• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Indeed, all his work only succeeded in chafing his wrists, so that the blood came more profusely.

A strong morning wind began gusting, blowing sand through the broad plain. Dust clouds formed in the distance down below Dengar’s feet—dirty gray streaks that filled the sky like thunderheads or fog. They were kilometers away, but he could see them rolling toward him, menacing.

He closed his eyes for a bit, trying to keep the grit from blowing into them, and he remembered one of Jabba’s henchmen mentioning a place not far from the palace, a place called the Valley of the Wind.

He had no doubt that that was where he was now. A comforting thought, for at least he knew he was near Jabba’s Palace, perhaps within walking distance of water, if he could only get free.

Out across the pan, Dengar heard a bleating roar. He turned to his side and saw a shaggy bantha running hard, heading toward him. Three Sand People rode on its back, up behind its curling horns, and in moments the Sand People were at his side.

Two of them leapt down and stalked toward him, weapons ready, while the other stayed on the bantha, watching for signs of ambush.

Dengar had heard tales of the Sand People, how they fell upon travelers and killed them, only to harvest the water from their dead bodies. Indeed, the two that hovered over Dengar were making odd slurping sounds, hissing in their own tongue, and Dengar was reminded of darker tales, where it was hinted that the Sand People, to show their contempt for captives, would bind their prisoners and insert long metallic tubes into their bodies, then drink from their prisoners while they yet lived.

But Dengar had done nothing to earn such disrespect from these Sand People, and so he was not surprised when they simply sat next to him at his head, watching him die.

For a long hour they sat as the winds blew steadily stronger. Dengar watched them, and after a while he renewed his struggle. The Sand People merely stared in morbid curiosity, as if this were their form of entertainment.

But he knew that they were waiting for him to die so that they could harvest him.

Dengar looked at their wrapped faces, at the spikes sewn into their clothing, and they reminded him of teeth. He wondered if the Sand People would kill him, if this was what Boba Fett had meant by “the Teeth of Tatooine.”

But the morning grew hotter, and the winds grew dry and blew more fiercely, and heavy sands began to blow. And suddenly Dengar remembered something more about the Valley of the Winds. Something about “sand tides.” It was unusual for Dengar to forget anything. The mnemiotic drugs that the Empire had forced into him made certain of that. Dengar only had difficulty recalling what had been said because it was part of a conversation between two other people, and his attention had been directed elsewhere at the time, but now he remembered. The Valley of the Winds was located between two deserts, one high and cool, the other lower and hotter. Each day, the winds would blow up the slopes as the hot air rose from one desert, and at night the cool air would come blowing back with great force.

In each desert there were dunes of sand deposits, which would blow, scouring the stone, only to be redeposited each morning and night.

The wind picked up and blew more fiercely. Dengar was sweating, and his mouth had become dry. He could feel a burning fever coming on. The sand was blowing through the valley with such force that he could no longer keep his eyes open. To do so, even for a moment, left them searing and gritty.

After one devastating gust of wind, where small rocks pelted the Sand People, the bantha roared out in pain and struggled back onto its feet, then turned away as if to leave the area, and the Sand People made to follow it hesitantly, as if it were their leader giving an undesirable command.

One of the Sand People paused by Dengar, pulled out a long knife and sawed at one of the ropes that held Dengar to the ground. The other two had