Jedi Trial (35 page)

“Not really,” she said. “We’ve finished dinner, and there’s nothing urgent I have to do before tomorrow. I mean, I was intending to practice in the training room, but that could—”

The girl flushed and stuttered to a halt under the massed gaze of the Jedi Masters. “Padawan Scout,” Mace Windu said deliberately, “I am surprised to hear you have this much free time, given the upcoming Apprentice Tournament. I hate to think you might be bored. Would you like me to
find
you something to do?”

The girl gulped. “No, Master. Not necessary. As you say—practice—I should …” She bowed and backed out of the room, sliding the door almost shut, until they could see only one green eye. “But if there’s anything else you need, don’t hesitate to—”

“Scout!”

“Right!” And with a click the door slid shut.

Mace Windu shook his head. “The Force is weak in that one. I don’t know—”

Master Xan held up her hand, and Mace fell silent. Xan’s fingers truly were like iron, sheathed with muscle, the joints knotted from years of hand-to-hand combat training. She flicked her hand at the door in a gentle Force push. The door thunked and they heard a muffled yelp. A moment later, embarrassed footsteps pattered away down the corridor.

Mace Windu shook his head impatiently. “I don’t know what Chankar saw in her.”

“We’ll never know now,” Jai Maruk said. Together they paused in remembrance of Chankar Kim, another Jedi fallen in the ring at Geonosis. At first, there had been ceremonies and vigils memorializing that horrible slaughter. But time and the war had gone on, and the Temple was now bleeding from more than that one great wound. Every week or two, another report would come in of a comrade lost in a battle on Thustra, or blown up in high space over Wayland, or assassinated in a diplomatic mission to Devaron.

“Frankly,” Mace said, “I was surprised she was ever chosen to be a Padawan.”

The tip of Yoda’s cane swirled slowly over the chamber floor, as if he were stirring the depths of a pond visible only to him. “To the Agricultural Corps she should be sent, think you?”

“Actually, yes, I do.” A note of sympathy entered Mace Windu’s voice. “There is no dishonor in that. When you see how hard she has to fight just to keep up with children years younger than she is … Perhaps it would be kinder to let her work at her own level.”

Yoda cocked his head and looked curiously at him. “See her struggle do I, as well. But if you make her stop, tell you it is ‘kind,’ she will not!”

“Maybe not,” Jai Maruk said grimly. “But children do not always want what is best for them.”

“Nor do Jedi Masters,” Yoda said dryly.

The burned Jedi forged on. “Let’s be honest. Not every pairing of Jedi Knight and Padawan will be Obi-Wan and Anakin, granted, but the truth is
we are at war
. To send a Jedi into battle with a Padawan who cannot be trusted to hold her own is to needlessly risk two lives—lives the Republic cannot afford to throw away.”

“The Force is not as strong in Scout as it should be,” Ilena agreed. “But I’ve had her in my classes for years. Her technique is good. She is smart and she is loyal. She tries.”

“There is no
try,”
Master Maruk said, unconsciously letting his voice slip into the Yoda imitation for which, a lifetime ago, he had been famous among the young boys of the Jedi Temple. “There is only
do.”

The other three Jedi in the room glanced guiltily at Yoda. He snorted, but laugh lines crinkled around his eyes. “Mm. Thinking of students, I am. Best then I should go to battle with him in whom the Force is strongest, hmm? With young Skywalker, think you?”

“He’s not polished,” Ilena said.

“And too impulsive,” Mace added.

“Hm.” Yoda stirred again with his stick. “Then best of all would be the strongest student, yes? Wisest? Most learned in the ways of the Force?” He nodded. “Best of all, Dooku would be!” His eyes found the other Jedi, one by one: and one by one, they looked away. “Our great student!” Yoda’s ears flexed, then drooped. “Our great failure.”

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 clambers awkwardly onto a rock, scrabbling for purchase and then hauling himself up to sit snuffling beside his student like some unfortunate garden gnome. The student’s grin broadens, but he knows better than to offer to help.

Yoda settles himself on the stone in a series of grunts and shifts, adjusting the skirts of his worn Jedi robes, and letting his feet hang just over the surface of the pond. The water-skeeters zip under his ancient green toes, oblivious to the slightly hairy greatness dangling over them. “Pensive, are you, Dooku?”

The student doesn’t attempt to deny it.

“No fear about this mission have you, surely?”

“No, Master.” The student corrects himself. “Not about the mission, anyway.”

“Confident, you should be. Ready you are.”

“I know.”

Yoda seems to want the light he has left on the ground. He turns his cane around and tries to hook the glow light’s handle with it. Grimacing, he fishes once, twice, but the light slips off. He grunts, exasperated.

With the barest flick of his attention, the student picks up the lantern with the Force and sends it floating to his teacher. “Why not do it the easy way, Master?” he asks—and knows what’s coming as soon as he shuts his mouth.

“Because
it is easy,” Yoda grunts. In the young man’s experience, students get a lot of answers like this from Yoda.
He didn’t send the light away, though
, Dooku thinks.

They sit together in the garden. Somewhere out of sight, a fish breaks the surface, then settles back into the water.

Yoda gives the student a companionable prod with the end of his stick. “So ready to leave, yesterday you were!”

“And last month, and last year, and the year before that.” A rueful smile from Dooku lights and dies slowly away. “But now that it’s really going to happen …” He looks around. “I can’t remember a time I didn’t want to leave—to go out, to travel the stars, to see the world. And yet I have loved it here. This place has been my home. You have been my home.”

“And will be still.” Yoda gazes at the sweet-scented darkness of the gardens approvingly. “Always be here, we will. Home, yes … they say on Alderaan,
Home it is, where when you come to the door, they have to let you in!”
He snuffs the evening air, laughing a little. “Hm. Always will there be a place for you here.”

“I suppose so. I hope so.” The student looks down at the shell in his hand. “I found this on the bank. Abandoned by a freshwater hermit crab. They don’t have homes of their own, you know. They keep outgrowing them. I was thinking about that, how the Jedi found me on Serenno. With my mother and father, I suppose. I can’t remember them now. Do you ever stop to think how strange that is? Every Jedi is a child his parents decided they could live without.” Yoda stirs, but does not speak. “I wonder, sometimes, if that is what drives us, that first abandonment. We have a lot to prove.”

A glow-fly comes flickering out of the tangled vines to zip over the surface of the pond, like a spark shot from a fire. The student watches it make its dizzy pattern over the quiet water.

Yoda has a question he likes to ask:
What are we, think you, Dooku?
Every time the student tries a different answer:
We are a knot tied in the Force
or
We are the agency of Fate
or
We are each cells in the body of History
 … but tonight, watching the glow-fly hiss and flicker in the night, a truer answer comes to him.
In the end, what we are is: alone
.

With a faint
pop
, like a bubble bursting, a fish rises from the dark water and snaps. The glow-fly’s light goes out and is gone, leaving no trace but one weak ripple that spreads slowly across the surface of the pond.

“I guess even then I was like that hermit crab,” the student says. “Too big for my parents’ house. So you brought me here, and it’s been years, now, that even the Temple has seemed a tight fit for me. I guess …” The young man pauses, turning, so the light falling against the edge of his hooded robe throws a shadow across his face. “I worry that once I am out in the big world, I will never be able to fit inside here again.”

Yoda nods, speaking almost to himself. “Proud, are you. Not without reason.”

“I know.”

“Not without danger, either.”

“I know that, too.”

The student rubs again at the hermit crab shell, and then drops it into the pond. Startled water-skeeters skitter madly from the splash, trying to stay afloat.

“Bigger than the Jedi, bigger than the Force, you cannot be,” Yoda says.

“But the Force is bigger than the Jedi, Master. The Force is not just these walls and teachings. It runs through all life, high and low, great and small, light—” Awkwardly the student stops.

“—and dark,” Yoda says. “Oh, yes, young one. Think you I have never felt the touch of the dark? Know you what a soul so great as Yoda can make, in eight hundred years?”

“Master?”

“Many
mistakes
!” Wheezing with laughter, the old teacher reaches out with his cane and pokes his student in the ribs. “To bed with you, thinker of deep thoughts!”
Poke, poke
. “Your Master, Thame Cerulian, says the most gifted Padawan he ever saw, you are. Trust in yourself, you need not. I, Yoda, great and powerful Jedi Master, will trust for you! Is it enough?”

The apprentice wants to laugh along, but cannot. “It is too much, Master. I am afraid …”

“Good!” Yoda snorts. “Fear the dark side, you should. In the mighty is it mightiest. But not yet Thame’s equal are you; not yet a Jedi Knight; not yet a member of the Council. Many shells have we left for you, Dooku—as long as you can fit inside
this
one,” he says, rapping his student’s skin. “Tomorrow, go you must, into the darkness between the stars. But home always will this place be. If ever lost you are, look back into this garden.” Yoda hefts his glow light, so shadows like water-skeeters dart away from them. “A candle will I light, for you to find your way home.”