Star Wars_ Children of the Jedi - Barbara Hambly [30]
Leia shifted her shoulders under the baggy white linen of her shirt. The sticky heat was far worse than Ithor, the humidity gruesome, though at least up at this, the higher end of the valley, the unpleasant sulfur tang that managed to get past the processing plants lower down was almost hidden under the heavy green sweetness of the leaves. Looking up, it was impossible to believe that a hundred and fifty meters over her head, iron winds scoured glaciers deeper than the towers of most cities.
Looking up, in fact, it was impossible to see anything except green, and more green: galaxies of starbloom, riotous armies of orchids, fruits of every color, shape, composition, and degree of ripeness, all blurred and softened and hidden by the omnipresent density of the mist.
“Do you remember them?” On the way to Belsavis she’d looked up statistics about the original population. The Mluki were adolescent at seven, old at thirty. With his long white hair elaborately braided into crests down his back and arms, Jevax would have been a child when the Jedi left.
“Not clearly.” Jevax, small among his peers, was still taller than Han, and would have been taller yet had his natural posture been straight instead of inclined slightly forward, long arms almost touching his bowed knees. He wore a great deal of jewelry, silver and iridescent blue shellwork imported from Eriadu, mostly in the form of earrings. His saronglike breeches were printed in dark purple and black. Like nearly everyone in Plawal, he wore black rubber injecto-kit shoes of the kind manufactured on Sullust and sold by the freighterload in every corner of the galaxy, incongruous on the slumped, hairy, primitive form. The shoes had bright orange latches.
“It was years, you see, before any of us remembered the Jedi had been here at all.”
“That quiet, hunh?”
Leia reached back to give Han a shove. “They blotted your minds, didn’t they?”
“I think they must have.” Jevax led them around another corner and up another knee-breaking screw of stairs. Trees and promontories of rock overhung the way, and Leia could see Chewbacca gazing up approvingly at the possibilities for defensive ambush. The mists shredded away around them, the pallid daylight almost blinding after the ghostly dimness of the rift floor. Matte-gray cutouts of plants showed a cliff edge overhead, the tallest of the benches that graded up in the narrow end of what had originally been a small volcanic crevasse.
“I can’t recall them doing so, of course,” went on Jevax, rubbing his head in rueful amusement. “Nor could my mother. I was only three.” He smiled at the recollection. “Funny, looking back. For ten or twelve years nobody remembered them at all—though it’s quite clear from examining the ruins of Plett’s House that he’d been living here for some seventy years before the other Jedi brought their spouses and children here to hide. Lately a few people have remembered: small things, memories that don’t seem to fit with what we all thought we knew. But it’s as if …”
He shook his head, searching for a way to explain. “It’s as if for years we just didn’t think about our past.”
“I know people who run their lives that way,” remarked Han. He didn’t add—though he could have, Leia thought—that for a good percentage of his life he’d been one of them.
“Well, it isn’t that we didn’t have plenty of present and future to think about,” the Chief Person went on. “The Jedi, bless their spirits, saw to that.”
The last turn of the stair took them above the level of the mist. As if they had stepped through a trapdoor, the atmosphere was clear and noticeably warmer. Strange small winds stirred at Leia’s hair, rustled the gray-stemmed trees that grew like a stalky curtain along the cliff’s edge. To her left and below lay a mingled sea of green and gray, trees like islands amid vaporous billows, bright-winged birds and insects flitting between them in the wan and shivery light.
Leia looked up, and gasped.
“The Jedi,” said Jevax, with shy pride, “were responsible for that, we think.”
From the black rock