Chapter 2
The training was harsh and gruelling and the Jedi gave him no quarter. She roused him long before dawn and did not let him sleep until the daylight was a distant memory. His life deformed around exercises and study. Long hikes across the stony landscape were followed by long sessions with ancient books retrieved from hidden compartments in the cabin's floor. She imposed order on his mind and showed him how to impose order on his body. He became strong and swift and alert. And he began to comprehend the Force.
She taught him to quiet his mind and to feel beyond the fringes of his own consciousness. He learnt to listen to the world and hear the song of every creature, every plant and every stone, to hear the chime of the stars and the thunder of atomic forces, gravity's waves breaking on a thousand, billion shores and the stirring of grass in the depths of a windless night. It was so vast and so all pervading that at first it overwhelmed him. It awed and terrified him in equal measure. But she guided him through the fear and and showed him to temper his awe with understanding. The Force flowed from life and the cosmos was swept along in its currents, but in the tiniest stone lay the power to divert those currents, to change the direction of that flow. Great events hinged on pebbles and motes of dust. A butterfly held as much power as a supernova.
Everything mattered. And nothing mattered. The paradox at the heart of Jedi teachings.
"Emotion, yet peace," she recited to him as they faced each other, cross-legged atop a hill of bare earth and scrubby grass, "Ignorance, yet knowledge. Passion, yet serenity. Chaos, yet harmony. Death, yet the Force."
"All is equal," he replied, brow furrowed with concentration as his thoughts held a bead of dew in the air between them, "All is . . . unequal. Everything is the same . . . yet different. And everything deserves protecting."
She did not say anything and he half suspected he had said something stupid. But if so, she did not reprove him and the lesson continued until heavy raindrops began to splutter down around them.
A year into the training, she taught him to hunt. She showed him how to trace movements across the skin of the world and follow them to their cause. How to approach prey unseen and how to bring it down.
How to end life cleanly and without malice.
On the farm, death had been something that happened as a necessary part of rearing animals. No one dwelt on it, except when it came before its time. You accepted it, even if you did not like it. He had accepted it.
This was different. Feeling the big land bird's fluttering mind snap out sent a hollow shock through his body, the horrible silence all the worse because he had caused it.
"Life feeds on life," the Jedi murmured, kneeling beside him as he hunched, shaken, over the carcass, "This is a fact. Take no joy in it but do not turn away from it. The death of another may mean your survival or the survival of millions. It may bring peace and an end to suffering. We face this. We recognise it. We accept it."
She helped him – guided him – in gathering up the bird, in skinning it, cleaning it and in taking its meat. There were parts you could not eat, uses to which the offal and bones could be put. Nothing was wasted – nothing must be wasted. Death must have meaning if it came by your hand. He knew that was the real lesson. Not the mechanics of it but the way in which it was done, the understanding of what it meant to kill.
The shadows of blinding rage and of the man whose life he had ended weighed heavy on him that night.