Star Wars, page 17
Loden looked at Bell, grinned, then swept his gaze across the townspeople, finally, slowly, letting his eyes move upward until he was staring directly at the gaping hole in the tavern’s roof.
“Must be something we can do around here. How can we help?”
The crew was struggling. Two men and a woman, all dressed in the heavy, thick clothing woven from oil-bearing seaweed worn by those who worked Eiram’s seas. Their boat was drawn up to the pier, and they were trapped in a battle on their main deck, dodging and pulling away and darting back in with knives and boathooks as they tried to free a long, thrashing creature caught in their nets, its spines and fins whipping lethally through the air.
Bell had been walking along the docks, getting a sense of the various crews, trying to see whom he might approach. This one caught his eye—but mostly because they were in trouble.
One of the creature’s iridescent silver fins slammed into a crew member, nearly pushing them off the deck into the sea. Bell had seen enough. He stepped closer to the boat, lifted a hand, closed his eyes.
He could sense the energy from the deck through the Force. Four beings, all consumed by different sorts of fear. He looked for the wildest, the most desperate, the one that didn’t understand what was happening to it, the strangest, the most lost and confused. To that one, Bell connected through the Force. He touched its mind, evolved in an environment far removed from anything a Chandrila-born human could ever hope to truly understand, and offered comfort. Uncomplex feelings, ideas common to all beings everywhere.
Calm, he thought. Calm. Do not fear.
The beast’s thrashing slowed, becoming less wild, less dangerous. The three members of the boat’s crew approached, cautious, then used their tools with quick movements, slashing through the bits of net that had tangled around the creature. It put up little resistance and in short order was freed. The crew pushed and slid the great beast to the edge of the deck, where the railing had an open section. They shoved it into the water, where it fell with a great splash. A quick squirm of fins and tentacles, and then it was gone, whipping away into the depths of the sea.
The people on the deck watched it go, breathing heavily, holding hands to their sides, gingerly examining their cuts and bruises.
Bell waited, saying nothing. Eventually, one of the men, olive-skinned and powerfully built, noticed him standing on the dock, dressed in full Jedi regalia. The man frowned.
“Something interesting up here, Jedi?” he said. “We’re busy, as you can plainly see.”
The man’s guard was clearly up, and as the other two turned to look at Bell, he could see they felt the same.
“I can help with that, maybe,” Bell said. “It looks like most of the boats of your size operate with a four-person crew, maybe even five. You’ve only got three. If you’ll have me, I’d like to sign on.”
“Aye, four people at minimum,” the big man said, possibly the boat’s captain. “We had the full complement, until we were nearly swamped when your damn station fell on the planet and Bettyjill decided she didn’t like the sea trade no more. Now we’re shorthanded, and I wonder whose fault that is.”
“Not mine, I promise you,” Bell said. “I’m here to help. That creature you were just trying to deal with—it was terrified, and I used my Jedi abilities to calm it down so you could set it free. I’m sure I could be useful in all kinds of ways.”
The crew exchanged glances, and then the captain turned back to Bell.
“Stupid spinefin didn’t know enough to stay out of our nets—just a young one, I’d wager. Important part of the sea’s churn, though. You need the big predators. We set them free when they blunder into the catch, but it’s not an easy task, especially with just three hands aboard.”
“I’ve got hands,” Bell said, holding his up. “Two, in fact.”
“You’re clearly no fisherman,” the woman said, raising a skeptical white-blonde eyebrow, striking against her deep-black skin, several shades darker than Bell’s own. Dotted here and there were the green freckles common to long-term residents of Eiram, a side effect of the local kelp serving as a staple in their diet.
“You’re right, I’m not a fisherman,” Bell said. “I’ve never tried. I’ve spent almost my entire life in the Jedi Temple on Coruscant. But I’m a quick study.”
“This don’t make no sense,” said the final member of the crew, a red-skinned, green-specked Twi’lek (this made Bell think of Loden Greatstorm, as did every single Twi’lek he ever saw). “What would one of them Jedi want with the likes of us?”
“That’s a fair question, and I don’t want you to think I’m being deceptive,” Bell said. “A friend of mine was lost when Starlight Beacon fell, another Jedi, and I’m. . .just not ready to leave the planet. Everyone’s telling me it’s foolish to stay, that there’s no way he could still be alive, but. . .I’m not ready to go yet.”
He gestured past the boat, toward the open sea beyond.
“Alive or dead, I think my friend’s probably somewhere out there, and I’d like to spend a little time looking. Just a personal thing. But I promise I’d take the job seriously if you’ll have me. You won’t regret bringing me on. I don’t need credits, either. Food and a bed, that’s all.”
“Berth, is the word you’re lookin’ for,” the captain said.
He turned to the other two members of his crew, and a moment of silent communication passed between them. He returned his gaze to Bell.
“Fair enough. We’ll head out again soon, for a four-week cruise. Join us if you like, but be aware that work begins every day before dawn, and shirkers get tossed to the spinefins.”
“Won’t be a problem,” Bell said. “I’m used to that. Jedi get up early, whether they want to or not. I haven’t missed a sunrise since I was three years old.”
Loden and Bell fixed the tavern’s roof, using tools supplied by its owner. Gratitude was not offered, but when Loden asked the bartender if there was a place they might secure additional supplies, as their stocks up at their camp were running low, he grudgingly allowed that a shop at the far edge of town might have a few things they could spare.
The Jedi discovered this was true, but the shopkeeper was equally uninterested in Republic credits in exchange for her goods. She did, however, have a sewage system that clogged regularly and required digging out. Two very disgusting days later, Loden and Bell returned to their campsite bearing baskets of fresh produce and grains.
And so it went.
Every so often, someone shot at them, and Bell or Loden calmly deflected the bolt with their lightsaber. They never said a word, never looked to see who might have fired the weapon. They just put their saber away and got on with whatever task they were working on.
Despite these occasional interruptions, Strop’s End was largely a calm place, at least for the moment. The same could not be said for the rest of Teriona. The Jedi spent time in the tavern almost every night, using local coins or goods or promises of work to pay for Loden’s vinbeer and Bell’s endless bowls of scrambled grubbubs (a local delicacy of which he could not get enough). As they ate and drank, it was impossible not to overhear quiet discussions of battles being fought in other places across the planet. At first these conversations were guarded, spoken in hushed tones to avoid offering too much information to the outsiders, but less so as the weeks passed. Bell and Loden caught references to the factions involved in these battles, the nature of the overarching feud, the historical events underpinning generations of ill will, unforgivable failures of the past creating present-day flashpoints of disaster and aggression. Violence was seen as a good solution to many problems.
Bell came to understand how badly hurt these people were.
Much like Kijimi was a planet of ice and Mon Cala was a planet of water, Teriona was a world of war. They didn’t want peace.
But somehow, at least in Strop’s End, peace was what they got.
Violence, vendetta, reprisals—common in every settlement across this world—slowed, then ceased during the time the Jedi lived among the people of Strop’s End. One day, as they worked to repair a farmer’s fence lines so his livestock could be properly herded, Bell asked Loden why it was happening.
Loden finished straightening a fence post, then responded.
“Our presence here holds a mirror up to them, lets them see themselves in a way they have not for generations. They’re coming to understand how awful it is to live the way they are, and how much better it might be to exist another way. This plan wouldn’t work on a whole planet. It wouldn’t even work for a larger town. But here, in this small place, it is, and it will.”
Bell wiped the sweat from his forehead.
“But if we can’t bring the whole planet to peace, what are we even doing here?” Bell asked.
“Wait and see, Bell,” Loden answered. “Wait and see. Right now, we’re fixing this guy’s fence so he’ll give me some fabric to shore up our tent. Winter’s coming, Bell. I bet it’ll get pretty cold up on that hill.”
Bell sighed.
“Yes, Master,” he said. “I’m sure it will.”
A jet of freezing saltwater splashed across Bell’s face. He barely even flinched. He used the sleeve of his coat to wipe the brine from his eyes, never taking his hands from the lines running to the trawler’s net. You had to keep your hands on the lines, no matter what happened, no matter how much your fingers hurt or how hard the boat slammed into the waves or how heavy the catch might be. Hands on the lines, no matter what. One of many things he’d learned in six weeks aboard the Queen Xiri.
Bell had learned to haul and mend nets. He’d learned to sort good catch from the creatures you tossed back, avoiding spines and pincers and gnashing teeth. He’d learned about the wind and the waves and why an ugly dawn was better than a beautiful dusk. In short, Bell Zettifar was learning to fish. The work was long and difficult, and despite his initial assumption that the Force might help him here and there, it really didn’t. Not much was useful on a fishing boat besides strength and focus.
For the first few weeks, no one said much to Bell beyond offering essential pieces of instruction, and he didn’t ask many questions. He kept his eyes open and focused on becoming as useful as he could.
Then, while they were mending the nets alongside the boat’s salt-scarred maintenance droid, the red-skinned Twi’lek asked him what it felt like to use the Force. The Twi’lek was named Gorge, and the droid was 9-0-9, usually just called Ny-no by the crew. Bell thought for a moment and then said it wasn’t so different from the net itself, all these small strands woven together into something that could touch everything and move it and lift it, even thousands of kilos. Just threads, but together, endlessly powerful.
This got him a grunt and a thoughtful look, and a few days later another question, this time from Nelly, the captain’s wife, which led to a whole conversation about how the lives of the crew were very, very different from Bell’s, but also in many ways the same—hard work, dedication, and a deep focus on finding the beauty and art in basic labor underlying their lives.
Bell wasn’t trying to trick them into trusting him. Trust wasn’t the goal at all. The goal was understanding. He wanted the crew of the Queen Xiri to see that he wasn’t a space wizard looking to implement unknown policy that would drastically affect their lives, up to and including space stations falling on their planet. He wanted them to see him as he was—a person looking for a lost friend.
It took time. But as the days went on, the crew began to include Bell in their gossip, relayed the stories they were hearing from other fishing boats, passed along news from across the many seas of Eiram. In turn, Bell told them about Burryaga, what a wonderful person he was, why Bell was so dedicated to looking behind every wave on the planet to find him. And at last, Captain Okoro came to Bell and offered to spread the word about Burryaga to other crews far and wide, to see if there was some piece of news about the Jedi’s fate that had not reached beyond the trawler network.
For many weeks, nothing, until one morning, Bell was busy repairing a set of scorpion traps when he heard Gorge and Nelly discussing something that caught his ear.
“It’s an ill wind blowing,” Nelly said.
“Aye,” Gorge replied.
“I heard they have bones in them.”
“Some sea witch’s curse.”
“What are you talking about?” Bell called over.
Captain Okoro yelled down from the pilothouse.
“They’re being superstitious fools, but then so am I, so I can’t fault them for it,” he said. “All along the Pastor’s Shore, strange totems have been coming up with the tide, washing up on the beaches.”
“No one’s ever seen the like,” Nelly said. “Creepy little things. Clearly made, created, but to what end, no one can say.”
“Is it far to the Pastor’s Shore?” Bell asked. “Could we go look at one of these things?”
Captain Okoro considered the request.
“Bit of a journey, but I heard Half-Roud might have one. I know the man. We can go. Sure, and why not?”
Bell knew that if not for the weeks he’d spent on this ship, they absolutely would not go, not at the request of a Jedi, anyway. But for a member of the Queen Xiri’s crew on the hunt for a lost friend, they would.
And so an opportunity was found that might otherwise have been missed. After a long sail to the Pastor’s Shore, Bell’s crew offered him a warm introduction to Half-Roud. This convinced the unusually configured man to allow the Jedi a glimpse of the mysterious talisman he had fished from the sea. The totem was small, just a bit of foam insulation to which was attached a braided length of light-colored hair. The fisherman assured Bell it was taken from the mane of a mer-witch, but the Jedi immediately recognized it as something else.
Wookiee fur.
“Company,” Bell said, looking down from the hilltop gate toward Strop’s End. “Just left the town’s east gate, headed this way. Six people.”
“I know,” Loden said, and Bell believed he did, even though Loden seemed to be deeply engaged in a meditation exercise requiring him to levitate nine small stones and weave them around each other in a complex sort of dance and, more than that, was sitting on the ground with his back to the town.
Bell didn’t think his master sounded particularly worried—though Loden Greatstorm never really did. But Bell wasn’t too concerned, either. It had been two weeks since the last time anyone took a shot at them in Strop’s End, and even then it was a desultory sort of blast that was well off target. The Jedi hadn’t even lit their sabers.
Loden stood and joined Bell, and they watched the little group approach their hill and climb, making their way to the top.
“Hullo, Jedi,” said the leader, a woman they both knew well named Hennah, who taught in the Strop’s End school.
“Hennah,” Loden said, giving her a nod. “Beautiful day for a hike.”
“True, but this isn’t a nature walk, Loden.”
Hennah gestured toward two other members of her group, two men carrying large handled baskets. They stepped forward and set them on the ground near Loden and Bell.
“Got some nice cheeses in there, a few good bottles of this and that from the tavern, and Sveen baked you three or four nice loaves. My wife put in some orberries from the bushes out back of our place.”
“This is very generous, Hennah,” Loden said, smiling. “Sounds like you’re going to ask us to dig you a new reservoir or something. Bell, fetch my shoveling shoes.”
“Your, uh—” Bell said, not sure what Loden could possibly mean.
“We don’t need anything from you, Jedi,” Hennah said. “This is a gift, freely given. Offered in gratitude as we set out on our journey.”
“Gratitude for what? And where are you going?” Loden asked, sounding genuinely curious.
“We’re grateful because the tavern’s got a new roof,” said one of the group, a man named Argeel, and the others began to chime in.
“Because the sewers don’t clog anymore.”
“Because we haven’t had a red funeral here in months.”
“Because people are starting to think about the way we’ve done things, and the way we might do things,” Hennah finished. “We’re going to visit a few other settlements near here, talk to them about how we’ve been living. Not sure we’d have seen it if you two hadn’t come around.”
She put out her hand, and Loden shook it, followed by Bell.
“Be well, Jedi,” she said.
And then the townspeople left, heading back down the hill and off to the east, toward whatever the future might hold for them.
“Okay, Bell,” Loden said, retrieving a comlink from inside his tunic, a second one he’d clearly been holding on to the whole time they’d supposedly been marooned on Teriona.
“We can go now.”
With the help of the crew of the Queen Xiri, now truly his crew, Bell activated a network of fisherfolk all up and down the Pastor’s Shore, gathering information about every location where one of the little talismans had washed up. He created a command post in the common room of a well-situated inn, and captains from all over Eiram stopped in to offer their insight on the problem Bell was trying to solve. They smoked their seaweed-filled pipes, puffing out pungent clouds while gesturing at charts and current maps, offering strong opinions and bickering with their fellows, using generations of lived experience to consider the origin point of the totems.
Bell knew none of this would have happened if he had asked Administrator Gorta to order such a meeting. The captains had come together because Bell’s friends had asked them to, because Bell had taken the time to make Okoro and Gorge and Nelly and even Ny-no his friends. They wanted to help him, just as Bell would help them with anything they needed. All very simple. Not so different from the time Loden Greatstorm had convinced a planet to consider a path of peace by fixing a tavern roof.
A consensus slowly emerged among the captains that the talismans had all come from a single location, one they all agreed made no sense whatsoever: the Great Southern Gyre, also known as the Maw of Shareen, also known as a spot people on Eiram didn’t even fly over, the superstitions so strong about the gigantic whirlpool and its ability to drag down into the depths anything that came near it.
