Star Wars: The Courtship of Princess Leia Read online

  “What are you doing?” Isolder said. “That thing is drinking all of our water.”

  “It’s eighty kilometers through the desert to the mountains,” Luke said, “a difficult journey even for a Jedi, and there is no water between here and there—only sand. But every evening, these creatures run to the hills to feed, and every morning, they run back here to hide from predators and the day’s sun. That’s why we saw so many skeletons here in the crevices, where their old ones have died. They call themselves the Blue Desert People. Tonight, they will carry us to the mountains. We won’t need all this water.”

  “You mean they’re intelligent?” Isolder asked doubtfully.

  “Not much more so than most other animals,” Luke said, gazing at Isolder, “but smart enough. They care for one another and have their own kind of wisdom.”

  “And you can talk to them?”

  Luke nodded, stroked the reptile’s nose. “The Force is within us all—you, me, her. It binds us together, and through it I can read her intent, make mine known.”

  Isolder watched them a moment, then sat down, troubled for some reason that he could not express, could not quite grasp. He slept part of the day, ate from his pack, drank his water. All day long the beast slept beside them, laying its head out flat on the ground so that it could sniff Luke’s feet.

  That evening just before the sun began to set, the beast raised its head, made a honking noise. Several other beasts answered, came to its call.

  “Time to go,” Luke said. Isolder climbed up from the ravine while Luke closed his eyes, levitated Artoo up, then climbed up himself.

  The Blue Desert People were everywhere, climbing out of their holes, snorting loudly and looking at the sunset. They seemed unwilling, or perhaps by some virtue of genetic memory were unable, to begin the journey until the sun had dropped below the mountains.

  Under Luke’s guidance, Isolder climbed on the back of a large male, set himself just beneath its arms. When the beast stood, it was a precarious position, but Luke carried Artoo up to the same spot on a larger male and seemed to balance fine.

  As the bottom of the sun touched the top of the mountains, the Blue Desert People bellowed, lowered their heads, lifted their tails out straight behind them as a counterbalance, and raced across the sand on their powerful hind legs.

  With the beast’s head down, Isolder found that his position was quite stable, even comfortable, though Artoo whistled and groaned about it at first. The Blue Desert People thundered across eighty kilometers of pan and towering dunes, their red eyes seeming to glow a glittering black in the darkness, grunting and snorting. Isolder listened to them talk, realized that the grunting and snorting came from animals on the perimeters of the herd, and that they were issuing instructions. If reptiles snorted two or three times on one side of the herd, the herd would veer away. But if animals issued contented grunts, the herd would stay on course.

  By early nightfall they reached a wide muddy river where tall grasses and reeds grew in the shallows. Birds with long necks and leather wings swooped low over the river in the moonlight, taking long drinks. Here the Blue Desert People stopped to water and feed among the rushes.

  “This is where we get off,” Luke said, and they dismounted. Luke patted the nose of each of their mounts, thanking them with soft words.

  “Can’t you make them carry us farther?” Isolder asked. “We’ve still got a long way to go.”

  Luke flashed an annoyed glance his way. “I do not make anyone do anything,” Luke said. “I do not make Artoo follow me, just as I did not make you follow me. The Blue Desert People agreed to take us this far, and now that we have water, our own legs will suffice for the rest of the journey.”

  Isolder suddenly realized why he found Luke’s behavior toward the Blue Desert People so discomforting: among the royal family on Hapes, they did not treat their servants so well. Women were accorded greater respect than men, industrialists more respect than farmers, royalty more respect than them all. But Luke treated his droid and these dumb animals as if they were Isolder’s equals, or as if they were Luke’s own brothers, and that … alarmed Isolder, to think that the Jedi saw him as no more important than a droid or a beast. And yet, Luke showed the Blue Desert People such tenderness that Isolder found himself feeling jealous of them.

  “You shouldn’t do this!” Isolder found himself saying. “The universe doesn’t work this way!”

  “What do you mean?” Luke asked.

  “You—you’re treating those beasts as equals. You show my mother, the Ta’a Chume of the Hapan empire, the same degree of cordiality as you give a droid!”

  “This droid, these beasts,” Luke said, “all have a similar measure of Force within them. If I serve the Force, how can I not respect them, just as I respect Ta’a Chume?”

  Isolder shook his head. “Now I see why my mother wanted to kill you, Jedi. You have dangerous ideas.”

  “Perhaps they are dangerous to despots,” Luke said, smiling. “Tell me, do you serve your mother and her empire above all else?”

  “Of course,” Isolder said.

  “If you served her, you would not be here,” Luke countered. “You would have been content to marry some local despot and sire your heirs. Instead, your heart is divided. You tell yourself that you have come to rescue Leia, but I believe you have really come to Dathomir to learn the ways of the Force.”

  A thrill coursed through Isolder as he realized that it might be true, and yet, the very idea sounded absurd. Luke was saying that Isolder’s every small impulse, each mad decision, could be taken as evidence that Isolder was his disciple, a servant to some higher power that Isolder was not even convinced existed.

  True, Luke had floated through the air, carried Isolder’s ship to safety, but couldn’t that power have issued from Luke’s own twisted mind, rather than from some mystical Force? On Thrakia was a race of insects with genetically transmitted memories who worshiped their own power to speak. Apparently the insects all remembered that in the recent past they had communicated only through scent, and then one day they discovered that they had the ability to communicate by clicking their mandibles. After three hundred years they were all still overawed by the fact that they could communicate this way, and all of them took it as a sign that they had been gifted from some higher being. But it was just their stupid mandibles clacking!

  As they walked off through the low hills, following the course of the river, Isolder watched the Jedi and wondered. Was Luke truly led by some mystical Force? Or did he simply follow his own conscience, fooled into believing that his strange powers and crazed notions came from some outside influence?

  With each step they took toward the mountains, Isolder had to wonder: are my footsteps guided by the light side of the Force? And if so, where will this Force lead me?

  Whatever answer Isolder found to that question, he knew it would change every future moment of his life.

  Chapter

  14

  At dawn the morning fog blowing off the muddy river obscured Luke’s vision so that he could not see more than a few meters ahead. The ground along the riverbank had turned swampy, hindering Artoo’s progress. The trees along the river had all burned and rotted, so that limbs pointed up out of the fog like crooked fingers, in shades of ebony and ice. Large speckled lizards clung to the trees, sometimes as many as a dozen to a branch, watching the fog-shrouded reeds for prey or predators.

  Behind Luke, Isolder did not speak. Several times Luke turned to see him, deep in thought, brow furrowed. Luke knew only too well what the young man must be thinking. Only a few years ago, Luke had followed Obi-Wan Kenobi off on a similar mad quest to take stolen blueprints to Alderaan.

  For these past months, Luke considered, I’ve wanted so badly to find the records of the ancient Jedi, to find some talented students and teach them of the Force. Yet Luke realized the truth: Isolder had sought him out, even though the prince showed little talent.

  This was Luke’s chance to practice, t
o teach someone to follow the light side of the Force, without the pressure of having to worry about whether the student would become another Vader.

  He picked his way through the mud, watching for quicksand, wondered if that is how it had happened with Obi-Wan Kenobi. Luke had always imagined that the old man had been waiting for Luke to mature, like a farmer watching over his field of grain. But now he wondered if Luke’s sudden intrusion into Obi-Wan’s affairs hadn’t been as much of a surprise to Obi-Wan as Isolder’s intrusion now seemed to Luke.

  Isolder was obviously moved by the Force. That much Luke could discern, but he could feel no power in the prince. Perhaps the power was so new, so small, that Isolder could not feel it himself.

  Luke reached a fork in the trail. One way was high and safe-looking, but the muddy path seemed to draw him. He followed his instinct down the muddy path.

  Perhaps there had never been a Jedi academy, he thought. Certainly, Ta’a Chume had lied to him about an academy on one of her worlds. He sensed that.

  Perhaps the Force directed acolytes to their Masters when they were needed. Perhaps the only true training of any worth that a Jedi could receive came only as he or she battled against darkness.

  If this were true, certainly Dathomir would be the perfect academy. Luke could feel tremendous disturbances in the Force—yawning pits of darkness. He’d never run across anything remotely like it. Yoda’s cave had held such a darkness, but here—he felt it all around him.

  Ahead of them, reptilian avians croaked and flapped into the sky on leather wings. Luke stopped, realized that he had just come to the end of a peninsula that jutted into the river. He could go no farther, and the brackish water here bubbled. A tar pit. He cast his eyes about for a place to step.

  Isolder said, “What’s that?”

  Luke looked up. Jutting above the fog in the river sat a huge metal platform, leaning at an odd angle. The flocks of avians flew around the platform nervously. The rising sun cast golden rays on the rusted metal, turning it bronze, and beyond the platform was an enormous exhaust nacelle, rotted through so that Luke could see parts of the heavy turbo generators still intact.

  “It looks like an old spaceship crashed here,” Luke said, realizing after he did so that the wreck was far larger than even one of the old Victory-class destroyers. Yet it must have lain here for hundreds of years.

  A small wind blew over the river, stirring the fog, and Luke glimpsed a dome out beyond the exhaust nacelle, the transparisteel still intact.

  He started to turn to leave when the name on the rusted exhaust nacelle caught his eye: Chu’unthor.

  His mind did a little flip. It was not a race of people that Yoda had tried to free from the planet hundreds of years ago, but the spaceship. And in all that time, no one had ever gotten it off the planet.

  “We’ve got to get out there,” Luke said, his voice husky with excitement.

  “What for?” Isolder asked. “It’s just an old wreck.”

  Luke cast about through the fog, looking for a way to the ship. They walked back up the peninsula, circled through the mire for nearly a kilometer until they found two ancient wooden rafts made of logs tied together with rotting hide. They looked like something children played with. There were fresh marks on the bank where the rafts had been tied up.

  “Someone was here recently,” Isolder pointed out.

  “Yeah,” Luke said, “well, who could pass up the chance to look at a really neat wreck?”

  “I could,” Isolder said. “We don’t really need to go out there, do we? I mean, we came here to rescue Leia.”

  Artoo whistled his agreement, issuing a bunch of clicks and beeps to remind Luke that every time the droid gets near water, there’s a monster in it.

  Isolder looked off toward the mountains, and Luke could see that the prince really didn’t want to delay his trip. Yet the promptings of the Force had led Luke to the place, just as he allowed it to lead him in battle. He knew only too well that he must trust his feelings. Now his feelings told him to get out to that wreck. “It will only take a few minutes,” Luke said, hopping onto one of the rafts. “Who’s coming with me?”

  “I’ll wait here,” Isolder said, and Artoo’s eye swiveled around to look at the prince. The droid was shaking scared, but made a grinding noise at Isolder and rolled onto the raft.

  Luke poled the raft out to the wreck. Huge brown fish lazily sunned themselves in the still water. The morning sun had begun burning the fog away, and as he got closer, Luke could see most of the ship—colonies of living domes, the engineering section. The hull around the hyperdrive engines had rusted through. The ship looked to be two kilometers long, a kilometer wide, and eight levels high. The space between the windows to the living quarters showed that the Chu’unthor had been heavily inhabited, almost a floating city, perhaps some sort of pleasure craft. It was definitely made to house people. By the tilt of the ship, most of it seemed to be well sunk under the tar pits, with only the upper decks showing, and they were pretty badly rusted.

  Yet this was no ordinary wreck—there were no blast marks to show signs of battle, no gaping holes to show an explosion, no crumpled structure to indicate a violent landing. Rather, it seemed that the ship must have developed a technical problem, floated down peacefully, then tried to land in the tar pits.

  As he got closer, Luke saw that the ship had been sealed tight. Entryways weren’t just closed—they had been welded shut, and many of the transparisteel bubbles on the domes bore heavy scuff marks, as if something had tried to batter its way through the transparent material.

  The ship was tilted at an angle, so Luke poled the raft around to the front, which had sunk deepest into the mire, then climbed up onto the wreck. Someone had indeed tried to break into the ship. Luke found many more scuff marks on the domes, bent pieces of crude iron that someone had used to try to pry open the welded doors, along with shattered pieces of giant clubs and broken boulders. Writing had been painted here or there in some strange tongue, and arrows pointed to the weaker welds. Someone had worked for years at breaking into the ship, had made it a great study, but their tools were ineffective.

  Kids, Luke thought, but no child could have wielded those giant clubs.

  Some of the domes had access sockets that Artoo could have plugged into and opened, but the sockets were far too rusted. Anyway, the whole ship looked as if it had rotted inside too. The transparisteel was pitted by blowing sand, almost fogged. Many of the domes seemed to contain training rooms for gymnastics of some kind—huge balls littered the floors, as if someone had been playing a game when the Chu’unthor fell. Another dome had been a restaurant or night club. Beverage glasses and uneaten meals sat on rusted tables, covered with dust. Artoo wheeled along behind, working hard to negotiate the angle, whistling softly and studying all the damage.

  “It looks like whoever was on this ship got out fast once they landed, and they never came back,” Luke told Artoo.

  The droid issued some beeps and clicks, reminding Luke of Yoda’s message: “Repulsed by the witches.” Luke could feel the disturbances in the Force here, like dark cyclones sucking in all light.

  “Yeah,” Luke said. “Whatever Yoda encountered on this planet, it’s still here.”

  Artoo groaned.

  Luke stopped, looked in at one bubble. Workbenches stood at the center, and several benches held rusted mechanical parts—corroded power cells, focusing crystals, handles for lightsabers—tools to make weapons that only a Jedi could use.

  Luke’s heart pounded. A Jedi academy, he realized, and everything suddenly made sense. I searched forty planets and never found a sign of an academy, because the Jedi academy was in the stars. Of course they needed a spaceborne academy. With so few people strong enough to master the Force, the ancient Jedi would have needed to scour the galaxy hunting for recruits. In each star cluster they might have found only one or two cadets worthy to join.

  He pulled out his lightsaber, flipped it on, and began cutting through the
transparisteel, feeling desperate. This old wreck, as rusted as it was, couldn’t possibly hold anything of worth. But he had to look. Blue gouts of molten transparisteel bounced off the deck of the Chu’unthor, and Artoo wheeled back a pace.

  Luke was so involved in trying to break into the spaceship, that he almost did not feel her presence, but suddenly there was a power behind him, rushing toward him. He turned just in time to see a woman—long reddish brown hair flashing, tawny hides from some alien creature, strong bare legs. She spun and kicked at him with a leather boot, and Luke felt the force of her intent, ducked, swung with his lightsaber.

  He felt a ripple in the Force signifying an attack, but before he could respond the girl swung a club, smashing his artificial hand hard enough so that circuits shorted and the lightsaber spun away. She kicked at his belly and Luke dropped and rolled, used the Force to call his lightsaber back to his left hand.

  The girl stopped, and her mouth dropped in astonishment as she saw what he had done. Luke could feel her Force—powerful, wild, like that of no other woman he had ever met. Her brown eyes were flecked with orange, and she crouched on the hull of the Chu’unthor, panting, considering. She could not have been more than eighteen years old, perhaps twenty.

  “I won’t hurt you,” Luke said.

  The girl half-closed her eyes, whispered some words, and Luke felt a touch, a probing finger of Force that rippled through him. “How can you work the magic, being only a man?” the girl said.

  “The Force is in us all,” Luke said, “but only those who are trained can become its Masters.”

  The girl studied him skeptically. “You claim to master the magic?”

  “Yes,” Luke said.

  “Then you are a male witch, a Jai, from beyond the stars?”

  Luke nodded.

  “I have heard of the Jai,” the girl said. “Grandmother Rell says that they are unbeatable warriors, for they battle death. And since they battle for life, nature cherishes them, and they cannot die. Are you an unbeatable warrior?” The Force of the girl rippled, almost as if she would attack, but Luke felt a difference—the rippling was almost like a blanket, smothering him, binding him, and as Luke tried to imagine what it foreboded, an image came to mind.