Come to Dust
The sky never turns actually dark at night on Coruscant. I have heard that it is otherwise in the lowest levels of the city, where the light is a constant dustgrey twilight, but I have only ever gotten to know the upper levels. The sky hanging over the rooftops of the buildings was the usual dull velvetsoft purple color. It was filled with the constant motion of speeders, their headlights glaring fish-eyed stars in the gloom, the only stars I had ever seen there. None of the moons were visible. I watched it all from the open doorway before I made myself look down, and face the landing pad floating out ahead of me.
It could not have looked more unremarkable. It was lit with the soft glow of the perimeter lights, which may have only been standard procedure, or (I realized a minute later than I would have recently, only days before) a ship was expected in for arrival. I didn't know how much time I had left before it pulled in out of the sky—and I needed to use it. I walked out towards the pad, into the petrol stained wind, leaning on my new walking cane.
The pavement was a clean blank raingrey again—there wasn't even a single scorched bruise mark left from the explosion. But of course: they would have cleaned it up after the security forces were finished with the area, and I ought to have expected that.
It wasn't a monument. It was still, it was only, a landing pad for interstellar traffic in this part of the senate district.
It reminded me of the tiny cuts cracked into my face. I must have gotten them from the jagged insect-winged shrapnel flying from the wreckage, though I hadn't felt it happen. When I had looked in the mirror, the morning after I was released from the embassy medical center, they had already faded into my skin. I had barely needed to use any of Milady's whiteface powder. They wouldn't even leave scars behind, and that didn't seem right. I should have had my face scarred and pocked like the surface of an asteroid.
Instead, I would be just as pretty as ever, according to one of the assistant-droids, as it stared with its violet candy eyes. My leg would heal and soon I wouldn't need the cane; I wouldn't even walk with a limp.
I stopped near the center of the platform. The wind tugged at the back of my dark winterwool cloak, the one I had bought nearly a year before I entered Milady's service. It wasn't one of the many gowns, and cloaks, in my wardrobe, that I wore to match up with her, and the latest of her many frocks. I didn't know what I would do with those, since I hadn't any reason to wear them now.
(It had been a fog-blurred morning when we had arrived on the planet, after several weeks of traveling through hyperspace, and the royal mirror-polished starship Milady hadn't wanted to give up, came to a landing on its tiny bird feet. Or perhaps the sky had been clear, and the fog I remembered had only ever been smoke-)
After several minutes, I heard someone moving behind me. It might have been their carefully whispered-soft footsteps, or the air they breathed out. I have learned to notice the details other people don't. But then, I had become (by my own choice) one of those details. I jerked around, and felt at my hip before I remembered that I wasn't carrying a blaster.
"What are you doing here?" I said, tossing my voice away into the shadows where I could make out another person, another being.
"I could ask you that same question," a young man—a boyish and very young man—said back to me. He tried to sound hard, but his voice shivered with the last two words.
"I don't have any reason to explain myself," I said. "But you do. You're not here on some sort of official business, or you would have shown yourself."
"I'm sorry. I didn't—expect to see anyone else here." He came towards me, and into the glow from the platform lights.
He was a tall gawky-thin blond boy in a dark cloak slinking behind him. I didn't recognize him, but I noticed that he had a scrawny braid of hair that dangled down to his shoulder, which meant he was a student-Jedi. His eyes had a fierce, forest-hawk glow to them—and then I realized it came from tears. He looked away from me to wipe at his eyes with his sleeve and swallow, and then:
"This is where it happened." He looked back at me—but I couldn't be sure that he saw me, instead of someone else. His voice had a raw heartbeat-throbbing quality that he shouldn't have shown in front of me, and we both knew what he meant.
"Yes." There was nothing else I could have said. But I knew who he had to be now—and I had seen him before, though only once, ten years before, as an image over the holonet. Anakin Skywalker was the only young Jedi who would need to see the place where Milady (and oh yes, the other people whose names I could have told him) had died.
"It had been almost ten years," he said. "But I still thought that someday, the Force would work it out, and we would meet again. But now—we never will."
"Oh. Then I'm sorry." Milady had never so much as mentioned him to me. We discussed the present, not the past. But I knew—better than most people—that she had had an idealistic, even romanticized view of the Jedi that hadn't changed since she was a little girl. Her experiences during the Trade Federation invasion had only enforced it.
"She remembered you fondly," I said. "I'm certain of that."
He shrugged, and his voice was clenched: "Yeah, she remembered me as a cute little boy who just happened to save her entire world. But I didn't save it. She was the one who did that. It was always about her."
I walked away from him, and across the dance floor of the platform, towards the circle of burning theatre lights. And the sky looming around it. Several private speeders flowed past, and I could just hear the polite felix-purrs from the very expensive engines. I would only have to take several more steps to fall down into the sky. The shock would kill me (or so I had heard, though not from a reliable non-fiction source) before my body crashed and broke into pieces.
I took the first step forward. You should do it you stupid slag, the echo of my voice thinking inside my head said. Maybe that's why you came here to begin with.
I had wondered—as I lay in the dream-daze from the painkillers at the medical center—what I might have done to save her. But I only knew what had happened: that I had given in to my primitive animal instincts to save myself when the world, or the tiny fragment of it we were in, had exploded around me.
She died alone, I could have told him. Oh, Captain Typho had been there to watch her gasp out her last breath, but she was already alone in the darkness inside her mind. Versé (Versé, whose body had been cremated in anonymity on this city-world, whose name had not been included in any of the holo accounts) was already dead. And: I had been trapped across the platform from her, my leg smashed into breadcrumb rocks underneath a piece of the wreckage, and later, though still only that morning, they would remove broken shrapnel fragments from my face, from my right breast, from my arms. I had only felt the pain that belonged to me.
"Handmaiden!" Anakin Skywalker said behind me.
The wind smacked against my eyeballs as I looked back to him. I couldn't move my mouth enough to speak, and he continued: "You don't have to do this. I know you must feel worse than I can ever imagine, but—she wouldn't have wanted that. I knew Padmé well enough, and long enough, to know that much about her."
"You're right about that," I said, when I could force my mouth open. I took several jerking-stiff steps away from the edge. "She wouldn't have."
Then, finally, the shadow of a starship came floating towards us, followed with the sound of its draigon-breathed engines. Anakin Skywalker and I didn't speak as we hurried across the platform and down the walkway to the dark hole of the opened door. I arrived there seconds behind him, thanks to my still lurching walk. He was already gone.
I returned to the apartment at 500 Republica. There was nowhere else on this entire world, this entire city, where I could go. The upper storey, where Milady had lived, was locked up and dark with underwater shadows—Queen Jamillia was, I had heard, considering selling it, but she would take the next Senator's opinions into consideration. The closets were still stuffed full with Milady's wardrobe. I couldn't imagine what they would do with that. The new Senator (who the Queen must have selected in private) wouldn't want it.
I went downstairs to our private quarters. There was a single rose-shaded lamp glowing in the sitting room, but the rest of the apartment was full of a dead and emptied silence. Dormé would have been asleep. No: I hoped she was only asleep.
I had just taken off my cloak when I saw the sheet of cream-pale thick paper lying on the sopha near the artificial fireplace—and then I saw the thorn of the poison dart lying on a rosepetal silk bit of handkerchief. I knew how it would work from my history classes. It would only take a slight prick to bring on a painful dragged out death.
You should have died instead of her, the note read, as though the author had heard my own private thoughts. I hadn't seen the writing before, but it was in a distinctly feminine style. This should help you remedy part of that.
I don't know how I managed to keep from screaming, from roaring, with the rage that suddenly blurred my thoughts away. I ripped the note into a heap of little snowflake-sized pieces, and watched as they burned away into black ashes in the electric glow of the fireplace, and the words were gone. I wanted to stomp the dart into dust beneath my foot, but it was far too dangerous. I put that into the garbage disposal unit.
I could not allow Dormé to find this. She would (I was afraid that I knew) take the instructions seriously. That is-unless she was the one who had left the note and that dart for me to find. She might have wanted me to pay for my continuing life.
Dormé had spent that day, as she had every day since the assassination success, since the explosion, in constant and silent tears. Her hair was a wind-pulled tangled mess, and she had insisted on wearing one of Milady's white nightgowns with the lace cuffs, even though she was inches taller than Milady, and it didn't quite fit her. She had spent the last several nights sleeping in Milady's bed, and she had only returned downstairs after someone-and I suspected Captain Typho—changed the access codes. She had stopped speaking—and that was just as well, since when she had, the afternoon I was released from the medical center, she had still, days after it was too late, wanted to cover up Milady's death for the sake of that vote.
"It's the last thing we can do for her. You should have understood that," she had snapped at me, wiping at the glossywet tears on her face with the sleeve of her dressing gown. Her eyes had been smeared with pink flowerpetal bruises, and her mouth was chapped.
Typho had only let his breath out in a sigh, before he looked away at the sky outside the window. He didn't bother to mention what she already knew: Milady would never have had one of us take her place in the Senate, and it wasn't because she knew we wouldn't be able to pass through the routine retinal scans, though that was true enough. That was the role only she could play.
When I looked into her room, using the override code to unlock the door, she was lying in bed, locked down inside sleep. She had left a small radio-unit playing, a female announcer with an icehard Coruscanti accent giving the coverage on Milady's death. She must have put a recording on repeat. I wanted to turn it off, but I didn't dare to move towards it.
-been no word from Queen Jamillia, but sources within the Naboo delegation say that she intended to replace Binks as the Gungan representative, the woman, the being, went on. There is no word yet on who the Queen has chosen for Amidala's successor, and she is not expected to make any announcements until after the funeral.
I closed the door, and let the automatic lock click back into its place, and then I slumped down to the floor, leaning my cheek against the wall. My leg whined with pain, but I didn't mind that. I still had the capacity to feel pain at all.
The voice glided on inside Dormé's room: Binks is expected to represent Naboo in the vote on the controversial military act, which is still scheduled for the floor during the opening session tomorrow morning.
There are many ancient songs on Naboo about the figure of Death, usually represented as a starved old crone in a cloak the color of funeral ashes. But there is one poem—of which there are only several fragmented stanzas left, by a poet whose name has been lost in history—in which death was portrayed as a man. He had come to take an aristocratic maiden dying of some sort of fever. She resisted him at the first, but-and when our ancient literature teacher blushed, I knew I had read it correctly-it was intended to be erotic. She didn't just give in and accept what was inevitable. She enjoyed the dance of death.
I have seen a painting on the subject in a small art museum in the last city near the northern pole: It shows death as a gaunt figure with an exposed bony smile, covered in a black cloak, hovering over a naked girl with messes of red-gold hair.
Come along with me, Death says in that story, in all of them, in a whispered dry voice like dead leaves, in a cold sexless voice. I am death, who makes all beings equal.
Milady used to play down her family background to make it sound more humble than it actually was. Yes, she originally came from a small mountain village near the Lake Country—a village her father's family had ruled over as the landowners for three thousand years. I think one of her second cousins holds the title now.
But when death came for her, none of that mattered. She snatched at Versé's hand, and they joined up with the two junior guards and danced away, in a swaying hand in hand chain, made equal at the last. The third guard, who died from his internal injuries the next day, would have chased after their distant, ink-black, darting figures, but he would never catch up.
Before we left the apartment for the final time, we watched the broadcast of Senator Amidala's state funeral in her sitting room. It was early evening in Theed, and the riverside road was crowded with people holding small flicking candles as the procession came past—with Queen Jamillia, along with two of her handmaidens, leading the way, and then Boss Nass with his attendant, and General Panaka, and Princess Araminta. And oh yes: Former representative Jar Jar Binks, having just arrived after he gave his pivotal vote, the one that gave the Chancellor permission to start up his army. I couldn't believe he had the nerve.
Milady's body, the beautiful porcelain-stone doll the morticians had made her into, was laid out in a white coffin-sled. The camera zoomed in over her, stroking her face as kindly, as zealously as Death ever had. Her dark hair was filled with the white stars of flowers, and you would never know how much of it was a hairpiece. She was surrounded by an honor guard from the Senate in full mourning dress. None of her handmaidens were there—and that was, despite what the Queen's chief of staff said, a travesty.
The people walking behind her were an older couple, frozen into regal, public composure, who had to be her parents. Of course, I had never met them—she didn't need us when she was visiting her family—but I had seen several of their official holoportraits. Her mother worked in the administration at the university in Theed, and her father was a well-known architect. I could only just see the woman (the sister Milady had mentioned only several times), and the little girls in their shadow-grey mourning cloaks, who came after them.
Dormé sat in a slump at the other end of the long roseyellow sopha. She had her hair trapped in a single braid, and she was no longer weeping. She couldn't. Her eyes were burnt-dull and far away, and I could see the reflection of the funeral floating inside them. The hem of her violet traveling cloak with stamped with dust.
"What are you going to do next?" I said. She did not turn away from the crawling progress of the funeral procession, but she snapped her eyes in a blink—and I knew she had heard me.
"I don't know," she said, letting each word fall like a stone into a pond.
"Have you gotten in contact with your family?" While I had never been close with Dormé, it was only since Milady had died that I had realized how badly I knew her. I couldn't think of one thing I knew about her. I was making an assumption that she even had any family, but it was an educated one-she must have had the people who were her parents, even if they were only dead memories now. Everyone has that much.
"They're irrelevant," she said, and then: "You're asking the wrong question. Cordé, Senator Amidala was my life. I loved her more than I have ever loved another person—more than I should have, I know, but I can't regret it. I don't see how I can—continue living without her."
"You weren't her life," I said. My voice came out like a winter knife wind, colder than I had intended when I knew what words I wanted to use. Even though I had not mentioned it to her, I could not forget (and oh, I wanted to) the note, and the thorn-dart inside it. "I can assure you that had you been in her place, she would have continued on living quite well."
Dormé's face didn't change. She must have already known that, then, and obsessed over it when she was alone in her bed. But she blinked her eyes shut, and the first glass-smooth raindrop of a tear rolled down her cheek.
She turned back to the street and the nightshadowed river on the screen, and: "I'll go back to Theed. I have had more than enough of this world to suit me. After that, I don't know. Perhaps I can find a place with the Queen. I can't think on it just now."
She stood up and turned the holo dark with a whipcracked snap. She didn't look back as she walked away. "I'll meet up with you downstairs."
After I heard the whisper as the door slid shut, I picked up my cane from the sopha and pulled myself to my feet. I had only to turn out the lights, and enter the lock code into the main door, for one last time before I followed after her. I thought—I fancied—I could hear all those dresses I had spent so much time tending to rustling like dried flower petals inside the dark.
When I had finally made my way out of the dreamfog of the painkillers, Typho was sitting in a chair near my bed. He had bacta gel smeared over a scabbed dark cut on his face, but otherwise, he had made it out without any serious injuries. He was reading something on the screen of his datapad, and I wondered how long he had been there. My mouth was woolthick and dry, so dry I had to struggle to swallow. I pushed myself up against the bedstand, careful not to move my wooden-stiff doll leg, and Typho looked up. He went to a table in the blurred light across the room, and returned with a glass of water.
It had a miniature starflower floating inside it, and tasted faintly of limon. One of the helper-droids I had seen through my daze must have brought it in. I drank most of it in shaking gulps. I had drink nearly all of it, in large shaking gulps, before my mouth was wet again.
My voice was burnt-dry when I set the glass down on the nightstand table, and: "I'm sorry, Captain Typho. I failed the Senator—and I failed you."
"There's no need to apologize." He leaned towards me in his chair. "Cordé, you played the part we gave you. You did your duty. No one, and I mean no one, should be able to fault you for that. None of us could have known how things would go."
He must have pressed a button, because a helper-droid came floating with another glass of water. It set it down with a chrono tick on the bedside table. Its face glowed at me, and I realized that I could not remember seeing one of the medics, an actual human, that close. Of course, I hadn't. They knew (or believed a whispered rumor that may as well have been the truth) who I was.
After the droid left, I tried to jerk my mouth up into a smile. "I wish I could believe you."
"My uncle told me something once," he said. "I had just accepted my post on the Senator's staff, and I had asked him for his advice. He said that in the end, our job, the job all guards take on, is to keep them alive—for as long as we can. Senator Amidala made some dangerous choices. But we did our part. We kept her alive as long as we could."
I thought back on what he had said, his words echoing inside my mind, once again as we met with the passenger ship on the landing pad near the embassy. Dormé stood off by herself, hidden away inside her bruised-purple cloak. The others, including Typho, stayed away from her. Her face had a moonlight gleam in the shadows of the hood, and she stared directly ahead, towards the workers preparing the ship for take-off, but I don't know what she saw. I only knew that I didn't want to.
I hadn't been able—at the very end, in that one flashed second of time I might have had—to save Milady. And it wasn't (of course, it wasn't) my responsibility, my duty, to save Dormé. If she had written that letter (and soon, it would only be a scar in my memory, and my history, that I had learned not to understand) she had meant it for herself. She wouldn't want any help, or any attempted kindnesses, from me.
The workers smacked the cargo doors into place, and the forewoman nodded over to Typho. Several of the guards—young men I knew by sight, but had never spoken with—boarded first, and then Dormé walked towards the ship. Her cloak floated up in a whisper-thin breeze, and I saw her skirts, the color of the night sky when it falls down over the mountains behind my mother's house. It remains dark even after the first white lights of the stars blink on.
Then she was stepping past Typho, and his hovering hand, up onto the boarding steps. I waited until she was inside the ship, through a long sky-swollen moment, before I went ahead to meet it. The landing platform shivered underneath my feet, but it was only the wind. It would move on.
Golden lads and girls all must,
As chimney-sweepers, come to dust;
All lovers young, all lovers must
Consign to thee, and come to dust.
-William Shakespeare, Cymbeline Act IV, Scene II