Chapter III: A Child Is Given
Talmar returned to the palace of the Hutt and found everything changed. No longer was he a slave. The people looked at him with respect to his face, and with fear after he had passed by. No one seemed to know that he was only Talmar, the assistant beast-keeper of the Hutt's monsters. They treated him as though he was someone of great position, and he had anything that he desired.
Finally he came before the Hutt himself. The memory of pain sang in his blood, and the Hutt cowered before his anger. He was surprised, at first, because the Hutt was the greatest power on Tatooine. But he remembered the promise of the Lady of the Desert.
She had promised him power. He knew now that she had kept her promise.
The Hutt blubbered before him, and Talmar reveled in the pleas of his former master. He remembered the way his sister had stood frightened but unyielding in the face of her own fate, and he looked again at the Hutt, her murderer, with cold distain.
He considered feeding the Hutt to his own beasts, but decided against it. That was the death his sister had died, and by so doing she had hallowed it. So instead, he had the Hutt taken deep into the desert, and left as an offering to the Lady.
Let him be the first.
When the Hutt was gone, Talmar began his reign. But he was no less cruel than his former master had been, for none but his sister had ever shown him kindness, and he was determined to offer kindness to none. He ruled the people with an iron fist, and he punished terribly all who had ever treated him harshly. And no one could stand against him, for the Lady made him strong, and none could defy her.
But one day, after many years had passed, a young girl was brought before him. She was only seven years old, dressed in tattered rags, and she carried with her a flute of simple make.
Bowing before him, the child asked if she might play for him. He very nearly refused her, but something that he could not name stopped him. It had been years since Talmar had heard music of any kind, but he remembered that, in a far distant world long since lost to him, his sister had always loved music.
So Talmar ordered the girl to play.
The song was simple and poignant, an old desert song. Its wordless melody spoke of love and loss and the long, heart-breaking days of solitude that follow. Yet for all that, it was beautiful. It reminded him of the songs his sister used to sing, songs which she said their mother had sung, in the days before his birth.
He had not thought of her in years.
So when the tune was finished, and the little girl bowed again before him, he asked her name.
The night grew still, the last echoes of his grandfather's words fluttering away like dead leaves on a non-existent breeze. Faint strains of garish music drifted past his bedroom window like wraiths, and for the second time that night, he shivered in the sudden chill, though not this time from fear. He felt as though he were on the cusp of a revelation, one that would make clear all that he had ever wondered about. And he found, now that he stood so close to that long-coveted knowledge, that he was almost afraid to reach out and take it.
He wondered if it would shatter when he tried.
Beside him, his grandfather sat ten million parsecs away, his eyes gazing into a past that perhaps never was, his hands unconsciously clenching into fists and unclenching again.
It was not the darkness that troubled his grandfather this time, he sensed, but rather the weight of shattered possibility. He felt as though they sat together in his room surrounded by an infinite number of potential worlds, each one now no more than a might-have-been.
The thickness of unrealized possibilities was suffocating.
He reached over and took his grandfather's hand in his own, and asked the question that burned in the air between them like a brand, encompassing all other questions. He felt, somehow, that if he could only know the answer to this one question, he would understand.
"What was the girl's name, Granddad?"
And his grandfather looked at him with haunted eyes, and whispered, "Her name was Leia."
And he understood.
