Tales From Jabbas Palace (Kevin Anderson) (7 page)

It crossed his mind to wonder what had killed the sail barge captain, but in this awful place, who could tell?

Jabba, laughing horribly, hauled on the dancer’s chain. Oola shrank back, unable to control the revulsion on her face—it was quite clear that what he intended was not to feed her more vegetable crepes—and for a time the Hutt amused himself, playing her like a fish before triggering the trapdoor and dropping her into the rancor’s pit below.

She gave one hideous scream and everyone rushed to the grille to see the show; Porcellus shrank back into the archway, shaking like a weed stern in a windstorm. The casualness, the offhanded quality of her murder terrified him… The Hutt had killed her with as little reflection as he expended on the next paddy frog he gulped.

Just so, thought Porcellus, pale and almost sick with shock, would he kill his chef, if the slightest rumblings of indigestion brought the word fierfek back to his mind.

That was the night the bounty hunter brought in the Wookiee.

It was a mop-up operation, really. The Wookiee—well over two meters of shaggy hair and ill temper—was partner to a Corellian smuggler named Solo whose inanimate body, frozen in carbonite, had been decorating Jabba’s wall for months. At one time Porcellus had toyed with the notion of unfreezing the man and bargaining for assistance in an escape, but at the last minute he’d lost his nerve. There was no way of knowing how cooperative he’d be even if Porcellus could keep him hidden long enough for him to shake off the blind weakness of hibernation sickness, and the thought of what Jabba would do to him if he was caught in an escape attempt had brought him into a sweat.

Jabba had advertised bounty on the Wookiee at fifty thousand credits, and was prepared to actually pay half that. After protracted negotiation with the bounty hunter—a ratlike scrap of a creature in a leather breathing mask— which included the hunter’s threat to set off the thermal detonator it conveniently had in its pocket, they’d settled on thirty-five. At that point Porcellus retreated to his kitchen, reflecting that he was unsuited for financial dealings of that sort and wondering how he would manage if this particular bounty hunter came to the kitchen demanding beignets or Chantilly crime.

The kitchen boy, Phlegmin, was stone dead in the middle of the receiving-room floor.

Darkness seemed to tunnel in around Porcellus’s vision—darkness that smelled of rancor. The next moment a huge hand shoved him aside and Ree-Yees, a sleazy Gran swindler and minor member of Jabba’s court, barged into the receiving room, three eyes bulging on their short stalks as he stared down at the kitchen boy in disbelief.

“I had nothing to do with it!” shrieked Porcellus.

“He never ate a thing in this kitchen! He never so much as touched a dish!”

Ree-Yees, on his knees: pawing through the goatgrass in the open packing box beside Phlegmin’s body, took no notice.

“Hey,” snuffled a basso rumble from the doorway.

“He sleeping?”

It was a Gamorrean guard. The same Gamorrean guard, Porcellus realized, who’d found him with Ak-Buz’s corpse in the passageway.

His life flashed before his eyes in a kaleidoscope of croquettes and Coruscant sauce supreme. “I didn’t do it!”

“You’re just in time!” Ree-Yees sprang to his feet. “I just found him— um—just like thisdown the hall—near the tunnel to Ephant Mon’s quarters! And I brought him here to perform—uh—emergency culinary resussusperation! Garbage inhalation of the last resort!

It’s an emergency technique I learned from…”

With great presence of mind, Porcellus slipped out of the receiving room and concealed himself in the very darkest corner of the kitchen. From there, a few minutes later, he watched the Gamorrean guard plod dutifully out, carrying the kitchen boy’s corpse slung over his shoulder. He was followed in fairly short order by Ree-Yees himself, staggering as though his brain had been set on auto-pickle and reeking of Sullustan gin.

There was very definitely something going on in the palace.

“A plot,” rumbled Gartogg, the Gamorrean guard, who returned to the kitchen the next morning, Phlegmin’s corpse still slung over his shoulder and much unimproved by the day’s rising heat. “Clues.” A long pause, while he considered, as if carefully matching the contents of one of his brain cells with the contents of the other. “All tied together.” He helped himself to a handful of the packing material which had come around a jar of candied rennet, and snuffled noisily.

“Girl. She, um…”

“What girl?” demanded Porcellus. “And get that disgusting thing out of here!”

“Mercenary girl. Brought in Wookiee. Last night.”

Gartogg licked a fragment of plastiform from his lower lip.

“Ladyfriend of Solo. The smuggler. Boss caught them.” He carefully poked back into its socket the corpse’s left eye, which was starting to droop free, and looked inquiringly in the direction of the white-chocolate bread pudding that Porcellus was preparing for tonight’s dessert.

“Get that thing out of here!” commanded Porcel-his.

“I cook in here, this place has to stay clean–clean and healthful.” He was not anxious to have the Gamorrean start thinking about plots.

But Gartogg was right about the girl. When he was summoned to Jabba’s audience chamber at the beginning of the evening’s festivities, Porcellus noted the absence of the tarnished brown-black slab of carbonite which for months had decorated the alcove, and the presence of a new “pet” on Jabba’s dais.

His heart went out to her in pity. She was very small, slender and fragile-looking in the iw scant scraps of gold and silk the crimelord allowed, her heavy, dark-red hair piled thick on her aristocratic head.

“I—I’m sorry,” he stammered quietly, kneeling on the dais at her side.

“If there’s anything I can get for you from the kitchen…”

It was a hopelessly ineffective offer of aid, and he knew it; but she smiled, and took his hand. “Thank you.” She had a voice like smoke and honey; he could see, not fear, but terrible worry in her brown eyes.

Solo, thought Porcellus despairingly. She’s in love with that smuggler Solo. She was in this position—a prisoner like himself in Jabba’s palace— because of that love.

And so, though his own heart hurt with love for her, he made it his business to see that Solo got food from the palace kitchen, not something that was guaranteed in Jabba’s dungeons. Many of the prisoners didn’t get food at all, for long periods.of time. But Porcellus, though his heart was in his throat with terror every time he did it, bribed the guards with beignets and chocolate ladybabies to take meat to the Wookiee, and because he knew hibernation sickness left the body weak and shaky from carbohydrate starvation, smuggled things like stuffed pasties and breaded eggs to the man his beloved loved.

He felt like a fool—the man was going to be executed anyway and he was playing around with a rancor-pit offense himself. But it was all he could do for her, and when, the following night, she took his hand and whispered, “Thank you. Porcellus, thank you,” and looked up into his eyes, it was, for one second, worth it all.

Jabba’s rumbling, horrible laugh sounded from above them. “You watch out, pretty Leia,” the crimelord said in his slow, almost incomprehensible Huttese.

The noise in the hall around them was tremendous, as Jabba’s court degenerated into the usual orgy of card games, alcoholism, and testosterone-imbued lying that characterized evenings at the palace: Max Rebo and his band were playing, and Jabba’s nasty little pet Salacious Crumb wasengaged in a vamped duet with the singer Sy Snootles.

Jabba hefted the golden dish of fricasseed sandmaggot kidneys which was the first of Porcellus’s culinary offerings for the evening.

After the adventure of the vegetable crepes, Porcellus had gone back to the Bloated One’s favorite standbys, but for days now he had produced every one with his heart in his mouth.

“I think there’s fierfek in his cooking. What you think, Chef?”

“No,” whispered Porcellus desperately, and checked to see if he was standing on the rancor’s trapdoor.

He was. “No, it isn’t true…”

“Here.” Leia cast a quick look at the cook’s ashen face and stood up, reaching to take the dish from Jabba’s hands. “There’s no fierfek in this, is there, Porcellus?”

“Uh…”

“Your Highness,” warned the golden protocol droid C-3PO hastily, “I really wouldn’t advise…”

Jabba generally dispensed With the formality of utensils, but an ornamental border of cracknels surrounded the fetid yellowish glop heaped artistically in the center. Using one of them for a spoon, Leia helped herself to two large mouthfuls.

She turned green and sat down rather quickly.

Jabba roared with obscene laughter. Salacious Crumb, skipping through the crowd around the bandstand, sprang up over the back of the Gamorrean stationed nearest Jabba’s dais, an ugly boot named Jubnuk, and, when Jubnuk swatted irritably at him, ran shrieking to his master’s side and hurled the rest of the dish of sandmaggot kidneys at the guard. This created enough of a diversion for Porcellus to slip hastily out of the main hall. But throughout the remainder of the night’s partying, he returned again and again to the hall to check on Leia, who was looking extremely wan as the night progressed.

Sandmaggot kidneys did not agree with everyone.

And all it would need, thought Porcellus despairingly, would be for her to drop dead.

Jubnuk, who had licked all the spattered sandmaggot kidneys off his armor and the surrounding walls, showed no ill effects. Porcellus took what comfort he could from that.

Luke Skywalker, last of the Jedi Knights, entered the palace with the first light of dawn.

The first Porcellus knew of it was when he picked his way on tiptoe among the sleeping bodies in the audience hall with a cup of vine-coffee and a freshly made jelly doughnut for Leia—also sleeping on the dais at the Hutt’s side—and saw Bib Fortuna enter, followed by a medium-sized, slender, and self-effacing young man in black.

“I told you not to admit him,” rumbled Jabba, when his majordomo had wakened him to see the young man before him.

Porcellus stepped hastily back, concealing himself behind the bemused and hungover crowd of Jabba’s retainers, one of whom—a dark-skinned newcomer in a helmet of gondar tusks—relieved him of the vine-coffee and the doughnut.

“I must be allowed to speak to your master,” said Skywalker in his soft voice.

Bib Fortuna turned immediately to the crimelord.

“He must be allowed to speak to—”

“You weak-minded fool.” Jabba pushed Fortuna aside. “That oldJedi mind trick will not work on me.”

Skywalker inclined his head in a respectful bow.

“You will bring Captain Solo and the Wookiee to me,” he said, and Porcellus felt an immediate urge to run to the dungeon, get the key from Captain Ortogg, and do just that.

“Look out!” piped up C-3PO, who—if Porcellus remembered correctly—had been Skywalker’s gift to Jabba. “You’re standing on—”

“Your mind powers will not work on me,” said Jabba, perhaps deliberately drowning out the droid’s warning that Skywalker was, in fact, standing precisely on the rancor’s trapdoor.

“Nevertheless,” said Skywalker gently, “I am taking Captain Solo.

You can either profit by this, or be destroyed.”

Jabba smiled evilly and his eyes seemed to grow redder as the pupils narrowed. “I shall enjoy watching you die.”

Porcellus had already seen how Skywalker’s eyes had met those of the woman Leia when first he had entered.

Now she cried “Luke!” as the guards closed in.

Skywalker flung out his hand, and somehow the blaster that had been in the holster of a guard four meters away was in it. He had time to fire one shot as they closed around him, Jubnuk the guard reaching to grab.

Then the trapdoor beneath his feet fell open, and both Skywalker and Jubnuk plunged into the pit below.

“Luke!” screamed Leia again, dragging fruitlessly against the chains, and the whole court rushed forward—pushing Porcellus along with them—to watch the show in the pit.

It was quick, horrible, the nightmare form of the rancor bursting forth from its den as the bars were raised. Brownish, slimy, hideous beyond belief, it lunged first at the Jedi, who managed to wedge himself in a crack of the rock, then turned and caught Jubnuk as the Gamorrean tried to force apart the barred judas window in the side of the pit. Porcellus was standing among the other Gamorreans as the rancor seized Jubnuk neatly around the waist—Captain Ortogg and his cohorts bellowed with laughter as the monster gulped Jubnuk down in three bites, the noise of their mirth almost drowning his agonized screams.

The chef felt faint, feeling those teeth around his own waist, seeing his own arm disappearing like a final fillip of noodle into that round, fanged nouth… Not me, he thought desperately, not me…

Skywalker saw his chance, and took it. He fled under the rancor’s feet, into the smaller den where the beast slept, and from there, as the thing pursued him, hurled a skull at the mechanism which controlled the den’s sharpened portcullis of bars. Whether he used some Jedi power to slam the missile home, or whether he simply had the unerring eye of a trained warrior, Porcellus couldn’t be sure. But the bars dropped like a guillotine, their pointed ends driving like spears through the rancor’s skull.

The beast made a dreadful sound, and fell limp.

In the startled silence of the criminals around him, Porcellus could hear, from the deeps of the pit, Malakili’s frantic wail, “NOOOOO…

!!!” Porcellus was safe.

He straightened up, feeling oddly light-headed. For five years Jabba had threatened to throw him to the rancor… and now the rancor was dead. He felt bad for Malakili, hurting with the echoes of that terrible cry, but in the first dizzying flush of relief it was hard to sympathize with his bereft friend. The rancor was dead…

Guards were dragging the smuggler Solo, the giant Wookiee behind him, into the audience hall. Solo was still blind from hibernation sickness, but noticeably stronger—Porcellus hoped desperately nobody would ask who’d been feeding him. They were thrust before the dais of the Bloated One.