Star Wars_ The Han Solo Adventures - Brian Daley [217]
“I’m thirsty,” Hasti announced, “and hungry as a Wookiee.”
“I’ll summon room service,” offered Han. “Marinated range-squab for four, and a few magnums of chilled T’iil-T’iil? We’ll get the place redecorated while we’re at it.”
She snorted. “You should get the auto-valet, Solo, and feed yourself into it; you look like a jet-juicer just off an eight-day twister.”
Amused, Han glanced at her, giving her a long-suffering smile. Then he sighed and sat down with his back against one of the stone slabs. Chewbacca lowered himself next to Han. “Hey, partner; forward guard to your center’s flanking slot, six win-lose units.”
Chewbacca fell into deep concentration, chin on fist, envisioning the gameboard match they would be playing on the Falcon. Without computer assistance, playing was much more difficult and involved, but it might help pass the time.
Hasti went to stand before the chamber’s single door. Han looked up and saw that her shoulders were shaking, as was the glow-rod she held in her hand. He got up and went to comfort her, assuming she was weeping, but she pushed his hand away, and it dawned on him that she was trembling in anger.
Without warning, the girl flung herself at the door, swinging the glow-rod. It burst into splinters and a shower of sparks and blazing shards. She pounded the stone with the stump of the glow-rod, kicking it and beating it with her free hand, ranting maledictions she had learned in a life among the mining camps and factory worlds of the Tion Hegemony.
Han and Badure approached her when the worst of her rage seemed spent. “Nobody’s locking me under some old mountain to rot!” she yelled. She swung randomly at the men with the battered stump of the glow-rod, and they found it more politic to duck than to grapple. “Part of that treasure’s mine, and nobody better try to cut me out of it!”
Puffing, drained, she shuffled over to where the Wookiee sat. Chewbacca had watched the proceedings curiously. Hasti dropped the glow-rod stump and sat down next to the Millennium Falcon’s first mate.
Han was about to say something, if only to comment on the intensity of her avarice, when a glissando from Skynx’s flute sounded through the room.
The Ruurian still wore his instruments. They had been cradled to his middle, concealed by his woolly coat, when he had curled up. He was tuning them in an absorbed way, shutting out his current distress, having perched on the slab against which Chewbacca and Hasti sat.
Han went to listen while Badure stayed at the door to study it with the remaining glow-rod. In the halflight Skynx played a haunting tune full of longing and loneliness. Han dropped down next to Hasti and together they listened. The music made strange play with the acoustics of the vast space.
Skynx paused. “This is a song of my home colony, you see. It’s called ‘By the Banks of the Warm, Pink Z’gag.’ It’s played at cocoon-weaving time, when the cycle’s crop of larvae gather to go chrysalis. At the same time the previous cycle’s cocoons open and the chroma-wings come forth to exude their pheromones, which draw them to one another. The air is sweet and light then; gaiety is there.”
A large globule of emotion-secretion gathered at the corner of each faceted red eye. “This adventuring has been educational, but most of it is nothing more than danger and hardship a very long way from home. If I were ever to come to the banks of the Z’gag again, I would never leave!” He resumed playing the sad melody.
Hasti, gazing vacantly into the darkness, was disheveled, but looked attractive nonetheless, nearly as pretty as when she had been gowned and primped onboard the Falcon. Han slipped an arm around her and she leaned against him, scarcely noticing him.
“Don’t fold until the hand’s over,” he encouraged her quietly.
She turned to him with a labored smile, brushing her dirty fingers against his stubble of beard, tracing the raw