Star of Gypsies by Robert Silverberg Page B

the door and said the word that activated the Vogon sphere. Everything turned bright and cheerful. Hoy! Yakoub has a roof over his head again!
    Now I set about hauling my possessions back from the various adjacent dimensions where I had stowed them.
    My treasures. The things which root me to myself and remind me of who I have been and who I must yet become. The deep-piled rug, two Yakoubs long and three Yakoubs wide, woven in wondrous red and green and blue and black on lost Earth itself by a sultan's fifty castrated slaves. The three brass lamps, fat-bellied and squat, with the names of my fathers inscribed on their sides. The necklace strung with Byzantine gold coins that had belonged to that wondrous whore Mona Elena, and which I meant to return to her if ever I saw her again. The silken scroll of office, spun for me by nine blind eye-beaters of Duud Shabeel, which I should have surrendered upon my abdication but did not because I could not bear to part with anything so ingenious: look at it long enough and you begin to know with complete certainty that you can never die. The starstone, plucked from a sand-dragon's bloody throat on Nabomba Zom, in whose depths the red light of Romany Star shines with wondrous warmth. The wonderwheel. The shadowstick. The Rom scepter, bareshti rovli rupui, the chief's silver wand, with its eight-sided red-tasseled head engraved with the five great symbols, nijako, chjam, shion, netchaphoro, trushul: axe, sun, moon, star, cross. The statue of the Black Virgin Sara, our patron saint. The veil that had belonged to La Chunga, the Gitana dancer. The set of tinsmith's tools, worn and bent. The frayed and tattered bearskin, last of its kind in the universe. The golden candlesticks. The Tarot cards. The scythe that was dipped in my bath-water when I was born, to drive the demons away. The amulet of sea-urchin fossils. The dear little prickly niglo, the hedgehog that we brought with us from Earth into half the worlds of the galaxy, carved from the fiery yellow jade of Alta Hannalanna. And more, much more, the treasures of a long life, the gatherings of all my great odyssey.
    These things I arranged in the ice-bubble in the ways that I liked to arrange them. Then I stepped outside and saluted the writhing green arms rising from the snow just before me, and called out my name three times, and cried the words of power, and waved my manhood in the frosty air and made water in front of my door, slicing a hot yellow track through the snow in the home-sealing patterns. And laughed and danced one more quick dance, arms and legs flying, hootchka pootchka hoya zim! Yakoub! Yakoub! Yakoub!
    It was almost like being in my house of power again, my shining palace on Galgala where I lived when I was King of the Rom and shaper of the destinies of worlds. I lit the lamps and grasped the scepter and stood upon the carpet and once again they came to me, the chieftains of the Rom, one by one, saying, "I am Frinkelo," "I am Fero," "I am Yakali," "I am Miya," bringing me their disputes and their sorrows and their dreams. Wherever I am, that place is my house of power, my palace. That is one of the great Rom secrets, the reason why we can be wanderers. It is not that we have no roots, but that all places are one to us and we put down the same roots wherever we may be, for every place where we may wander is the same place: it is the place known as Not-Romany-Star. And therefore any place can be home for us, since no place is home.
    So in the silence and the solitude of this new place beside the strange forest I lived and was happy in the company of myself. The ghost of Polarca came to me, and Valerian, and several of the others, misty figures drifting through time to show me that they still loved me. Shrewd old Bibi Savina came once or twice, that wise and cunning woman who has given me so much good advice over the long years, not only while I was king but even before: for she was the one who had gone ghosting back to my