Star Wars_ The Approaching Storm - Alan Dean Foster [78]
“I don’t doubt it,” she responded, repressing a smile. “Actually, I think you’re kind of friendly.”
He took immediate offense, standing as tall as he could. This brought his face up to the level of the Padawan’s stomach. “Tooqui not friendly! Tooqui most fierce ferocious slayer of all Gwurran enemies!”
“I’m sure you are,” she agreed, reaching out to brush the fur on his forehead from back to front. He stumbled away from her, flailing irately at his head as he struggled to smooth down his ruffled fur.
“Don’t do that! Don’t touch Tooqui.” Fur once more flattened and smoothed back, he glared up at her out of bulging, orange-tinted eyes. “Tooqui have much dignity.”
“Sorry.” She lowered her offending hand, palm upward. “Now, if you and I are going to be friends, Tooqui, and if you’re going to join the party, you have to return what you took.”
The Gwurran eyed the three foodpaks uncertainly. “Tooqui work hard for to steal this stuff.”
“Take my word for it, you wouldn’t like it anyway. At least, not until it’s been properly rehydrated. If you’ll come back with me, I’ll see that you’re the first one who gets to taste it.”
“First one? Tooqui be first?” His single nostril sniffed at the pak he still held. “Tooqui always first.”
In your own mind, anyway, you sly little sneak. “It’s settled, then? You’ll come back with me, we’ll be friends, and we’ll have a party?”
The Gwurran vacillated only a moment longer. Then he confidently placed first one foodpak and then the other two in Barriss’s waiting arms.
“Tooqui consent to join you.” Leaning back, he regarded his comrades on the rim above. “It okay okay now. Tooqui make stranger harmless. All Gwurran can come down safely safely now. We go to see what nasty ugly outlander strangers got to offer Gwurran.”
Smiling to herself at the little brigand’s bravado, Barriss waited while the rest of the chattering Gwurran, agile as spiders, scrambled down the walls of the fissure to join them. Tooqui’s blustering notwithstanding, they largely ignored him as they pushed and shoved to get close to her, feeling her feet, her exposed lower arms, and her protective clothing. She put up with their innocent, wide-eyed curiosity for several minutes, until it threatened to become more intimate than she was prepared to tolerate. Then she shrugged them off and started back down the cleft, the three foodpaks slung over her left shoulder, accompanied by the entire tribe of chattering, jabbering, energized Gwurran.
Slender but strong fingers continued to tug at her as she walked, along with a continuous flow of questions.
“Where humans come from?… Why you so silly-tall?… What happened to rest of you hair?… How can you see see out of such small small flat flat eyes?… What this shiny-pretty on you waist?…”
“Don’t touch that.” She slapped the probing fingers away from her belt. The notion of a lightsaber in the hands of an unruly, combative, slightly rowdy Gwurran was more than a little unsettling. In the constricted confines of the fracture in the hillside, the riotous babble of the diminutive Ansionians was deafening.
“She can’t just have disappeared into thin air!”
For the tenth, or maybe the twentieth time, Luminara ran through the list of possibilities. Barriss had gone walking outside the protective overhang and had managed to get herself lost. She had found something of interest and wandered off into the hills. Something vast and voracious had swooped down out of the sky and carried her off. She was attending to personal needs that were taking more time than usual.
The last seemed the most likely, but even allowing for a severe gastrointestinal upset, the Padawan ought to have reported back in by now. If nothing else, she should have used her comlink. That she hadn’t done so suggested a number of possible explanations. The device was broken, its power pack had inexplicably gone dead, she had lost it off her belt somewhere and was even now searching some hillside for it, or