Star Wars_ The Approaching Storm - Alan Dean Foster [161]
The ancient Master hobbled over to the tray and poured himself a glass of water. “Enough. The rest of your story, tell us, Master Maruk.”
“Ventress found me,” Jai said. “We fought. I lost.” His burned hand was shaking again. “She took my lightsaber. I composed myself for the killing blow, but instead she took me prisoner. She blindfolded me and bundled me into a speeder for a short ride, no more than an hour. Count Dooku was waiting at the end of it.”
“Ah!” Mace Windu leaned forward. “So Dooku is on Vjun!”
“You escaped from Dooku and Ventress alive!” Ilena said.
A mirthless smile tugged on Jai Maruk’s burned cheek. “Make no mistake, I am here because Dooku wanted me here. Ventress would have killed me if she could, she made that very plain, but Dooku wanted a messenger. One he could trust,” the Jedi said, his voice heavy with irony. “One who would report here first, and not to the Senate. He was very particular about that—I was to deliver my message to Master Yoda, and only in the Temple, far from other ears.”
“And what was this urgent message?” Mace Windu said.
“He says he wants peace.”
Jai Maruk looked at the disbelieving faces of the Jedi and shrugged.
“Peace!” Master Xan spat out. “Bioweapons slaughter innocents by the millions on Honoghr and he wants peace! The Republic is falling like burned logs into the fire and he wants peace! I can imagine exactly the kind of peace he means.”
“Dooku anticipated we might be, ah, wary.” Jai Maruk reached for a pocket under his cloak. “He would send me back, he said, with an offering and a question for Master Yoda. The offering was my life. But the question was this …” He drew his hand from his pocket and opened it. There on his shaking palm was a shell—a single, quite ordinary shell, such as a child might find on the seashore of a hundred worlds.
The Jedi looked at it in confusion, but Yoda, for once, was not so serene. He drew a sharp inward breath, and his brow furrowed.
“Master?” Jai Maruk looked away from the shell in his shaking hand. “I have carried this thing across half the galaxy. But what does it mean?”
Sixty-three standard years earlier. It is evening, and the sky is dark blue above the sprawling compound of the Jedi Temple. In the Temple’s walled gardens, the twilight sky is reflected in the ornamental pond. Yoda’s most accomplished student is sitting on a rock by the pond’s edge, looking into the water. In one hand he holds a shell, running his thumb again and again over its bone-smooth surface. Before him, water-skeeters dance on the surface of the water, light-footed.
The apprentice’s attention moves with them, dancing, too, on the surface of silence; skating on the endless deepness of the Force. He has always been light-footed; the Force dimples underneath his attention, but holds him up, effortlessly. Only tonight, for some reason, he feels sad and strangely heavy. As if realizing for the first time how easy it would be to see his foot fall through, into that deep power—to sink into dark depths there, and drown.
Tick, tick, tchak. Tick, tick, tchack. Footsteps coming nearer, one, two, and then the thunk of a cane stubbed into the white-pebbled path. A glow light approaches, coming from the direction of the Masters’ quarters, a blur of light moving through the garden’s tangle of leaves and vines. The presence is a familiar one, and the student can feel Yoda, his old mind warm and bright as that glow light, long before the old one’s silhouette rounds the last bend, and the great Master of the Jedi Order hobbles slowly up to join him.
The student smiles and dips his head. How many times Yoda has told him, in endless hours of meditation or lightsaber training, that while the outer form of a figure or an attack need not be displayed, one must feel its intention in every cell. So that little dip of the head, so casual, carries a lifetime of gratitude and respect. And fear, too. And guilt.
The Grand Master of the Jedi Order puts down his light and