A/N: Some questions get answered again. And Qui-Gon gets some face-time. Any drum references have their origins in Doctor Who. As always please read and review!


Chapter 11: All these Blasphemies to be True

Already the knowing animals are aware

that we are not really at home

In our interpreted world.

-Rilke, First Elegy

Nearly everyone retired early, but Sabé could not sleep again. Every time she drifted off she woke to a sound like the distant drumbeat, but when she bent her ear to its source, nothing came, only the sizzling crackle of fires, the mute winking of stars. The third time she woke it was with a pounding heart, as if she had been called. Wakefulness seized her. She had not rested since the morning of that day long ago when she had gone shooting with Dengar Duel, when for some hours she had been holed up in Dexter's Diner, fixing broken eggbeaters, speaking with Obi-Wan.

Sabé went to sit by the fire, banked but still burning high. Every whisper of wind overturned a sparking ember. The dark, which took from things their shape and solidity, took from Sabé her intense embarrassment. For it was as if she could not, did not, have control over what she said into Obi-Wan's waiting silences, and instead of conversation she had surfaced with words and feelings that she had hardly dared acknowledge to herself. But there it was; no mind tricks, no prompting, only that brilliant edge of him, his balance giving her back that center from which truth emerges.

So she would wait a few days, but Sabé knew in her heart the letter she must send back to the abbey, back to the papery hands of Sister Mabela. Sabé did not know where she would go, after the Captain had no more use of her, but she suspected that something would turn up. She was no longer without friends in the Galaxy.

The figure had been sitting so still on the opposite side of the fire, it was only when he opened his eyes that Sabé saw Qui-Gon Jinn there, in meditation pose at the edge of the flames.

"You should sleep," he said to her.

"Ghosts do not sleep, Master Jinn," Sabé replied. The night was turning chill and she gathered the blankets more tightly around her.

"Do ghosts have names," he said, "as Jedi do?"

"I am Sabé."

"Ah," Jinn said. He unfolded his limbs from his meditation pose, and rubbed absently on his right knee. "What disturbs your sleep, Handmaiden Sabé?"

"I don't know, Master Jinn," she said, "I thought heard something."

A groan from somewhere near Jinn made him look down at the figure, wrapped in blankets, huddled in on itself. It was shivering violently,

"Is that –"

"Obi-Wan?" Jinn said, "Yes. He's having a nightmare, as some might call it."

"What do you mean? It's not a nightmare?" Sabé whispered, watching the huddled shape flinch, gasping as if in pain. She wanted to reach out, shake him awake, and speak to him until the fit passed. But Qui-Gon Jinn did not move.

"The force speaks to Obi-Wan most directly when he cannot hope to close his ears," Jinn said, "In waking he seeks control, restraint, and self-mastery. Even in meditation there is still a sliver of that desire to control left in him, and so the force speaks but quietly, like a shy creature that waits at the edge of the clearing, just shy of the light. It waits until he is asleep, and then it roars in his ears like sand storm off of Tatooine. Only when he is defenseless does it show him the hidden tremors of futures that could be. So yes, it is a nightmare. One he has to bear before we do, and, if we are fortunate, one that he has to bear only in his dreams and not in waking."

"He must have woken me," Sabé said.

At this, Qui-Gon smiled.

"No," he said, "no, handmaiden Sabé. I heard what it was you heard, and it is what you heard in your mind that woke you."

"What do you mean, Master Jinn? You speak riddles."

"The beating drum," he said, "you can hear it, can't you? At the edges of of your mind, pulling, tugging. Still your mind. Let it dissolve into the air. Can you hear it?"

Sabé closed her eyes, and there it was.

"Yes," she said, "it is the red lightsaber."

"It's a disturbance in the force," said Jinn.

"The man you were fighting in the desert."

"Oh, I don't know how much man there is left in him," Jinn said, "say Sith lord, rather. The first two times you woke I sensed him as well, at the periphery, faint but unmistakable like the tang of burnt things in the air. What woke you finally was I, calling to you through the force."

"That's impossible," Sabé said, "I've already told Obi-Wan. I am no force-sensitive."

"Oh, I think you have been a decoy long enough, little ghost," he said, "there is no shame in it; there's no need to deny it."

"Master Qui-Gon," said Sabé, exasperated, "Naboo is a core planet. I was tested when I was born."

"Ah yes, and there is the mystery," Jinn said, "can you imagine with me? You will have to bear with an old man's fancy, I'm afraid. Is it not possible that the girl who survived a virus that took her whole village, might not have something special about her, something other than pure luck?"

He turned again to stare into the fire.

"At the Jedi Temple, on the core planet of Coruscant, the center of every cilivilization, we have the best medicine in the world. I might come in at the edge of death and be healed. But we have almost nothing of the sort of medicine that treats the chronic diseases that afflict the affluent and poor alike, in their old age.

"We Jedi do not live long because we die in battle, because our enemies overpower us. Yet if we were to live, with all these midichlorians weaving that rhythm of life inside us, we would age and age and age, but in our souls, and not in our faces, not unless there is great sorrow. If we were good enough, we might live on and on, come even to look like Master Yoda, and one day fade like dust into the sunbeam.

"This is because the midichlorians repair us, restore us as no medicine can, as only the giver of life itself can. So imagine our young girl, there on the verge of death with the virus raging through her body, the virus the claims your life, your memories; the virus that gets inside your brain.

"Then, by some unknown mechanism, a force rises in her. What healthy cells are left in her body begin to create, by the millions, these mysterious midichlorians, and they emerge, colonizing the infected tissue, remaking her mind essentially, rebuilding it with the very organisms that sustain our lives.

"And so she emerges unscathed from the unthinkable illness with ears that hear the secret dreams of machines, with a voice that, used in earnest, may convince the doubtful, with a face that not only lookslike the face of another but becomesthe other's face. And with no memories, for what was restored to her was a mind in its infancy, unused because it was brand new. And she still walks above the yawning dark, thinking herself perfectly ordinary.

"Not a force-sensitive," Jinn said, and chuckled, "they never thought to test you again, you and all those other children who lived. I would wager that all of you have some form of force-sensitivity."

"Oh," said Sabé.

"Yes, little ghost, you were brought back to us, by the force."

Besides Jinn, Obi-Wan gave another groan, still wrestling with the monster of his dreams.

"He is dear to you," Jinn said. It was not a question. But Sabé did not hear anger in it either.

"Yes, he is."

"Another thing we have in common, little ghost," he said, but his eyes were heavy, far away, "I can see your bond, growing by the day. I can sense it, in the force. Perhaps that is why you are here, because he needs you."

"Master Jinn? I don't understand."

"I am talking like an adherent of the unifying force, am I not?" he said, " let us leave the business of portents to Obi-Wan, then. I will only tell you that sometimes, to do what is right Obi-Wan will smother his own heart. It is what will make him great. Yet, one cannot live without his heart."

"Why are you telling me this, Master Jinn?"

"Just listen," he said, "listen to an old man. Obi-Wan will need you one day, to do what he needs to do, to live. A man will need his heart. But you will have to be patient."

Besides Jinn, Obi-Wan tossed as a man in fever, unable to emerge from the nightmare.

"Should we wake him, do you think?" said Sabé.

Jinn began a sentence, but thought better of it. Instead he stretched out a hand and beckoned her over to him.

"Indeed, we should," he said.

Sabé rose, unsure of her legs, feeling the night stir like a cool beast of the air. She stepped softly to where Obi-Wan lay , no longer aware that Qui-Gon looked a them both with a terrible gravity. She saw instead how the now-familiar notch had carved itself onto Obi-Wan's face, as if even in sleep some nagging thought bothered him. She saw the perspiration on his forehead, and in the hollows of his throat, glinting in the fire light.

And though she felt hesitant, unsure, bewildered even, Sabé laid her hand on Obi-Wan's shoulder, tensed and raised in sleep. Obi-Wan did not wake, only mumbled something in that hoarse, guttural voice of dreams and curled in upon himself. Nonetheless, Sabé moved her hand across his back in a gesture of reassurance.

It was as if she saw her hand from far away, and there was a feeling in her that this gesture was written into her very bones, that this was not novelty but rather a rite, something repeated over millennia, so deep it had sunk into the bones of her ancestors, and though they be dust their ghosts and the ghost of their hands moved with hers in an age-old gesture of comfort. It said that one was not alone, not even in the lands of sleep, from which he could see into death's domain.

And as if he had heard her on the other side of the dark door, Obi-Wan quieted. He gave two sighs, like a man whose pain was suddenly removed, and fell into that deathlike stillness of one in bright caverns that lay beyond dreaming.

Sabé stood, and walked around the fire, to sit down next to the Jedi master, who now seemed just as strange and wonderful, just as mysterious as before. But he had lost that terribleness, under the light of her Naboovian moon. She saw that he looked tired, but expectant, still alert, even into the watches of the night.

"I have never been able to take a nightmare from him," Jinn said, "sometimes he would not wake at all, but flail out at me with all the force of his training unleashed. I've had some impressive bruises from those encounters. Other nights he merely opens his eyes as if blind, and when he returns to that world of shadows and sand, he returns with no moment lost into nightmare."

Jinn looked at Sabé, "This is why he did not see that you were, like him, force-sensitive. Your signatures had harmonized, perhaps even from the moment that you first met, and so when he reached out he merely saw echoes of himself, the parts and traits which you had assumed. And over these short days he did not even notice that his own force signature had changed, as if a new wing had unfolded under his old, brilliant tone. And yours, handmaiden, yours has become like the running river that reflects all the dazzling blaze of the firebird soaring above. It was by this intimacy that you reached through his dreams.

"You can see by his eyes that he dreams on. But you took away his fear of it, his resistance to that which must come, which makes him look at me with all the anguish of loss in his unguarded moments. The emotion surprises even he, but that is because his waking mind does not believe what his dreaming eyes has seen. But now he is at peace. You have given him that. For that you have my thanks."

There was an unfamiliar fullness in Sabé's heart.

"But isn't it forbidden, Master Jinn? Even if he did – even if our force signatures were harmonized – isn't it wrong?"

"Perhaps," Jinn said, "the old masters forbade Jedi to have love, to have attachments based on love. They feared the ambition and hatred and dominating will that came with any passion, even this one. But they did not see the bridge under the fire, the bond beneath the passion. Or perhaps they feared that as much as they feared passion itself, feared to be altered, changed in their very essence.

"Know this, little ghost. Obi-Wan was made in the mold of these old masters. Even I gave them my whole-hearted trust, in my youth. But I believe that a man or a woman can only find the exquisite stillness of peace after great passion. I believe that the world wouldn't hold together, were it not for love.

"I believe it should not be in fear that we choose the light, nor should we choose it, in ignorance of the dark. Were we not born bathed already in both rivers of the force?"

Jinn looked back into the fire, "long have I considered these old blasphemies, argued with the old masters that reside in the chambers of my mind. But I do not have to read the book at any gate, or any temple, to know what is written in the book of my heart. And my heart has ever known all these blasphemies to be true."

The night fell quiet around them, punctuated by the rustle of trees and the muffled steps of Gungan soldiers, keeping watch. Sabé gathered her blanket around her again, not for warmth or comfort, but so that she could stand and move closer, and sit by where Jedi master Qui-Gon Jinn sat before the fire.

"May I share this watch of the night with you, Master Jinn?"

"It would be my honor, little ghost," Jinn said, moving over, "and perhaps you will help me answer the question of where I shall dwell, when there is nowhere to remain."

That night Obi-Wan dreamed that he was in fever. But a hand took hold of his, cool but not cold, and passing across his face it eased the fever of the world.