She wondered what they’d think now, those aunts, if they could see her married to a man who’d started life as a smuggler, whose parents had been nobody-knew-who. If they could see her as Chief of State, after years of dodging around the galaxy in the company of a ragged gang of idealistic warriors with a price on her head.
She honestly didn’t know whether they would have been aghast or proud. When she was eighteen, she hadn’t known them well; hadn’t known them as an adult knows other adults.
And they had all died before she could.
She stepped from among the trees of the orchard. The white dress was at the far end of Old Orchard Street, moving swiftly. Heading for the market square, Leia thought.
For a long time she’d tried not to know whether it had been day or evening in the capital of Alderaan when the Death Star had appeared in the sky. Somebody had eventually told her that it had been a warm evening late in the spring. Aunt Rouge had undoubtedly been having her hair dressed for dinner in front of that gilt-framed mirror in her boudoir; Aunt Celly would have been lying down indulging in her daily bout of hypochondria, and Aunt Tia would have been reading aloud to her or talking baby talk to the pittins. Leia even remembered the pittins’ names: Taffy, Winkie, Fluffy, and AT-AV—“All-Terrain Attack Vehicle.” She’d named that last one. It had been pale candy pink and small enough to fit in her cupped hands.
The pittins had all died, too, when somebody had pulled that lever on the Death Star.
And everything else had died as well.
Everything else.
Leia gritted her teeth as she moved along the steep slant of the street, keeping close to the jumble of old walls and prefab shops, fighting the sting behind her eyes and the dreadful tightness of her throat. Her aunts had made her girlhood an intermittent burden, but they’d deserved better than that.
It had been her father who had presented her to the Emperor—in the Senate rotunda, as junior representative of Alderaan. She remembered as if it were yesterday the evil dark eyes peering like a lizard’s from that desiccated face in the black hood’s shadow. But her aunts were the ones who had insisted on taking her to the levee at the palace that night.
That was where she’d seen this woman—this girl.
She herself had been eighteen, clothed in the spare, formal white of Senatorial office, as her father had been. There had been few other Senators there, and the crowd in the pillared hall had been an autumnal flower bed of dull golds and bronzes, plum and dark green. Among the usual courtiers, the sons and daughters of Governors and moffs and the scions of the ancient, aristocratic Houses, whose parents were trying to arrange alliances, Leia had noticed a half dozen women of truly startling beauty, exquisitely gowned and jeweled like princesses, who did not seem to belong with either the bureaucrats’ wives or the more elite groups of the old Houses and their vassals. She’d asked Aunt Rouge about them and had gotten a very superior, “Whom the Emperor wishes to invite is of course his business, Leia dear; but one is not obligated to speak with them.”
Leia had realized they were the Emperor’s concubines.
This woman—this girl—had been one of them.
Leia was catching her up. The woman glanced behind her as she threaded swiftly through the barrows of vegetables, jewelry, cosmetics, and scarves in the market square, like a small fish hoping to lose a larger one among bright-colored rocks. She began to run, and Leia ran after her, dodging vendors and shoppers and the occasional lines of antigrav wagons on their way in from the orchards. The woman—who must be only a few years older than she, Leia thought—ducked down an alley, and Leia ran on past its mouth, then doubled down the narrow lane beyond. The houses around the marketplace were old, built on the sunken foundations and lower stories of the original dwellings of the town; Leia descended a short flight of steps at a silent run, dodged through the squat pillars of what had once been a hot-spring hall and was now a sort of open cellar under the gleaming white prefab of the upper house, knee-deep in swirling ground mist and smelling faintly of sulfur and kretch. At the far side she sprang up into the alley again.
The woman had concealed herself behind a stack of packing crates and was watching the mouth of the alley to see if Leia was going to come back that way. She was still slender and small, almost childlike, as she had been eleven years ago. Her exquisite oval face was unlined, her slanted black eyes unmarred by wrinkles—Leia remembered inconsequentially Cray’s vast catalog of such products as Slootheberry Wrinkle Creme and Distilled Water of Moltokian Camba-Fruit designed to preserve such perfection. The black hair that hung down her back in a heavy tail ringed with bronze—the hair that had been piled into the elaborate, masklike headpiece at the Emperor’s levee—was untouched by gray.
All the way from the house in the orchard, Leia had been trying to recall the woman’s name, and as she stepped from between the lava pillars and up into the alley she finally did. “Roganda,” she said, and the woman spun, her hand going to her lips in shock. In the drifting, shadowless mists it was hard to see her eyes, but after a moment the woman Roganda Ismaren stepped forward and sank into a deep curtsy at Leia’s feet.
“Your Highness.”
Leia hadn’t heard her voice before. Aunt Rouge had seen to that. It was soft, and pitched rather high, with a lisping, childish sweetness.
“I beg of you, Highness, don’t betray me.”
“To whom?” asked Leia practically, and gestured for her to rise. The old hand movement, drilled into her by her aunts’ deportment teachers, came easily, a whisper from the dead past.
Roganda Ismaren wasn’t the only one in danger of betrayal here. Leia and Han would probably find themselves far less able to pursue their investigations—if there was in fact anything to investigate—were it known who they were.
Roganda got to her feet, the hem of her gown stirring the mists that drifted up from the old house foundations, the lower end of the moss-grown street. “Them.” She nodded toward the bustling noises of the market, half invisible in the fog, and her gesture took in the stone foundations of the houses around them, the patched-in white cubes with their terraces, their trellises, their steps. Her every movement still retained the implicit beauty of a trained dancer’s. Like Leia, she had been well taught how to carry herself.
“Anyone in this town. The Empire laid it to the ground not too long ago, and even those who came in afterward have cause to hate even the unwilling servants of the Emperor.”
Leia relaxed a little. The woman was unarmed, unless she had a dagger or an extremely small blaster under that simple white linen gown, and the liquid drape of the fabric made even that unlikely. As Palpatine’s concubine, Roganda would have found herself very much in the crossfire between the Emperor’s enemies and his friends. Leia wondered how she’d gotten out of Coruscant.
“This place has been my refuge, my safety, for seven years now,” Roganda continued softly. She clasped her hands in a gesture of pleading. “Don’t force me out, to seek another home.”
“No,” said Leia, embarrassed, “of course not. Why did you pick this place to come to?”
She was thinking only of the Emperor’s levee, of the jeweled headpiece Roganda had worn, massy gold and layered with a galactic dazzle of topaz, ruby, citrine; remembering the elaborate bunches of shimmersilk skirts, held in swags and volutes with gemmed plaques the size of her palm; the chains of jewels, fine as embroidery thread, dangling row on row from the curved golden splendor of her concubine collar. Roganda’s hair had been augmented and amplified by swags of lace, swatches of silk in every shade of gold and crimson, her small white hands a glory of scintillant rings.
But Roganda hesitated, seemed to draw back. “Why do you ask?” Then, quickly, “It was out of the way.… No one knew of it, no one would look for me here. Neither the Rebels from whom I fled when I left Coruscant, nor the warlords who tried to take it back. I wanted only peace.”
She gave a shy smile. “Since you’ve come this far, will you come to my rooms?” R
oganda gestured back along the alley. “They aren’t elegant—you can’t pay for much elegance on a fruit packer’s wages—but I do pride myself on my coffee. The one remnant of earlier glories.”
The coffee served at the Emperor’s levee was one of the things that had stayed in Leia’s mind. The Emperor had had special farms on a number of suitable worlds to provide the beans solely for the use of his Court, including several that produced vine-coffee, a variety notoriously hard to rear. The transition to this provincial town among its orchards couldn’t have been an easy one.
“Another time,” she said, shaking her head. “Surely there were other places you could have gone?”
“Few as out of the way as this.” Roganda half smiled, and brushed aside the tendrils of dark hair that trailed across her brow. Her complexion was the clear, pallorous white of those who live without sunlight, on starships, or underground, or on worlds like this where the only thin sunlight that leaked down through the mists had to be magnified by the crystal of the dome.
“Even smugglers rarely bother anymore. I knew I wasn’t going to be welcomed in the Republic—his name was too hated, and those who haven’t been … coerced, as he could coerce … would not understand that there was no question of refusing him.”
Leia remembered what Luke had told her of his days serving the Emperor’s clone, and shuddered.
“And as for going to the worlds, the cities, still under the rule of the Governors and the new warlords, or the worlds where the old Houses still hold sway …”
She shivered, as if chill winds blew down the alley instead of the dense warmth of the drifting fogs. “He lent me to too many of them … as a gift. All I wanted to do was … forget.”
“What were you doing outside the house?”
“Waiting for you,” said Roganda simply. “For a chance to speak to you alone. I recognized you last night, when your droid malfunctioned.… I hope you got it back to the path without mishap? I almost came down to help you, but … on other worlds where I thought to take refuge, I’ve had bad experiences with those who remembered me from the Emperor’s Court. And I admit I was … unhappy enough to do some foolish things in those days.”
She averted her face, twisting on her finger the small topaz ring that was probably the only jewel she had left of those days. Maybe, thought Leia, the only thing left unsold after her passage here had been paid. Her hand was still white and small and fragile as a cage-reared bird.
“I lost my nerve,” she concluded, not meeting Leia’s eyes. “Then last night I began to fear that you had recognized me. That you might speak of it to your husband, and he to others here. I … I made up my mind to come to you in private. To beg for your silence.”
A bright drift of music keened from the market as the jugglers started setting up their pitches. A busker cried, “Step right up, ladies’an’gennelmens … three turns and turn ’em over …” Somewhere Leia heard the dim, skeletal clatter of a mechanical tree feeder being walked out of a repair shop back to the orchards, and a musical Ithorian voice sang, “Fresh tarts! Fresh tarts! Podon and brandifert, sweetest in town …” while high overhead the vast, flower-decked gondolas of the silk and coffee beds glided along their tracks, lifting and lowering, silent as birds beneath the crystal of the dome.
“But you didn’t.”
Roganda looked down at her hands again, turning her ring. “No,” she said. Her long black lashes trembled. “I can’t … explain, exactly. I’ve been so afraid for so long. It’s hard to explain to someone who hasn’t been through what I’ve been through.”
She raised pleading eyes to Leia’s, darkness and old memories shimmering in them like unshed tears. “Sometimes it seems I’ll never cease being afraid. The way it seems some nights that I’ll never cease having nightmares about him, for as long as I live.”
“It’s all right.” Leia’s voice sounded gruff and awkward in her own ears, shaky with the memory of her own nightmares. “I promise I won’t betray you to those who live here.”
“Thank you.” Her voice was barely a whisper. Then she smiled tremulously. “You’re sure you won’t have coffee with me? I make it rather well.”
Leia shook her head. “Thank you,” she said, and smiled back. “Han will be wondering where I’ve gone.” She started back for the market square, then turned, remembering something else. Something her aunt Celly had whispered to her in a corner when Aunt Rouge was over lecturing the head of the House Elegin about the proper deportment of its scions …
“Roganda … didn’t you have a son?”
Roganda looked quickly away. Her voice was almost inaudible under the musical chatter of the market. “He died.”
Turning swiftly, she vanished into the mist, the white swirl of it absorbing her like a white-robed ghost.
Silent in the narrow alleyway, Leia recalled the day the Rebels had taken Coruscant. The Emperor’s palace—that endless, gorgeous maze of crystal roofs, hanging gardens, pyramids of green and blue marble shining with gold … summer quarters, winter quarters, treasuries, pavilions, music rooms, prisons, halls … grace-and-favor residences for concubines, ministers, and trained assassins—had been shelled hard and partially looted already, Rebel partisans having killed whichever members of the Court they could catch. These had included, if Leia remembered correctly, not only the President of the Bureau of Punishments and the head of the Emperor’s School of Torturers, but the court clothing designer and any number of minor and completely innocent servants of all ages, species, and sexes whose names had never even been reported.
As Leia walked back across the market square she thought, No wonder she was twisting her hands in fear.
And stopped, to be cursed at by the driver of a puttering mechanized barrow of cheap shoe kits from Jerijador, but she hardly noticed. She was seeing, suddenly, the topaz ring on Roganda’s hand—a hand smaller even than her own, childlike, and completely innocent of either bandages, small cuts, or purple stains.
“You can’t pay for much elegance on a fruit packer’s wages …”
Oso Nim’s old pal Chatty had had at least three bandages on his fingers. So had half the clientele of the Smoking Jets and most of the people she passed in the market. Bandages on their fingers, and purple hands—or red, or yellow, depending on whether they were packing bowvine, brandifert, lipana, or vine-coffee … And podon and slochan were sturdy enough to be packed by droids.
Leia found herself wondering, as she walked quickly back toward the house on Old Orchard Street, what would have happened to her if she’d gone with Roganda to her rooms for coffee.
Chapter 14
Who are you?
The words glowed in amber silence in the almost-darkness of the quartermaster’s office on Deck 12. Somewhere in the distance a sweet, complex humming echoed in the labyrinth of corridors and rooms: the Talz singing in their hidden enclave of junior officers’ staterooms. Threepio, before he’d shut down, had tried to tap into the Will on this terminal and had reported that though power still functioned in some of its circuits, cable-greedy Jawas had torn out the computer connections somewhere up the trunk line.
Perhaps, thought Luke, that was one reason he felt instinctively safe here.
The far-off wailing halted, then resumed with transmuted rhythm. Even the air circulators were silent. The rooms smelled of Jawas, Talz, the vanilla whiff of the Kitonaks clumped like podgy mushrooms at the end of the corridor, chatting endlessly in their soft, squeaking voices. Luke gazed into the onyx well of the screen and felt suddenly tired unto death.
Who are you?
He felt that he already knew.
The word swam up out of the depth, whole, not letter by letter—as if it had existed there for a long time.
>Callista<
His breath paused. He hadn’t actually thought this would work.
Then, >She’s all right. They haven’t harmed her. Not beyond what she’d take in a rough training session<
Relief was a flood of sensation so violent it w
as almost like a headache, release bordering on physical pain.
Thank you, typed Luke. He was struck by the absolute bald inadequacy of the words on the screen; something you’d say to someone who moved a chair out of your way when your hands were full. Nothing to do with the interrogator droids in the Detention Area; nothing to do with the bruises on Cray’s face, or the dead, bitter look in her eyes. Nothing to do with the Gamorreans holding the screaming Jawa over the shredder.
“Thank you,” he whispered aloud, to the no-longer-quite-empty darkness of the room. “Thank you.”
>They’re on Deck 19, in the starboard maintenance hangar. They’ve dismantled half a dozen TIEs to make their village—or Mugshub has, anyway. It’s the sows who do all the work<
There was a pause.
>Fortunate, since the boars are about as smart as the average cement extruder and aren’t good for much besides getting into fights and making little Gamorreans<
Can you get me up there?
>I can take you to the cargo lift shaft they’re using as a communications tunnel. They’ve got it booby-trapped and guarded. Can you levitate?<
Yes. I’ve been—
>You don’t have to keyboard, you know. Internal Surveillance had every room and corridor on this ship wired. Charming people<
“I’ve been using perigen for my leg,” said Luke, still looking at the screen, as if it were a wall or a blacked-out window behind which she dwelled. “It’s beginning to interfere a little with my concentration, but I can manage.” Even as he said it he shivered. In addition to the painkiller’s eventual side effect of reduced concentration, fatigue, exhaustion, and the slow grind of constant pain were eroding still more his ability to manipulate the Force. The thought of self-levitating over a lift shaft hundreds of meters deep was an unnerving one.
Star Wars: Children of the Jedi Page 21