thing like a struggle over the imperial succession could have sent the Gaje heading back down the evolutionary trail so fast. War is an obsolete concept, I had been telling Julien de Gramont only the other day-so to speak -during the tranquility of my retirement on icy Mulano. And in the short time since then I had found myself in the midst of a small war on Galgala and now in what had the look of a very large one here at the Capital. First our seat of government and then theirs.

At any rate, we got through the city in the same number of pieces with which we had set out. We never knew which side was doing the firing. Most likely all three factions were taking turns, and nobody having any idea of who it was that they were firing at, any more than we could tell who was shooting. An anonymous war: more twentieth-century stuff. If there has to be fighting, give me the medieval days, when at least you knew your enemy's name.

The city was a tremendous mess. I wouldn't have thought they could smash so much of it up so quickly. At least half a dozen of the loftiest towers had been sheared right off in mid-loftiness. Mounds of rubble strewn high as houses in the wide boulevards. A pall of black smoke staining the sky. Here and there an arm or a leg sticking out of the ruins: death, actual death, irreparable and irreversible. Whole lives cut in half as those towers had been, men and women robbed of a hundred years apiece or even more. And for what? Some petty dispute over whether the Gaje crown should go to a man of Fenix or a man of Vietoris, or perhaps to the animated image of a dead man from Sidri Akrak?

In that scene of devastation there were, nevertheless, incongruous signs of imperial splendor. Sky-banners, symbolic of the presence of the emperor at the Capital, were blazing away in the east, the south, and the north. But it was a display of banners such as never had been seen here before, for they glowed in three different sets of colors, one for Periandros, one for Naria, one for Sunteil. Wherever those warring lights met and clashed overhead, there was such turmoil in the sky that it befuddled and baffled the eye.

And farther to the north, in the city's outer ring-what were those plumes of brilliant purple light there? Why, they were the light-spikes of the Rom baro, of all things, returned at last to their proper place! Naria's doing? Sunteil's? Well, it was all useless flattery now. Did they think my allegiance could be bought with a show of light?