Welcome to chapter 20! I usually find that my experience of a book or a TV series is influenced by knowing how far along I am in it, so I just thought I'd let you know what to expect from this story. What you've been reading is Part I of a two-part story. Part I will be wrapping up in chapter 24, after which I plan to take an extended break from posting while I work on Part II.
My apologies for the long intervals between posting chapters. Farm work is really busy right now, so it will probably continue to be 3-4 weeks between chapters. Thanks for reading!
The Way of a Siluan, Chapter 20: Departure
BBY 14, year five of Imperial rule
"Eo, Eo!" Varda called from the door of the hut. She shaded her eyes with one hand and looked out over the tangle of the garden in the mid-morning sun. Where is she? "Eo!"
"I'm here!" Eo's voice came from the far side of the garden.
Varda hobbled out of the hut and along the narrow path through the tangled garden. Her hip had been sore for no apparent reason for weeks, and she hoped Eo would be the one to walk down to the lake to get some watercress to go with lunch. It was late summer, and with the warm, dry weather the garden bore only fruiting crops; no greens except what they could glean by the lakeside.
As Varda headed in the direction of Eo's voice, it struck her as odd: with her return to Jedi practice, she ought, at this distance, to be able to sense some kind of Force-signature to tell her where Eo was, but she couldn't. "Eo?" she called again.
"I'm here!" Eo said, and suddenly Varda found Eo standing beside her, brushing her hair out of her face with dirty fingers.
Varda looked at her blankly for a moment. "I couldn't find you," she said. It wasn't an accusation, just confusion. She could sense Eo's Force-signature well enough now that she was looking at her.
Eo tilted her head to one side, confused. "But I was just here," she said. "I wanted to take care of the maramelo that I planted last week." Eo gestured to the patch of garden where she'd been working.
Varda followed Eo's gesture to the three-metre-long trellis, carefully constructed from long straight branches freshly cut, on which Eo had been training a row of velvety green maramelo vines.
"These ones are doing well," Varda said. They were rather lush and vigorous for only a week old.
Eo nodded. "I was thinking about what you said in the winter, about how the mycorrhizae feed the forest. So I gave the maramelo some mycelia I found in the soil where the vines grow around the wreck of Ava Yen's starship."
Varda bent down and touched the fuzzy young plants and touched the soil. There was indeed in the Force-signature of both the plant and soil-borne fungus something highly synchronized, each calling and answering to the other perfectly.
"But how did you know to choose that fungus as a mycorrhizal partner for them?" It certainly wasn't the same species Varda and Eo had looked at together back in the winter.
Eo shrugged and looked down at her toes. "I just thought it would be worth trying."
Varda looked at the plants carefully. Her Force-sense told her that in the exchange between plant and fungus there was something too well harmonized, too resonant for a mere guess to be a likely explanation for this symbiosis of a native fungus and a plant that Varda had brought with her from another planet.
"But how did you know?" Varda pressed her. "Please just say what you think," she added when Eo hesitated to answer. "It doesn't have to be right or wrong."
Eo bent down and continued to twine the little vines around the slender stakes of the trellis. "They sang the same song," she said at last, "or at least, the songs they sang fit together."
Eo wasn't looking at her, so Varda did not restrain herself from showing an expression of utter astonishment. She had never thought of Eo as being particularly adept at using the Force; she was certainly all but useless at telekinesis. But what Eo had just expressed – albeit in rather unconventional terms – showed an awareness of the Force that not all Jedi experience in plants and fungi. Could it be? Varda wondered. Lu Mang said some of the AgriCorps Jedi are like that, late-bloomers, but skilled in ways that we don't expect.
But Varda was not about to spoil her apprentice with praise. "This is good," she said, almost sternly. "You are learning to pay attention."
Eo nodded, absorbed in her work.
Varda sensed a quiet focus in Eo's Force-signature, and deep happiness. She still wanted that watercress for lunch, but hated now to take Eo from her work. It won't hurt an old lady to take a walk to the lake, she thought. It might even do me good.
"Anyways," Varda said brusquely, "I'm going to the lake for some watercress. We'll have lunch when I get back."
"Don't you want me to go get it?" Eo asked, looking up from her work.
"No, no, please stay here," Varda said, already hobbling off toward the path through the forest.
Eo watched her walk away stump-step, stump-step, favouring one leg, and couldn't help but worry about her. Varda still insisted that she would stay behind alone on Hokto when the gap in the debris field opened and it came time for Eo to leave for the AgriCorps station on Deema.
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The bad leg had developed gradually over the last couple lunar cycles. It certainly made the short walk to the lake somewhat cumbersome, but Varda felt good to be in the forest. Hearing the dry rustle of the breeze in the late-summer leaves, she looked up into the dappled green of the forest canopy. How much solar energy does the forest capture in a day? Varda wondered. There is power here, quiet power. Perhaps Eo is like that: not a Jedi Knight but powerful in her own quiet way. She took a deep breath of the resinous forest air. She could see the lake now, glinting through the trees.
Though it was shady in the forest, the air beneath the trees held a gentle warmth. Yet as Varda neared the lake she found herself shivering, then looking down through the trees, she froze: two men stood beside the lake, one older, one younger, and an amphibious starship perched on the shore. The younger man, the shorter of the two, was in civilian clothes, but the older man wore a dark blue uniform bearing a crest she didn't recognize: a white wheel with six rectangular gear-teeth, inside a black wheel with shallower gear-teeth of the same number, connected by straight dark lines to the inner rim of a dark circle. Seeing the two men, Varda stopped and made herself perfectly still, like a rabbit in hiding, and with hearing beyond hearing, she listened.
"Have you found anything?" the older man asked.
"No, it's the blasted tree-frogs! The way they use the Force masks the energy field of other beings."
The older man burst out laughing. "Force-sensitive tree frogs? What kind of weed have you guys been smoking there at IMAg?"
The younger man scowled. "Well, has the scanner picked up anything?" he snapped.
"Tree-frogs," the older man said sheepishly. "I can scan again if you want."
Varda looked cautiously back toward the garden. She could just barely see Eo there, singing quietly to the plants as she worked. Those men must not under any circumstances, Varda felt, be allowed to find Eo.
Varda drew her light-sabre but didn't ignite it. She studied its smooth, gleaming hilt for a moment, feeling its weight in her hand. How many of them were there? Even if only those two, even if she could take them both down...to strike first is not the way of the Jedi, she thought. And what if she failed, only alerting them to her presence? Looking back again at Eo, she put the un-ignited light-sabre away in the folds of her sari. Instead, taking a deep breath, Varda drew herself up to full height and began a gentle outward motion with her hands.
"You don't need to scan again," she said softly.
"You don't need to scan again," the younger man said.
"Just get out of here."
"Let's just get out of here."
The older man raised an eyebrow. "Don't you want to spray first?"
"Never mind about that. You have better things to do."
"Never mind about that. I've got better things to do."
The older man shook his head. "It's your head not mine if the Witch doesn't like it."
"Never mind her!"
The younger man threw his hands up in the air. "Oh, screw Kyver for once. I've had it with this damn crusade of hers. We're never going to track down that One she's so bent on finding anyways."
"Well, Mr. Xeres, you're the boss. Like I said, it's your head not mine."
"You're leaving now."
"Anyways, we're leaving now, so get your crew back to the ship."
"Yes, sir!" the older man said, half sarcastic.
The younger man boarded the starship. The older man pulled out his comm-link. "404, this is 712. Departure in five...yes, you heard that right. Boss' orders. Get your butts back to the ship before it leaves!"
Varda watched quietly as the scanning crew returned and boarded the starship. She watched with Jedi dispassion as it lifted off and disappeared into the blue sky. It was too bright a day to see the flash that signalled its leap to hyperspace, but she waited until both sight and Force-sense of it were gone, then all but ran as fast as she could with her bad leg, not back to the garden but to her own starship, her mind exploding in a thousand directions.
At the starship, Varda turned on the main computer, and while it took its time booting up, she paced back and forth, knocking her fists against her skull. "I should have checked, I should have checked!" she said over and over until the monitor was finally ready to display. She quickly pulled up the images she had programmed the telescope to collect. Flipping through them chronologically, she bit her lip: not only was the gap in the debris field open, it was well past its peak opening. It would be open, she predicted, to a good pilot for another week, and to a hotshot pilot for another month, but for a ship flown solely by Ava Yen's primitive little nav-droid, it was open today and today only.
Cursing herself, Varda paced up and down again. How did this happen? Why didn't I check? She went back in her memories; the last time she'd checked was the day Eo brought the droid from Ava Yen's starship. Varda had checked the droid over, found no problems, and had none of the trouble Eo claimed to have had getting the droid to connect to her ship's computer. Satisfied with the nav-droid, she had programmed the telescope to collect images of the debris field each night so that she could check that her three-lunar-cycle prediction was on track. Only now the debris field was open in not three, but two lunar cycles, about twenty days earlier than she'd predicted.
Why didn't I check? She demanded of herself again. Since that day of setting up the droid, and her decision to return to Jedi practice, the days had slipped by in the timeless warmth of summer. Daily meditation, solitary light-sabre practice each dawn, reading from The Way of a Siluan with Eo each night, Varda had felt too well, too grounded, too...too happy to think about the debris field opening and the inevitable loss of Eo that it would mean. That was the problem, I was too happy! Varda thought and cursed herself again. But there was nothing for it. Either Eo had to leave today, or she had to wait three to five years before the debris field might open again. With that thought Varda shook herself and hurried out of the starship, not bothering to turn the computer off to save precious battery power. Eo would be leaving within the hour anyways.
Varda cursed her slowness and her sore leg as she stumbled back along the forest path, never minding the soft voice of the green leaves now. But when she came to the place in the path where she had seen the men by the shore, a barrage of thoughts stopped her in her tracks: Who were those men? And what was that crest on the older man's uniform? Who is "the Witch"? Are they really gone? What if it isn't safe for Eo to leave?
These thoughts were more unsettling than the knowledge that she'd nearly missed the opening of the debris field altogether. The debris field had kept the outside world out as much as it had kept Eo from leaving the planet, yet today someone had purposely, intentionally come there looking for something, or someone. There was no reason Varda could see for the men's search to have anything to do with her or with Eo, but it troubled Varda that the younger man had brought with him a feel of the Dark Side of the Force; Varda had sensed it even before she saw him. That struck her as odd now: she hadn't been able to sense Eo through the Force before seeing her in the garden, yet she had sensed at least a shiver of the Dark Side from the unexpected visitor before she saw him.
Varda stopped in a clearing to get a view of the sky, hoping to sense something of the galaxy through it. What was happening out there now? she wondered. The war must be over by now, she thought, or was it? That crest the older man bore was neither that of the Separatists nor of the Republic. Was it some corporation, or? And who was "the Witch," the one the younger man called Kyver? Some Darksider, it would seem, but of how much power? These questions raced through Varda's mind, yet as much as she searched the sky, she could get no sense of what danger did or didn't lie beyond the planet's atmosphere. It was as if not only the debris field but some invisible Force-wall hemmed them in, blocking the galaxy from view.
Is it safe for Eo to leave here? Varda forced herself to breathe slowly and deeply, to centre herself, to regain some measure of Jedi dispassion. She searched within herself now also, and still she could find no answer to that question, only a deepening conviction that Eo must leave and must leave now, or some vital thing would not be.
But is it safe? Varda shook her head at herself. She wanted to trust that Force-sense that said that Eo must go and must go now, but she needed something more, and turned to logic to find it. Through hard logic, the choice was a simple binary: either Eo would leave now, doing her best to avoid danger, or she would wait perhaps another five years, when the danger might be less, but also might be greater.
Varda hardened her mind, forcing her thoughts along straight paths of logic. What actual danger was there in leaving now? The danger that the starship would be spotted and targeted, either by those men if they hadn't yet left the Hokto system, or by other hostiles while transitioning in and out of hyperspace along the multi-legged path to Deema. How likely is it for the starship to attract notice? Varda asked herself. The ship's cloaking device would screen it from radar, if not from biological vision, and it was a standard passenger model, unlikely to be identified as a Jedi target by the Separatists. The route she had chosen – she reviewed it quickly in her mind – used only remote and little-travelled locations for hyperspace transitions so that Eo's journey would go unnoticed. And while Eo was in hyperspace, Varda reassured herself, no one could track her, and once on Deema the Jedi there would care for her. With the matter mostly settled in her mind, Varda pressed on again to find Eo.
As Varda came to the edge of the garden, the pain in her leg forced her to stop, bent over and gasping for breath. When she looked up, she saw Eo, now harvesting starpeas into a basket slung over her shoulder, and making room for new growth by snapping off the old branches of the starpea bushes with quick, deft movements of her hands. When Eo first came to Hokto five years ago she was very much a girl, but now Varda saw a young woman, stunted by the spartan diet of subsistence life yet beginning to show a woman's curves in her skinny frame.
A weight of sadness settled over Varda. What would life be on Hokto without Eo? When Varda came to the planet she felt too dead to the Force to care if life was mere existence, but now it was hard to bear the thought of losing the person who shared her morning and evening meals, who joined her in her garden work and daily meditation, who had shown her the way back to her path as a Jedi. I don't want her to go...Varda thought with a sudden ache. Yet there was so much that Varda knew she couldn't teach Eo: about using the Force to work with plants and fungi, and about the full practice of Siluan life. To hold back a young woman who was beginning to show so much promise would be like trying to catch a dragonfly and only succeeding to crush it. It's not for her to be stuck here with an old hermit like me, Varda told herself. Attachment is not the way of the Jedi. With that thought, Varda hobbled into the garden to stand beside Eo.
Eo looked up from her work as Varda came and stood beside her. "What's wrong?" she asked, seeing the look on Varda's face.
"The gap in the debris field is open," Varda said quietly.
Eo looked at Varda wide-eyed for a moment. "But it's only been two lunar cycles..."
"I know," Varda said, "I thought it would be three, but I checked the telescope images and the gap is already on the far side of open. You'll have to leave now to get through safely. But there was one other thing: with the gap open, a starship came here. There was a man with a crew of some kind. They're gone now, but the man in charge had something of the Dark Side about him. I've tried and tried to understand, but I can't seem to see anything through the Force of what's happening beyond our atmosphere." Varda sighed. At least she could offer Eo a choice. "If you feel unsafe to leave, I won't force you to go."
Looking troubled, Eo took a deep breath and looked at the ground for a moment, weighing this information. "What do you think, is it too dangerous?" she asked, looking up at Varda again.
Varda shook her head. "I can't say for sure. I think that if you use the cloaking device until you make your first leap to hyperspace, it's no more dangerous now than it will be at any other time. If you don't go now, it might be three or even five years before you have another chance."
Eo nodded slowly. It was sad for her to leave Hokto and the forest and the garden she'd come to know there, but her mind was set on completing her training as a Siluan, which meant going elsewhere. As for the danger, she had made peace with the fact that the journey to Deema would necessarily involve some risk, whether of running into Separatists or pirates or some other sort of crime syndicate, but she was satisfied that Varda had chosen a safe route for her, and she knew how to use the ship's cloaking device and how to re-route the starship if she needed to. She had also resigned herself to a few years with the Jedi AgriCorps before she could ask to enrol as a novice at the Paloma Monastery, and even looked forward now to meeting the Jedi master Lu Mang who served there. What she had not made her peace with was seeing Varda standing there with one hip higher than the other as she kept the weight off her bad leg, yet knowing that Varda planned to stay behind on Hokto alone.
"I can go," Eo said, "but it's not good for you to stay here by yourself. So if you won't leave, then I should stay with you." They'd had this conversation before. The way Eo said it this time, it was almost an ultimatum.
Seeing the look on Eo's face Varda felt a stab of regret at her decision but didn't change her mind. "If my training has meant anything to you, please go," she said. "You will never become the Siluan you are called to be if you stay here with me."
Eo scraped a tear from her eye with the back of a dirty hand. "Then come with me."
Varda shook her head. "This is my path, to be a Jedi hermit. Not all things are accomplished by doing, some things by simply being. You must remember that in your life as a Siluan."
Later, when Varda had pause to consider what might have been, or what might not have been, if she had gone with Eo that day, it was clear to her that the only reason she had for staying behind was her reluctance to face her fellow Jedi – and worse, the Jedi Council – after her desertion from the Clone Wars. But for the moment, she was able to believe that her motives were noble.
Eo bit her lip and nodded, feeling numb and surreal.
"You've done enough work in the garden that I'll have what I need until winter. After that somehow I can manage. I don't need very much at my age. But get your things. If you're going you need to go now. And take a jar with some of the stew in the pot to eat along the way."
Eo hurried to the hut and came back with the jar and one other thing: the beige cloth bag from Ava Yen's starship, carrying the digital file reader with the Siluan texts she had Varda had been reading.
Together they walked slowly to Varda's starship. "When you get to Deema," Varda said as they walked through the forest, "don't talk to just anyone about your plan to be a Siluan. Not everyone will understand. But you can trust Lu Mang, Master Lu the younger Jedi call him. And his apprentice Devin is a good man. Tell them everything, and they can help you. I know you don't want to spend time in the AgriCorps, but the time you spend there is more precious than you think. Make sure to learn everything you can, and it will help you later. And if you run into some danger or trouble along the way, protect yourself however you can, but remember your calling: don't give way to anger or hate even in the face of evil. That is the way of a Jedi, and of a Siluan. That is what..." Varda trailed off. All this was to make the most of her final minutes with Eo, but she wished that lecturing wasn't how she would spend that time.
"I understand, Varda," Eo said. "I'll make sure, I'll do my best."
They continued to walk in comfortable silence until they reached the starship. It sat there in the clearing, sleek red and silver under its coat of sun-dried moss and lichen. The air was fragrant with the blue sabre-flowers Eo had planted around it.
The two stood looking at each other sadly for a moment. Suddenly Eo threw her arms around Varda. "I love you, Varda," she said. Surprised and touched and rather stiff, Varda somehow succeeded to hug Eo back.
"You are the daughter I could never have," she said. "May the Force be with you."
Eo boarded the ship, and Varda watched while it lifted off and sped out beyond her view. When night fell and stars shone in the dark void, the tree-frogs found Varda still standing there, looking out into the black sky.