“Khabarakh told me his people needed help,” Leia said simply. “I thought there might be something I could do.”
“Some will say you have come to sow discord among us.”
“You said that yourself last night,” Leia reminded her. “I can only give you my word that discord is not my intention.”
The maitrakh made a long hissing sound that ended with a sharp double click of needle teeth. “The goal and the end are not always the same, Lady Vader. Now we serve one overclan only. You would require service to another. This is the seed of discord and death.”
Leia pursed her lips. “Does service to the Empire satisfy you, then?” she asked. “Does it gain your people better life or higher honor?”
“We serve the Empire as one clan,” the maitrakh said. “For you to demand our service would be to bring back the conflicts of old.” They had reached the wall chart now, and she gestured a thin hand up toward it. “Do you see our history, Lady Vader?”
Leia craned her neck to look. Neatly carved lines of alien script covered the bottom two-thirds of the wall, with each word connected to a dozen others in a bewildering crisscross of vertical, horizontal, and angled lines, each cut seemingly of a different width and depth. Then she got it: the chart was a genealogical tree, either of the entire clan Kihm’bar or else just this particular family. “I see it,” she said.
“Then you see the terrible destruction of life created by the conflicts of old,” the maitrakh said. She gestured to three or four places on the chart which were, to Leia, indistinguishable from the rest of the design. Reading Noghri genealogies was apparently an acquired skill. “I do not wish to return to those days,” the maitrakh continued. “Not even for the daughter of the Lord Darth Vader.”
“I understand,” Leia said quietly, shivering as the ghosts of Yavin, Hoth, Endor, and a hundred more rose up before her. “I’ve seen more conflict and death in my lifetime than I ever thought possible. I have no wish to add to the list.”
“Then you must leave,” the maitrakh said firmly. “You must leave and not come back while the Empire lives.”
They began to walk again. “Is there no alternative?” Leia asked. “What if I could persuade all of your people to leave their service to the Empire? There would be no conflict then among you.”
“The Emperor aided us when no one else would,” the maitrakh reminded her.
“That was only because we didn’t know about your need,” Leia said, feeling a twinge of conscience at the half truth. Yes, the Alliance had truly not known about the desperate situation here; and yes, Mon Mothma and the other leaders would certainly have wanted to help if they had. But whether they would have had the resources to actually do anything was another question entirely. “We know now, and we offer you our help.”
“Do you offer us aid for our own sakes?” the maitrakh asked pointedly. “Or merely to wrest our service from the Empire to your overclan? We will not be fought over like a bone among hungry stava.”
“The Emperor used you,” Leia said flatly. “As the Grand Admiral uses you now. Has the aid they’ve given been worth the sons they’ve taken from you and sent off to die?”
They had gone another twenty steps or so before the maitrakh answered. “Our sons have gone,” she said softly. “But with their service they have bought us life. You came in a flying craft, Lady Vader. You saw what was done to our land.”
“Yes,” Leia said with a shiver. “It—I hadn’t realized how widespread the destruction had been.”
“Life on Honoghr has always been a struggle,” the maitrakh said. “The land has required much labor to tame. You saw on the history the times when the struggle was lost. But after the battle in the sky …”
She shuddered, a peculiar kind of shaking that seemed to move from her hips upward to her shoulders. “It was like a war between gods. We know now that it was only large flying craft high above the land. But then we knew nothing of such things. Their lightning flashed across the sky, through the night and into the next day, brightening the distant mountains with their fury. And yet, there was no thunder, as if those same gods were too angry even to shout at each other as they fought. I remember being more frightened of the silence than of any other part of it. Only once was there a distant crash like thunder. It was much later before we learned that one of our higher mountains had lost its uppermost peak. Then the lightning stopped, and we dared to hope that the gods had taken their war away from us.
“Until the groundshake came.”
She paused, another shudder running through her. “The lightning had been the anger of the gods. The groundshake was their war hammer. Whole cities vanished as the ground opened up beneath them. Fire-mountains that had been long quiet sent out flame and smoke that darkened the sky over all the land. Forests and fields burned, as did cities and villages that had survived the groundshake itself. From those who had died came sickness, and still more died after them. It was as if the fury of the sky gods had come among the gods of the land, and they too were fighting among themselves.
“And then, when finally we dared to hope it was over, the strange-smelling rain began to fall.”
Leia nodded, the whole sequence of events painfully clear. One of the warring ships had crashed, setting off massive earthquakes and releasing toxic chemicals which had been carried by wind and rain to every part of the planet. There were any number of such chemicals in use aboard a modern warship, but it was only the older ships that carried anything as virulent as this chemical must have been.
Older ships … which had been virtually all the Rebel Alliance had had to fight with in the beginning.
A fresh surge of guilt twisted like a blade in her stomach. We did this, she thought miserably. Our ship. Our fault. “Was it the rain that killed the plants?”
“The Empire’s people had a name for what was in the rain,” the maitrakh said. “I do not know what it was.”
“They came soon after the disaster, then. The Lord Vader and the others.”
“Yes.” The maitrakh waved her hands to encompass the area around them. “We had gathered together here, all who were left alive and could make the journey. This place had always been a truce ground between clans. We had come here to try to find a way for survival. It was here that the Lord Vader found us.”
They walked in silence for another minute. “Some believed then that he was a god,” the maitrakh said. “All feared him and the mighty silver flying craft that had brought him and his attendants from the sky. But even amid the fear there was anger at what the gods had done to us, and nearly two tens of warriors chose to attack.”
“And were duly slaughtered,” Leia said grimly. The thought of effectively unarmed primitives taking on Imperial troops made her wince.
“They were not slaughtered,” the maitrakh retorted, and there was no mistaking the pride in her voice. “Only three of the two tens died in the battle. In turn, they killed many of the Lord Vader’s attendants, despite their lightning-weapons and rock-garments. It was only when the Lord Vader himself intervened that the warriors were defeated. But instead of destroying us, as some of the attendants counseled, he instead offered us peace. Peace, and the blessing and aid of the Emperor.”
Leia nodded, one more piece of the puzzle falling into place. She had wondered why the Emperor would have bothered with what to him would have been nothing more than a tiny group of primitive nonhumans. But primitive nonhumans with that land of natural fighting skill were something else entirely. “What sort of aid did he bring?”
“All that we needed,” the maitrakh said. “Food and medicine and tools came at once. Later, when the strange rain began to kill our crops, he sent the metal droids to begin cleaning the poison from our land.”
Leia winced, freshly aware of her twins’ vulnerability. But the analysis kit had found no trace of anything toxic in the air as they approached the village, and Chewbacca and Khabarakh had done similar tests on the soil. Whatever it was that had been in the rain, the decon droids had done a good job of getting rid of it. “And still nothing will grow outside the cleaned land?”
“Only the kholm-grass,” the maitrakh said. “It is a poor plant, of no use as food. But it alone can grow now, and even it no longer smells as it once did.”
Which explained the uniform brown color that she and Chewbacca had seen from space. Somehow, that particular plant had adapted to the toxic soil. “Did any of the animals survive?” she asked.
“Some did. Those who could eat the kholm-grass, and those which in turn ate them. But they are few.”