Yoda (2 page)

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.”

Sixty-three years later, Jai Maruk had been sent to the infirmary, and Ilena Xan had returned to her room, making preparations for the Jedi Apprentice Tournament. Mace Windu alone lingered with Yoda.

“Dooku asks to come home,” Yoda said. “A trap, could this be.”

“Probably,” Mace agreed.

Yoda sighed and studied the shell. “A question, he called it. Yes, such a question! But ignore it we must, do you agree?”

Unexpectedly, Mace shook his head. “Dooku should be dead. I should have killed him on Geonosis. I could have stopped the whole war then. And still he is key. Could he come to parley in earnest? There is only a little chance. Could he come all the way back to us? Surely the chance is less than a little. But balance that chance, however small, against a million lives, and it's a chance we must take. So I think, Master.”

Yoda grunted. “Hard it would be, to dare to hope again for this lost student!”

“Tough,” Mace said. “Nobody said being a Jedi Master was easy—even for you.”

Yoda grunted, glaring around at the Temple. “Pfeh. All too wise, you have become. Better before it was, when only Yoda was wise!” He glanced over at Mace and snickered. Mace would have laughed, too, if somewhere in the ring on Geonosis he hadn't lost the knack.

On the other side of the galaxy, the Order's most gifted apprentice reached out to tap a lightsaber with the toe of his boot. Count Dooku grimaced. The lightsaber was still attached to a hand. The hand was soot black and rimed with frost; it ended in a gory stump of frozen blood just above the wrist. Dooku was in his study, a place for reflection, and the severed hand hardly struck the contemplative note. Besides which, as hard as it had frozen in the bitter vacuum of space, it would be thawing out in a hurry now. If he wasn't careful, it would leave a stain on the tiles. Not a good thing, even though one more bloodstain on the floor of Château Malreaux would hardly be noticed.

On the other side of Dooku's desk, Asajj Ventress hefted a bag of foil insulation. “There wasn't much left of the ship, Master. The Force was strong, and I hit the reactor chamber with my first shot. It took me several hours to find that,” she said, glancing at the frozen hand. “It occurred to me a magnetic scan might turn up the lightsaber. Funny to think he was reaching for his weapon when his ship blew up. Instinct, I suppose.”

“He?”

“He, she.” Asajj Ventress shrugged. “It.”

When her first Master died, Asajj Ventress, scourge of the Jedi and Count Dooku's most feared associate, had tattooed her hairless head and left her girlhood behind. Her skull was striped with twelve marks, one for each of the twelve warlords she had killed after swearing their deaths. She was a dagger of a woman, slender and deadly. Even in a galaxy cluttered with hate, such a combination of speed and fury comes only once in a generation; Dooku had known that from the first moment they met. She was the rose and the thorn together; the sound of a long knife driving home; the taste of blood on one's lips.

Asajj shrugged. “I never found a head, but I did pick up a few assorted bits out of the wreckage if you want to take a look,” she said, giving the foil bag a heft.

Dooku regarded her. “What a little cannibal you have become.”

She said, “I become what you make me.”

No easy answer to that.

With an expert Force tug, Dooku brought the severed hand, still clutching its weapon, to hang in the air before him, as easily as he had drawn up Yoda's glow light all those decades earlier. Before the starfighter explosion had ripped the hand so untidily from the rest of its body, Dooku rather thought it might have been olive-skinned. The charring made it hard to tell if it was even human. The dead flesh, unconnected to any spirit, was merely matter now—no more interesting than a table leg or a wax candle, and bearing no more imprint of its owner's soul and personality. Dooku always found this astonishing: how
transitory
the relationship was between one's body and oneself. The spirit is a puppeteer to make one's flesh limbs dance: but cut the spirit's strings, and nothing remains but meat and paint, cloth and bone.

A Jedi's lightsaber, now: that was something different. Each weapon was unique, built and rebuilt by its owner, made to be a pure expression of Self. Dooku ran one finger along the handle of the dead Jedi's weapon. The force of the explosion had stripped off half the casing and fused its works so it would never burn again, but the essential pattern was obvious still. “Jang Li-Li,” he murmured. To his surprise, he found he was sad.

“I make that sixteen,” Ventress said. “Seventeen, it should have been, if you had allowed me to kill that spy, Maruk.”

Dooku turned. Released from his attention, the gory hand and the handle it clutched dropped with a wet
thump
and clatter to the floor. The Count walked to the window of his study. When he was very young, Yoda had told him Vjun's tragic story, and for years he'd had it in mind as a good place to make a retreat. The planet was heavy with the dark side, which made the study of the Sith ways easier. And more practically, Vjun's catastrophe—a plague of sudden madness that carried off most of the planet's population in a year—had left a great many nicely appointed manors empty for the taking. An old crab likes a comfortable shell, after all, and Château Malreaux was very comfortable indeed. The previous owner's sanity had slipped from him in sudden and spectacular fashion; except for the bloodstains, one might think the château had been built new expressly for Dooku's occupation.

Beyond the study window it was raining, of course—the same acid drizzle that had nearly eaten through the roof before Dooku had arrived to set things in better repair. In the distance, toward the seashore, a few twisted thorn-trees raised their claws at the dolorous sky, but the real ground cover was the notorious Vjun moss: soft, sticky, venomously green, and passively carnivorous. A two-hour nap on the stuff would leave exposed skin red, welted, and oozing.