Chapter 3. Changes
At the end of that grueling day Padmé collapsed into the relative safety of her stateroom on the Queen's Yacht. One more minute, one more meeting, one more miserable conversation and she would have exploded.
"Make sure that door is double-locked," she demanded. "Better yet, put a time lock on it. I don't want to come out again until this is all over." Sabé shook her head and made sure the door was secure.
Padmé collapsed onto the nearest chair and buried her face in her hands.
"Miss Padmé, are you all right?" Balé's worried face peered at her from behind a pile of luggage.
"Sabé hurried over and took the child gently by the shoulders. "Miss Padmé is very tired. Let's let her rest a bit."
"No," Padmé said, "It's all right. Come here, sweetheart." She held her arms out for the little girl, who happily ran into them and scrambled into her lap, dislodging a few exquisite pleats and tucks in the process.
Padmé couldn't have cared less about the dress. She wrapped her arms around the child and buried her face in her silky hair. It felt indescribably good to hold her warm little body. To feel gentle fingers stroking her cheek and then playing with the heavy necklace that had been bothering Padmé all day. She drank in the child's innocent love like a plant that had spent a season without water.
Impulsively she reached up and unfastened the annoying jewelry and fastened it around Bale's neck. "There," she said. "Now you're the Senator and I'm the Handmaiden."
The little girl squealed with delight and slid off Padmé's lap to go find a mirror.
Sabé looked at Padmé with that searching look that rarely missed anything.
Padmé looked back. "I wish," she said.
Balé admired herself in the necklace very much. Padmé continued to sag in her chair. Finally Sabé decided to take steps.
She retrieved the necklace.
She sent the little girl to find Dormé and Vespé.
Then she pulled up an elaborately enameled packing case and sat down on it facing her mistress and friend.
"It's getting out of hand, isn't it," she said matter-of-factly.
Padmé felt stinging tears of rage well up. "I have never been outmaneuvered as badly as this. Not even when I was Queen."
Sabé gathered Padmé's hands into her own, trying to pass along some kind of reassurance.
"Surely something can be done."
A couple of tears dropped. "Those arrogant, power-hungry, ignoble, strutting, self-important, arrogant…"
"You said that."
Padmé ignored her. "… narrow-minded, unyielding, spiritually void, culturally retarded, mercenary dandies have succeeded in boxing us into this unbelievable treaty before we could find a way out, and now they're besieging us."
"Well," Sabé said reasonably, "they are a warrior culture. That is why we wanted to ally with them – they can provide protection for us in our Sector that we can't get any other way."
"Warriors? Try imperialists." Padmé pulled her hands away from Sabé's and started to yank pins and fasteners out of her hair. "Imperialist barbarians." Pins and combs dropped onto the floor like rain. Sabé watched her mistress with mild astonishment.
"They know we need them." The ever-practical Sabé had found the hairbrush and offered it before last pin came out.
Padmé kept talking while she savagely brushed her hair. "We can't protect our planet or our ability to trade if this sector becomes embroiled in the War."
"No one can," Sabé reminded her. "That's the terror of war."
"True." The Senator was warming up to her speech while at the same time impatiently tearing off jewelry and dropping it on the floor with the hairpins. It made a fascinating spectacle. "But neither we nor the D'laians are planning to secede from the Republic. Neither are most of the other worlds in our sector." She waved the hairbrush. "If the worlds in our sector can just stay together and remain loyal to the Republic, we might not see the worst of it."
Her hair done, Padmé started viciously unbuttoning her long narrow sleeves, snapping off some of the tiny buttons in the process. Sabé sighed and stood up to help, then turned her mistress around so she could undo the complicated fastenings at the back of her heavy embroidered brocade dress. Padmé was still talking. "But what our dear friends the D'laians are trying to do amounts to annexing Naboo. With me as the hostage."
"Do you have something against your clothes?" Sabé asked, gently putting aside the exquisite garment that Padmé had flung onto the floor with a gesture that looked a lot like hostility.
"Yes." Freed of her heavy outer garments, Padmé had flung open a large trunk and was now rummaging in it wildly.
"What are you looking for?" Sabé gently pushed her mistress aside and lifted up the garments in the trunk one by one. She wished Dormé and Vespé would come soon. She needed to hold her own council of war.
"I want something plain. As plain and simple as you can get. No tucks, no ruffles, no decoration. No jewels." Her voice faded as she went into the fresher.
"How about a sack?" Sabé suggested, looking through the pile of jewel-like colors and complex textures.
"Perfect," said Padmé through the sound of running water.
Sabé sighed again. She seized on a plain pale blue garment and pulled it out of the case. It was filmy and translucent. A nightgown. No, that wouldn't do. She was starting to grumble as she dug to the bottom of the pile.
Her fingers found something smooth and dense. She grabbed and pulled, and came up with a plain white gown. It was almost unornamented, except for a line of artisan-quality embroidery along the neckline and sleeves. She suddenly remembered the garment – it was actually an under-dress for a quite magnificent tabard-and-skirt thing. Oh, well, it would have to do.
"I found something," she called.
Padmé came out of the fresher without makeup of any kind. She had scrubbed her face clean and her hair hung down her back. She looked like a young girl.
Sabé handed her the simple white gown. Padmé frowned at it and picked unhappily at the embroidery. "It will have to do for now." She pulled it over her head. "I need something to wear over it. A cloak, maybe. But it has to be…"
"I know, I know." Sabé went to another large packing case. "It has to be plain." She began rummaging again. "Would you like to tell me what this is all about?"
Padmé found a soft leather belt with only a tiny bit of hand tooling and fastened it around her waist. "I realized something today," she said softly.
Sabé turned around, dragging a dark velvet cloak with her, and stopped short when she saw Padmé standing in the middle of the room. The unornamented gown flowed over her like water. Her face and hair shone in the soft light of the cabin. In her grave simplicity her being seemed many times brighter than all of the gleaming objects that surrounded her in the cases and on the floor.
"You look like a priestess," Sabé breathed.
* * * * *
Padmé's gaze turned inward as she allowed herself to remember the picture she had been carrying in her heart all day – the picture of a young Jedi standing quietly in a crowded room of flashy, heavily ornamented people. Demanding people. People who wanted and expected things from her. People who displayed their self-importance in their clothing and their manners and their words.
"I realized that everything I value – everything I love – everything that is important to me, and to the world, is on the inside." Padmé smiled at Sabé for the first time since she had stormed into the cabin. "To the D'laians, everything is exterior. Everything is show. They wear their wealth and their status in their clothing and their manners, and that is what they value in others." She looked ruefully around the room at her own precious belongings. "I fear they must believe they have found the perfect partners in us."
Sabé was still puzzled. "And so you are trying to make a point? Or to discourage them by being something different?"
Padmé actually laughed. "No. Nothing could discourage those sons of the seventh pit. As far as they are concerned the battle is won and the village is ready to be sacked." She reached for the cloak that still trailed from Sabé's hand. It was heavy velvet, of course – a rich brown, the color of polished wood, with a pale lavender lining – but it was mercifully unornamented. She slipped it on. She looked up to find Sabé staring at her with a look that said she still didn't understand.
"I had the opportunity today to see an aspect of myself reflected in everything I saw around me. An aspect I didn't like." She looked around the room. "We'll have to replace most of these things. My days of dressing like – well, like a D'laian – are over."
Sabé was very confused. "Ours is a culture of artisans, My Lady," she said, somewhat stiffly. "Beauty is everything to us. This isn't bragging –" she looked around at all the lovingly crafted things that lay strewn around the room, " – this is an expression of our art. Of our way of looking at the world."
Padmé stepped over the gleaming bits and pieces on the floor and hugged her friend. "I know," she whispered. "I don't mean to reject or to criticize anything or anyone. But I don't want to wear my world on the outside any more. I want to carry it inside." She stepped back to see Sabé's face. There was still no understanding reflected in it.
"Oh, for heaven's sake," Padmé said heavily. "If I'm going to be a sacrificial offering for my people, at least let me do it on my own terms."
"There must be a way out of all this," Sabé said longingly. "I don't want things to change."
Padmé was silent for a while, lost in her thoughts while she braided her hair into a heavy plait over her shoulder.
"Well," Sabé roused herself back to duty. "I had better take care of the mess you made here."
A tap on the stateroom door made both of them jump.
"Surely not the D'laians." Padmé guessed that they would not announce their presence so gently.
Indeed Sabé opened the door to the welcome sight of her reinforcements. "I think she has finally snapped," she whispered to Dormé. The older woman took in the state of the room and the interesting attire of her mistress without comment. Young Vespé hung back shyly. Balé, on the other hand, danced into the room full of exciting news.
"I found the Jedi again!" She announced with delight. "He's really nice. We played tumble sticks."
"I'll bet he won," smiled Sabé, catching Dormé's eye. They both surreptitiously looked at their mistress, who was watching the child intently while fiddling with her plait.
"Not all the time." Balé leaned against Padmé's knee. "Did you know that he's an orphan, too?"
Padmé cleared her throat. "Yes," she said. "Yes, I did know that."
"He said I'm lucky to have you look to after me." She looked up at Padmé. "I think so, too." Padmé smiled and stroked the child's hair, reminding herself firmly that it did not do for a Senator of the Republic to be hopelessly jealous of a seven-year-old child. "What else did he say?" Every nerve in her body felt alive.
"He couldn't talk to me any more because the shiny man started talking to him."
"The shiny man?"
"You know, the really tall one. In the shiny clothes. Miss Padmé, why don't some people like Jedi?"
"I don't know, sweetheart." She looked meaningfully at Sabé, who had watched the exchange with deep interest. "But I would be very interested in finding out." She stood up and took the child's hand. "Let's let Vespé take you to the dining salon for some supper before bed."
Both girls went willingly enough. Vespé was the youngest and shyest of the Handmaidens, and had not been with Padmé as long as the other two. She was not yet a confidante.
As soon as they left Padmé turned to her co-conspirators.
Sabé was grinning from ear to ear.
Dormé was methodically folding clothes and putting them away. "Why do I get the feeling," she said into a wardrobe, "That there is going to be trouble again?"
"As far as I'm concerned," Padmé said with asperity, "today's events have brought more trouble that I have ever imagined. It cannot possible get worse than this."
"You'd be surprised," said Dormé darkly while dropping a handful of jewelry into an ornate box.
"Tell, tell," said Sabé, perching on the arm of the nearest chair. She accepted that wardrobe duty was part of her job, but everyone knew that her favorite thing in the world was palace intrigue. She was the best spy and covert operative that Padmé had ever seen. It was probably because she loved her work.
Dormé turned around and folded her arms, enjoying her rapt audience.
"Apparently our D'laian friends do not think much of the Jedi in general. The word "sorcerer" came up in several conversations. They were asking why we saw fit to have a Jedi presence on board.
Padmé became thoughtful. In her experience the multicultural Jedi Order was widely respected, although there was some grumbling about undue influence and high-handed methods. She tried to think of delegations that had spoken against them in the Senate, and remembered a few. But the D'laians had not been among them.
"Then," Dormé went on, "it came up that this particular Jedi is known to you and is here by special request."
"Go on," Padmé urged. She was beginning to get the picture. The D'laians really were worried about a Jedi presence on the ship.
"Our resplendent friend, Wolan" – Dormé rolled the name around in her mouth as though she had found a bitter pip – "heard about the connection between you and the hated Jedi, and puffed up like a sinda-bird in mating season."
Sabé giggled. The image fit, down to the strut.
Padmé was thinking furiously. "If the D'laians are that nervous about a Jedi presence they might be planning something." She looked grim. "Some kind of treachery." She looked up. "Sabé, I need you to warn Captain Typho. I don't want to be seen speaking to him myself."
"I'm on it." Sabé slid off the chair. "I'll find out what's going on."
"Wait." Padmé took a deep breath. "I also need to see Anakin. Alone. In private. And without the D'laians knowing anything about it. Do you think you can manage that?"
"For how long?" Sabé asked sweetly.
Padmé looked her right in the eye. "All night."
There was a long, long pause. Sabé finally broke the silence. "I knew it!" she said with the deepest satisfaction. " I knew it! Give me a couple of hours. I may have to set up a scenario, especially now that they're paying attention to his presence on the ship."
Dormé cleared her throat for attention and asked gravely, "Will My Lady be dining with her D'laian guests this evening?"
"Absolutely not," said Padmé with some horror. "No. I have retired for the night and will have supper in my stateroom."
"I thought so," said Dormé. "It's all arranged."
"Thank you," breathed Padmé, with the sincerest feelings of gratitude.
Then she turned to Sabé. "What are you waiting for? Go!"
With an exaggerated bow, Sabé turned and skipped out of the room.
Dormé in the meantime had succeeded in putting the room entirely to rights. "I'll put Balé to bed," she said. "Will you need anything else before I go?"
"No, thank you." Padmé smiled. Dormé didn't return the smile. She stared at her mistress speculatively, pointedly taking in her costume. "Do you," she said, slowly, emphasizing each word, "have the slightest idea what you are doing?"
Padmé raised her chin a little. "Taking risks. It is not the first time."
Dormé could not be deterred. "Do you honestly think this is the time to be playing games?"
"I am not playing at anything, Dormé, believe me. No matter how frivolous Sabé makes me sound. I am completely serious."
Dormé shook her head in disapproval. "May the Gods preserve us all," she muttered, and left the room without a backward glance.
After Dormé left Padmé wandered over to the computer console and half-heartedly began to search for yet more information about the D'laians. Perhaps she could find something she had not seen before – anything that would help her keep out of their clutches while still safeguarding Naboo's future. It seemed an impossible task.
Another part of her mind drifted down a different path. She tried to remember the last time she had taken as many risks in a single day. She thought of a few occasions. Somehow, Anakin had been present at each one of them.