"We thought you would not come. Your friend is in great danger."
"What friend?" Fortuna asked. He had no friends.
"Nat Secura. Jabba is about to feed him to the ranCOr."
Fortuna whirled from the room and rushed back down the passageway.
Jabba hated Nat because he was ugly: Nat had been horribly burned in
fires Jabba's slavers set in Nat's city to force its inhabitants out and
into their nets. His face and body were scarred. His lekku, the
head-tails Twi'leks sign with for much of their communication, were
nearly burned off. Nat could only communicate with his voice--a
terrible handicap, but he was still who he was. Fortuna had found Nat
in the rubble of the city and realized what a prize he was: of greater
worth than jewels. Feed him to the rancor, indeed!
After Fortuna stopped running, smoothed out his robes, caught his
breath, and walked into the throne room, he found this: Nat, bound,
flogged, lying facedown on the grille. The rancor roared below him and
held its mouth open for Nat's dripping blood.
The shameful tatters of Nat's lekku were splayed out above the grate:
someone had torn off the head covering Fortuna made Nat wear.
Jabba's crowd of sycophants and puppets jeered and taunted Nat over
their dinners. Jabba's own hand hovered inches from the button that
would open the trapdoor, but when Jabba saw Fortuna he rumbled his deep
bass laugh and motioned Fortuna to his throne.
"Nat is so ugly," Jabba said. "I want to see if the rancor will eat
him, or if it will throw him back up at US?"
The rancor would do that. It threw those it found unappetizing against
the grille again and again till the body became an unrecognizable pulp
the keeper dragged out the next day. The grille was dark with the blood
of those the rancor had rejected.
"Then you will miss the sport Nat could provide," Fortuna said.
"What sport?" Jabba rumbled.
Fortuna was thinking fast, trying to find a way to save Nat. "Nat is a
runner," he said, "and a tumbler.
He could elude the rancor for a time."
Jabba loved watching such sport through the grille.
Everyone knew it. He moved his hand toward the button.
"But not now," Fortuna said quickly. "Not after a flogging. Give him
two days to recover, then send him to the pit. It will be a great
diversion for us all."
"You betrayed me!" Nat shouted at Fortuna's back.
"I should never have trusted you. I--" Fortuna raised his hand.
Nat fell silent at once. For-tuna had trained him well, and obedience
was an early lesson. "Master?" Fortuna asked Jabba. Jabba hesitated,
considering. Fortuna could not take his eyes off Jabba's hand over the
button.
"Two days then," Jabba said, finally, moving his hand back. "I look
forward to it."
Fortuna called two Gamorrean guards to lift Nat from the grille and drag
him down to the dungeons.
Fortuna followed. The guards stopped by the first cell, which was
already crowded. "Not there!" Fortuna said. "I will not incarcerate
Nat with others who might kill him or maim him to spoilJabba's fun.
Follow me."
He led them down the passageway to the farthest cell. It was
unoccupied. "Put him in here," he said.
The guards threw Nat into the cell, slammed and locked the door, and
walked grumbling away. Fortuna stood looking through the bars in the
door. Nat lay on the stone floor. He would not or could not sit up to
look at Fortuna. It made communicating more difficult, since much of
what Fortuna wanted to say he could sign with his lekku so no one else
would understand.
He did not want to speak aloud for others to overhear. But finally
Fortuna did speak four words: "I will save you."
He turned and walked away--not back to Jabba's throne room, but down the
passageway to the monks.
He knew of just one way to save Nat.
Only then, while walking in the swept passageway of the monks, did
Fortuna wonder how they had known that this would happen, when he had
not.
Fortuna led the monks' surgeons to Nat's cell before dawn of the second
day. He wanted the procedure completed well before Jabba ordered Nat
thrown to the rancor. "Leave the brain stem so the body will still
breathe," Fortuna said.
"No!" Nat screamed. He realized what the surgeons had come to do.
"Don't let them take out my brain!"
Fortuna did not worry at all that the other prisoners could hear Nat.
They would try to ignore him, if they could, and hope such horrors would
not happen to them. But a Gamorrean guard was hurrying toward them. He
did not ask what Fortuna and the surgeons were doing.
"I will tell Jabba that you tortured this prisoner and spoiled the
sport," he told Fortuna.
"Then I will tell Jabba that since you informed on me, you obviously
cannot keep secrets and must be fed to the rancor with Nat."
The guard snuffled and stepped back. So stupid--so easily manipulated,
Fortuna thought. A mistake of Jabba's, taking these beings as guards.
"Then I will not tell if you will not," the guard said.
"Be quick about your work."
He walked away. Fortuna set his blaster to stun and looked at Nat.
"This is the only way I know to save you," Fortuna signed with his
lekku, then he shot Nat through the bars of the door. Nat fell to the
floor--but his arms twitched as if, though stunned, he were still trying
to pull himself up to fight to save his body.
Fortuna unlocked the cell door and swung it wide.
The surgeons wheeled their squeaking cart in ahead of them.
Fortuna did not follow. He did not want to watch. The sight of gore
did not bother him in the slightest, but Fortuna believed it would show
a lack of respect for Nat if he stood behind the surgeons to watch them
wash Nat's head and cut into it.
So Fortuna paced in front of the cell, impatient for the surgeons to be
done. He remembered finding Nat as a child in the smoking rubble of
Nat's family home on Ryloth. Fortuna had gone there, looking for
jewels.
But before he found any, he found Nat in the arms of his mother.
She was conscious.
"You!" she said, from where she lay, unable to get up to defend herself
or save her child. "Bib Fortuna-- I should have recognized your corrupt
hand behind this attack. Only you would bring slavers upon your own
people."
She said his name with such hatred, such loathing, that Fortuna stepped
back. Fortuna had been among the first to sell the addictive ryll spice
off-world, and thus attract the attention of the Empire to Ryloth.
Twi'leks he thought his friends sat in judgment on him and condemned him
to death for bringing slavers and pirates and renegades of all kinds
upon them. He escaped. They confiscated his family's holdings and put
a price on his head. He came back for revenge.
He had had that revenge. Seven cities lay in ruin, their people sold
into slavery, their riches going, most of it, to Jabba, but some of it,
secretly, to Fortuna.
Yet it was not what he
had wanted, after all. The demand for ryll spice
was greater than he or anyone could have predicted, and it would suck
his world dry and destroy it. Fortuna did not hate his own people so
utterly. He tried promoting trade in the cheaper, less effective--less
lucrative--glitterstim spice from Kessel to divert attention from ryll
and Ryloth to no avail: the demand for spice of any kind would tear
apart both planets. He had thought the Twi'leks would adapt to life in
the wider Empire--Twi'leks always adapted--but events had happened too
quickly. They had to be shown the way. Fortuna realized that, and his
responsibility to show it to them, when Nat's mother spoke to him in the
rubble of her home. He drew his blaster and stepped back up to her,
pointed the blaster at her head.
"Coward," she said.
He shot her, and she died at once.Shooting her had not been an act of
cowardice, he told himself. It had been an act of kindness. He had
saved her from the horrors of slavery.
Then Nat moaned.
The child was alive. Fortuna did not shoot him or give him to the
slavers. He carried him back to his ship and medical help. He later
explained to Jabba that since this was the last son of a great Twi'lek
family, it would amuse him to keep Nat for a time. In the years that
followed, Fortuna never told Nat he had killed his mother. They planned
together how best to save Ryloth from the hell the spice trade and the
Empire were turning Ryloth into.
The cell door opened. A surgeon hurried out. He held a brain jar with
a brain in it. All the indicator lights at the base of the jar glowed
bright red: not a good sign. The lights should have blinked green or
blue.
"The brain is screaming," another surgeon told Fortuna: "If it does not
gain control of itself soon, it will go insane and die. That is the way
of things."
Nat was not enlightened. He was not ready to give up the body.
The monks had explained all this to For-tuna, and he had forced them to
operate anyway.
There had been no other way to save him. It was done now.
"We will do all we can to help your friend," another surgeon said.
They left, wheeling their cart ahead of them, its squeaks loud in the
dungeons.
Fortuna walked into the cell. Nat's body lay on the floor. He knelt to
examine it. The surgeons had done excellent work: the sutures that
closed the skull back up were undetectable except to the closest
examination.
The brain stem kept the lungs breathing. The heart still beat.
Fortuna's own heart raced in his chest.
He would die for this, ifJabba found out before For-tuna could kill
Jabba. Fortuna straightened Nat's robes. He tied a bright red scarf
around Nat's disfigured lekku. He turned the body onto its back and
gently brushed the sand from its face. The face was so scarred,
tortured.
Then, with a sudden clarity, Fortuna realized why the universe had
ordered events this way. Nat had to lose this body. No one on Ryloth
would have recognized him. Soon, Fortuna would control Jabba's vast
fortune. He could locate and employ the services of those who practiced
the illegal arts of cloning and clone Nat a new and perfect body to put
his brain in.
When they returned to Ryloth, Nat would be able to communicate more
effectively--if he survived the next few days. Fortuna resolved to go
to him later to give him the hope of cloning to hold on to.
Later that morning, when Jabba ordered Nat thrown to the rancor, Fortuna
dispatched two guards to drag Nat's body to the trapdoor in front of
Jabba's throne.
"Nat has fainted from fear," he told them quietly.
"But he will surely awake on his descent to the rancor."
They believed him. Much depended on the events of the next few minutes
and whether Jabba would accept them.
The guards flung Nat's body onto the trapdoor and Jabba hit the button
at once--as Fortuna had hoped he would. The trapdoor dropped open, and
the body plunged down to the rancor's pit. Jabba's sycophants crowded
around the grille to watch the rancor eat Nat.
Jabba pressed buttons that rolled his throne to the edge so he could
see, too.
Nat's body lay facedown in the sand below. The rancor roared at it, but
it did not move.
"Nat won't run!" Jabba shouted. "Why won't he run?'?
The rancor seized the body and ate it in three bites.
Blood spattered through the grille onto Fortuna's hands and robes and
face, and the hands and robes and faces of everyone around the pit.
The rancor looked up at them and belched and roared.
BUt everyone in Jabba's throne room was quiet.
They all expected Jabba to be angry. "Nat must have come to hate you,"
Fortuna told Jabba, in the relative silence. "He knew it would please
you to see him run, so he would not run."
Someone laughed. Sy SnOOtles started humming a tune. Max Rebo began
pounding his keyboard. And Jabba finally laughed. "He ate him--the
rancor ate him. It has no aesthetic sense." Jabba rolled his throne
back to its original position, away from the grille, while the music
picked up and palace life returned to normal.
Jabba believed what Fortuna had told him. He never suspected what had
just happened. Fortuna walked thoughtfully through the milling crowd of
galactic toughs of all species, toughs he hoped to make his people a
part of, rubbing at the speckles of Nat's blood on his hands.
When he could, later that night, Fortuna hurried to the monks and Nat's
brain. He went first to the Great Room of the Enlightened, where the
brain jars sat on shelves and the brain walkers waited below them.
One embodied monk was dusting. "Nat would not stop screaming, so we had
to move him to a cell of his own," the monk said. "He was disturbing
the enlightened ones."
The monk led Fortuna to the cell. The brain jar holding Nat's brain sat
alone on a table. All the lights at the base of the jar glowed bright
red in the darkness.
The monk lit two candles in niches near the door and left quietly.
Fortuna sat at the table and put his hands on the jar for a time. The
brain was a ghastly sight: raw, white in places, suspended in a solution
Nat's blood discolored red. The monks would change the solution daily
for three days till there was no more blood and the solution stayed
clear.
Fortuna pressed a button at the base of the jar that made it "hear" for
the brain. "Nat," he said, "this was the only way I knew to save you.
Believe me."
He went on to tell him his plans for cloning, but then another idea came
to him. "Perhaps we can find a holding body to put your brain in till
we clone a body of your own."
The more he thought of it, the more Fortuna liked that idea: kidnap
someone acceptable, discard the brain, and put Nat's brain in the body
for a time. The sensations of a living, breathing body would surely
help keep Nat's brain sane till it could be put into Nat's own clone.
He would speak to the surgeons about it.
rose, even pink: not bright red.
Fortuna returned to Jabba's throne room to sleep. He had to sleep
there. Jabba's paranoia required that everyone close to him sleep
around him at night--supposedly to protect him from assassins, but in
reality so the guards could watch them all and keep them from
assassinating Jabba. The routine had grown lax. The guards slept along
with everyone else. Fortuna had even stopped lecturing them about it.
But he would get new guards when he was in control.
Fortuna could not sleep. He sensed goings-on in the palace he could not
pin down and that he could not attribute to the anxieties of the
day--probabilities swirling in the subconscious undercurrent of life
around Jabba. But the monks had trained him well.
Things would come clear again, he was confident of that. Beings from
all parts of the galaxy constantly came and went here, and it sometimes
took days to sort out the true purposes of their visits.
Meanwhile, the monks would advise him, as they had advised him about
Nat. Fortuna had allies no one suspected.
Tales From Jabba's Palace Page 26
