Star Wars: The Courtship of Princess Leia Page 16

  He saw the girl hunting in the desert, searching desperately for something that others guarded, protected. He saw a hut made of twigs beneath the shelter of a red rock ledge, an evening campfire twisting in the wind, half-naked children playing beside the fire. And the girl was searching, creeping toward the hut, hungering for something within.

  The girl smiled at him and began chanting, and the look in her eyes shocked him. He had never seen such fierce lust. “Waytha ara quetha way. Waytha ara quetha way …”

  “Wait a minute!” Luke said. “You can’t be thinking—” Broken bits of stones and clubs began rolling over the surface of the Chu’unthor, rumbling like an approaching storm. Behind the girl, the fog over the river swirled violently. We were repulsed by the witches.

  “Waytha ara quetha way. Waytha ara quetha way!” Lightning crackled overhead and a dozen small boulders blasted toward Luke, hurtling through the air. Vader had tried similar tricks, but Luke reflected woefully that Vader hadn’t been nearly as good at it. He swung wildly with his lightsaber, bursting several pieces of rock, but one caught him in the chest, throwing him backward a pace. Repulsed by the witches.

  “Wait!” Luke shouted. “You can’t just take men as slaves and mate with them any time you please!” Boulders thundered across the hull of the ship, hundreds of them, lunging toward Luke like a herd of living animals, and he realized that this woman could do just about anything she wanted. He raised an arm desperately, trying to turn the rocks aside with the Force, but his mind was a roiling sea and he could not gain his focus. Repulsed by the witches.

  A log whirled toward him, spinning, and he ducked, stones leaped at him in such numbers he could hardly see them whiz past, and suddenly she was before him, whirling and swinging a club. He hadn’t even felt her move toward him, yet her club smacked his skull, lights flashed in his head, and he reeled to the ground.

  Groggily, he heard the girl yelling at him, realized that she straddled his chest, locking his arms with her strong legs, but Luke was too weak to fight her off. She held his jaw and shouted triumphantly, “I am Teneniel Djo, a daughter of Allya, and you are my slave!”

  In the early morning Han struggled up the treacherous flight of steps carved into the sheer mountain cliff. As on most low-gravity planets, the volcanic mountains rose tall and sheer, and they were walking along a cliff face two hundred meters above solid black rock. The stone steps were wide enough even for a rancor, and thousands of feet had worn them smooth. During the night, cold water dripping from the mountaintop had deposited a thin crust of ice over the steps, making them treacherous.

  Behind Han, the rancors snarled and paced slowly, grabbing at the bare rock cliffs for support, terrified of falling but driven mercilessly by their riders. Chewbacca didn’t look good. He held his ribs and moaned softly as the rancor carried him along.

  In the clear morning light, Han could see the three women clearly now. Under their robes, they wore tunics made from colorful reptile skins. Each hide tunic flashed in colors of green or smoke blue or yellow ocher. Over these, they wore thick robes woven of fiber, intricately trimmed with yellow plant fibers or large dark beads made from seedpods. Yet their most ornate decorations were the helms. What he had first thought were antlers in the darkness, he saw now were merely headdresses of blackened metal, curving up like some odd insect wing. Drilled into the helms were holes. A child’s playground of ornaments dangled in each hole, swaying with each step the rancors took. For ornaments he saw what looked like pieces of agate and polished blue azurite, the painted skulls of small carnivorous reptiles, a small petrified fist from some creature, bits of colored fabric, glass beads, a piece of beaten silver, a bluish-white orb that might have been a dried eye. None of the women wore the same style of helm, and Han knew enough about various cultures to be wary. In any given society, the most powerful members tended to dress the most elaborately.

  Han kept hold of Leia and Threepio, concerned that if one of them fell, they might all tumble from the cliff. His breath came ragged, steam puffing from his mouth. They turned one last treacherous corner and looked down into an oval-shaped valley hidden in the folds of mountain cliffs. Stick shacks with thatch roofs dotted the valley, and checkerboard squares of green and tan showed growing crops. Men, women, and children worked the fields, fed huge four-legged reptiles in their pens. A large stream ran through the fields to a small lake, then tumbled over a cliff into the wilds below.

  They descended the stairs, passing a phalanx of ten women, all mounted on rancors. The women were all dressed in similar styles—in rough lizard leather with robes suitable for the cold mountains, helms with antlers. Most of the women had blaster rifles, though others were armed only with spears or throwing axes tucked into their belts. None of them seemed to be younger than twenty-five, and somehow the dirty faces of the women chilled Han more than the mountain air. They did not smile, did not show grief or worry. Instead, they were cold, brutally impassive, like the faces of shell-shocked warriors.

  Above the narrow valley, carved into the basalt, were fortifications—turrets and parapets and windows. The women had placed slabs of plasteel from the hulls of broken spaceships over the rock like a mosaic. A couple of odd blaster cannons pointed out from the mountain stronghold. Black scorch marks and pits in the rock showed that these women were indeed at war. But with whom?

  The group reached a landing of stone, and on orders from one of the women, one rancor gingerly carried Chewbacca, leading Leia up toward the fortress, while other rancors marched Han and Threepio down into the valley on a muddy trail, past pens filled with herds of giant dirty reptiles that sat quietly munching fodder, sullenly staring at Han.

  They came to a circle of huts made of twigs and mud, and at the opening of each hut was a tall stone urn that Han guessed held water. Through open doors he could see colorful red blankets hanging on the walls, baskets of nuts on small wood tables, various wood hay hooks.

  His guard led him to the back of the huts, where he found dozens of men and young women and children. In a sandy lot filled with weeds the villagers had dug holes and filled them with water from buckets, making small puddles. Each adult sat gazing intently into the puddle while children stood quietly outside the circle, watching.

  The rancor stopped, and the warrior astride it reached down and tapped Han on the shoulder with her spear, pointed at the puddles. “Whuffa,” she said. “Whuffa!” indicating that he should go look into a puddle.

  “Do you have any idea what they want?” Han asked Threepio.

  “I’m afraid not,” Threepio said. “Their language is not in my catalog. Some terms of their dialogue may be ancient Paecian, but I’ve never heard the term whuffa.”

  Paecian? Han wondered. The Paecian empire had foundered three thousand years back. Han went to one old gray-beard, looked at his mud puddle. The puddle was small, perhaps half a meter around and only a finger deep.

  The man sneered up at Han, growled, “Whuffa!” He handed Han a copper blade, indicating that Han should use it to dig, and gave Han a bucket of water, pointed toward a free space in the field.

  “Whuffa, right. I’ve got it,” Han said, and he took the items to the clear spot, away from the others, and scraped out a small hole, poured in the water. It smelled terrible, and Han suddenly realized it wasn’t water at all, but some form of crude fermented beverage. Great, he thought. I’ve been captured by weirdos who want me to stare into a puddle until I have a vision.

  He looked at his reflection in the puddle a moment, realized his hair was mussed up, and used his fingers to comb it. The warriors did not seem to know what to do with Threepio; they left him on the sidelines with the children, who gawked at the droid curiously, but not worshipfully. Up at the fortress, Leia had already gone into the shadows of an open doorway. Distantly, Han heard a TIE fighter screaming through the atmosphere, and the women on rancors searched the sky nervously, hands shadowing their eyes.

  It seemed a good sign. If these women were having trouble
with Zsinj, then at least Han was in the right camp. But considering the haphazard nature of the fortifications, maybe not. In any case, he didn’t like the sound of being “judged.” If these women were xenophobes, they might kill or enslave offworlders out of fear. If they thought Han and Leia were spies, they could be in even bigger trouble. Then there was the fact that the women had automatically assumed that Han was Leia’s slave. He glanced at the warriors on their rancors. The women watched him coldly. He decided to pretend to be hard at work.

  For an hour he sat gazing into his puddle of fermented goo, the sun shining on his back, until he realized he was getting mighty thirsty and wondered if it was permitted for him to drink some of the liquor himself. Better not, he decided. It might not be allowed of slaves.

  Leia hadn’t come down from the fortress yet. Han watched a woman come out to a parapet a hundred meters above the valley floor. She was an old woman, wearing a leather hide for a cape, carrying a bucket. She stood gazing down a moment, then waved her hands in the air and spoke, but her words did not carry. After a moment, a crystal ball rose from the valley floor to meet her. She leaned out over the parapet, held the bucket under the ball, and the ball dropped, splashing liquid over the rim of the bucket. The old woman carried the bucket back into the fortress, and Han sat astonished. It had not been a crystal ball floating in the air at all—but water. Yet it had not been a natural phenomenon. The ball of water had risen slowly.

  Han heard a loud sucking sound, looked down at his puddle of liquor. Some form of large worm had risen to the hole and was drinking. Nearby, an old man whispered, “Whuffa!” and Han looked at the toothless geezer. He made grasping and pulling motions with his hands, telling Han to catch the thing.

  Han looked at the worm. All he could see at the moment was a leathery, dark brown skin and a hole that it drank through. After a moment it oozed up a little, showed a head about the thickness of a child’s arm. All around the crowd, everyone was watching him—children, adults, warriors on their rancors. All of them remaining absolutely silent, holding their breaths. Whatever a whuffa was, these people wanted one pretty badly. There might even be a reward in it.

  After a moment, the worm eeled up a bit more, began rolling in the mud, sniffing for more liquor. Still, it looked pretty big, and there wasn’t much to grab on to. Han waited for three minutes, till the worm got up enough courage to ooze farther out of its hole, heading for the bucket of liquor. Han figured it couldn’t hurt to let the thing get a little drunk, so he let the worm stick its orifice in, begin draining the bucket accompanied by slurping sounds. The worm had long segments to its skin, no eyes. Han reached down and grabbed it with both hands, afraid he might break it.

  The worm jerked back so hard and so quickly it pulled Han to the ground, but he didn’t let go. “You’re mine!” Han shouted, and suddenly everyone rushed around him, waiting to help, children leaping in delight and crying, “Whuffa! Whuffa!”

  The worm twisted in Han’s grip, turned its orifice toward him and spat a pitcher of liquor into Han’s face, then began wheezing and hissing.

  Han held on tight. He could feel the worm tensing, using the friction of the ground to pull itself back, but after a couple of minutes the worm exhausted itself, and Han pulled it forward a meter. Still, there was more in the ground, so he grabbed another handful and pulled. Sweat was running down his face, down his hands, making his grip precarious, but after another three minutes he got another meter of the whuffa up. Behind him, other men had grabbed the thrashing head of the thing and held it.

  Han worked for half an hour before he realized that this was going to be a long job—he had twenty meters of whuffa out of the ground, and the thing hadn’t begun to taper down or anything. Yet now he was developing a system. When the whuffa fatigued, he pulled out as much as he could as fast as he could, tugging up two or three meters at a time before the whuffa could reestablish its grip.

  An hour later, Han was reeling from fatigue when he yanked on some whuffa and found that, miraculously, it seemed, he had reached the end. The force of his tug knocked Han down. Every kid and man in the village had a hold on the whuffa, which had now gone quite limp down near its head. Han estimated that it must be two hundred and fifty meters long. With great fanfare, the villagers paraded the whuffa down to an orchard. Old men clapped Han on the back and whispered their thanks, and Han followed them.

  The villagers began draping the whuffa in a bare tree, and Han saw other whuffas there, drying in the sunlight. He went over and touched one. It felt dead, almost rubbery, but the supple leather of its skin felt good in his hand, strong, even elegant. The chocolate color was nice, too. On a whim, he tried to see if he could tear it—but the stuff wouldn’t snap, wouldn’t even stretch. He looked over at the women on their rancors, saw that saddles on the rancors’ necks were tied in place with whuffa hide.

  Great! Han realized. So I caught a rope. But the villagers here seemed to think it was a big deal. They were all ecstatic. Who knew what kind of reward they might give him? If they executed offworlders, maybe being Han Solo, the heroic Whuffa Grabber, had just saved his life. And even though it was just a rope, Han had to admit that it was a darned good rope. You could probably sell it offworld to fashion designers, and maybe there was more to it than just rope. What if it had medicinal properties? These people were at war. Maybe they applied whuffa hide to their wounds as an antibiotic, or boiled it to make antiaging drugs. Why, once Han thought about it, there was no telling what you could do with a whuffa!

  “Han?” a woman called. He turned. A dark-haired woman sat astride the neck of a rancor at the edge of the orchard. “My name is Damaya. You will follow me.” She tapped the rancor’s nose with her heel, turned the beast.

  Han’s mouth felt dry. “Why? Where are we going?”

  “Your friend Leia has been pleading your case to the Singing Mountain clan for the past two hours. She has won your freedom, but now your future must be decided.”

  “My future?”

  “We of the Singing Mountain clan have chosen not to be your enemies, but that does not mean we will be your allies. We understand that you have a sky ship that may be repairable. If this is true, the Nightsisters and their Imperial slaves will want it. And, since you are a man of power in the outside world, they may want you. Our clan needs to know whether you want our protection, and if so, what you will pay for it.”

  Han followed Damaya, still panting, sweat dripping down his back. After nearly a day without sleep, his eyes itched and his sinuses burned as if he were allergic to something on the planet. The messenger led him up toward the fortress, and just before they reached the landing where the stone stairway diverged into three paths, a group of strangers came up from outside the valley—nine women, humanoid, with strangely blotched, purplish skin. They did not wear exotic helms like the warriors, but instead wore only dark, shaggy, hooded robes crudely woven from some plant fiber and covered with trail dust. He wondered nervously if these women had been called in to be his judges.

  But Han watched the warriors guarding the trail and knew that the hooded women were enemies. The rancors growled and fidgeted, scraping the stone walkways with their huge palms. The warrior women held their blasters at the ready, unblinking, though the leader of the nine carried a broken spear, probably as a sign of truce.

  Damaya got off her rancor and led Han up the steps toward the fortress.

  The nine women hesitated at the landing to watch them pass, studying Han intensely. Their leader, an older woman with graying hair at her temples, had glittering green eyes, and the hollows of her cheeks were a sickly yellow hue. She smiled at Han, causing him to shiver.

  “Tell me, offworlder, where your ship is,” she said to his back.

  Han’s heart hammered, and he turned. “It’s, uh, over—” he started to point, and the messenger Damaya spun violently on her rancor.

  “Tell her nothing!” Damaya commanded, and her words were like a knife slicing through some invisible cord th
at held Han’s throat. He realized suddenly that the old woman had used Luke’s Jedi trick of commanding those with weak minds.

  His face must have reddened, for Damaya said, “There is no need to be embarrassed. Baritha has a powerful gift for forcing minds.”

  The old woman, Baritha, laughed at him, and Han turned away, angry. She followed him two steps, then swung the haft of her spear up from behind, tapping his crotch experimentally.

  Han spun, fists clenched, and the old woman whispered under her breath, chanting, and held her hand out in a clutching gesture. Han felt both of his fists caught in an invisible vise, and joints cracked under the pressure.

  “Don’t be so quick to anger, you morsel of a man,” Baritha cackled. “Respect your betters, or next time, it will be an eye—or something equally as valuable to you—that I crush.”

  “Keep your filthy hands off me!” Han growled. Han’s guide, Damaya, casually pulled out her blaster, aimed it at the old woman’s throat and said something in her own language.

  The old woman released her grip on Han. “I was only admiring your prisoner. From behind he looks so … tasty. Who could resist?”

  “We of the Singing Mountain clan suffer your presence here,” Damaya said, “but our hospitality has limits.”

  “You of the Singing Mountain clan are weak-minded fools,” the old woman croaked, sticking her head forward and raising her eyebrows so that her face unwrinkled somewhat. “You couldn’t throw us out if you had to, and so you will suffer our presence, and submit to our demands. I despise your pretensions of civility! I spit on your hospitality!”

  “I could shoot you in the throat,” Damaya said longingly.

  “Go ahead, Damaya,” the old woman said, pulling open her robes, revealing a shriveled breast, “shoot your dear aunt! I don’t love life anymore since you cast me out of your clan. Shoot me. You know how much you want it!”