Star Wars: Tales from Jabba's Palace Page 5

  “Good,” said Porcellus. It wasn’t that he objected to real people coming around his kitchen to cadge snacks. It was just that most of the people in the court of the Tatooine crimelord who did come around his kitchen made him extremely nervous.

  “Quite polite, too,” added Malakili. “High-class social programming.”

  “That’ll be a switch.” Porcellus gently tonged the last beignets from the boiling oil at their exact moment of apotheosis, set them on the paper toweling on the counter, dusted them reverently with powdered sugar, and activated the portable electric fence around them. He smiled across at his friend. “Present company excepted.”

  “Oh, the guards and stuff ain’t so bad.” Malakili paused as Phlegmin the kitchen boy came in carrying a box of the fragile Belsavian bowvine fruit which had just been delivered. The pimple-faced youth sniffled, wiped his nose on his fingers, and started to take the fruit from their box, looking sullen and offended when Porcellus motioned him sharply to wash his hands. “Well, maybe some of ’em,” the rancor keeper conceded. He hopped down from the table, and crossed to where the chef was examining the fruit for subcutaneous bruises with the delicate fingers of an artist. Phlegmin tried in passing to steal a beignet—the electric fence hurled him several feet against the nearest wall. He retreated, sucking his burned hand.

  “A word in your ear, friend,” Malakili whispered.

  Porcellus turned from his work, the familiar sensation of cold panic clutching at his chest. “Eh?”

  Back in the days when he had been chef to Yndis Mylore, governor of Bryexx and Moff of the Varvenna Sector and that Imperial nobleman’s most prized possession—and how not, when he was a triple Golden Spoon and winner of the Tselgormet Prize for gourmandise five years running?—Porcellus had not been a particularly nervous man. Concerned about the perfection of his art, yes, for what great maestro is not? Worried, from time to time, about the firmness of a meringue served when the Emperor was Governor Mylore’s guest, of course, or the precise combination of textures in a sauce to be presented at an ambassadorial banquet …

  But not prey to chill terror at every unexpected word.

  Five years as a slave in the palace of Jabba the Hutt had had its effect.

  “Jabba, he had indigestion again last night.”

  “Indigestion?” Later Porcellus realized his immediate reaction should have been uncontrolled horror; it was actually, at first hearing, only a laugh of utter disbelief. “You mean there’s actually a substance he can’t digest?”

  Malakili lowered his voice still further. “He says he thinks it’s fierfek. As far as I can make out, that’s the Hutt word,” he went on softly, “for poison.”

  Then the uncontrolled horror took over. Porcellus felt himself go white and his hands and feet turned cold despite the oven heat of the kitchen.

  The rancor keeper put a big hand on his friend’s shoulder. “I like you, Porcellus,” he said. “You’ve been a good friend to me, letting me take a couple scraps for my baby …” He jerked a thumb at the mass of steaming meat and meat by-products that occupied a good two-thirds of the table. “I don’t want to have to throw you in there with him. So I thought I’d drop you the word before Bib Fortuna gets down here to talk to you about it.” Malakili gathered up the corners of the oilcloth upon which the offal was heaped, and lugged it out the door in a trail of dribbled juice.

  Porcellus said, “Thanks,” though his mouth was too dry to produce actual sound.

  “His Excellency is most displeased.”

  “Entirely without reason, Your Worship. It is wholly the result of a regrettable misunderstanding.” Porcellus bent almost double in a deep bow and hoped Bib Fortuna, Jabba the Hutt’s vile Twi’lek majordomo, wouldn’t notice the ransacked boxes and canisters which covered every horizontal surface in the kitchen, the result of a frenzied search for anything that might have caused the Bloated One’s unprecedented discomfort. Since many of the delicacies which had gone into the Hutt’s omelettes, roulades, and étouffées over the past years were inedible by any lesser species, the search hadn’t been an easy one—the chef was still wondering about the goatgrass he’d used the previous evening as a stuffing for the gamwidge, and the small unmarked red canister of unidentifiable paste whose contents had been used to top yesterday’s chocolate ladybabies.

  The Twi’lek’s small eyes narrowed still further; in the kitchen’s mephitic light they had the appearance of dirty glass. “You know how solicitous our master is about his health.”

  Neither of them was going to speak the word “poison,” of course.

  “Absolutely,” groveled Porcellus, reflecting that between Jabba’s wholesale consumption of triglycerides, cholesterol, and alcohol—never mind substances less identifiable—and indescribable sexual practices, the Hutt would scarcely need poison. Porcellus was still trying to deal with the concept that a Hutt could be poisoned. “I scarcely need to assure you that throughout my term of service here I’ve accepted nothing but the finest, the most healthful, the tastiest ingredients to lay before His Excellency’s discriminating palate. I am at a loss to understand this most distressing development.”

  Arms folded, Fortuna drummed his long nails gently on his own biceps. “Should the situation continue,” he said in his soft voice, “explanations for it could be devised.”

  “Here!” Porcellus whirled, lashed out indignantly with the dishtowel in his hand. “That’s the master’s!”

  Ak-Buz, commander of Jabba’s sail barge, backed quickly away from the little electric fence around the beignets, dropping the pair of long-nosed nonconductive machinist’s pliers he’d used to poke through the current. A snarl contorted his leathery face—the only expression, as far as Porcellus had ever been able to ascertain, of which Weequays were capable—and he ran out of the kitchen into the hot sunlight of the receiving bay, shoving the stolen beignet into his lipless mouth as he went.

  “They seem to think this place is a charity kitchen.” Porcellus mopped nervously at the last traces of spilled sugar.

  “Shall I suggest to Jabba that the Weequay be punished?” Fortuna’s voice was a dangerous purr. “Thrown to the rancor? A little quick, perhaps, though Jabba is fond of the spectacle … Lowered into the pit of the brachno-jags, perhaps? They’re small in themselves, but a hundred can strip a being’s bones in, oh, five or six hours. One alone—if that being is tied up quite firmly—can take four or five days.” He smiled evilly. “Would that be a fitting punishment for one who tampers with His Excellency’s food?”

  “Er …” said Porcellus. “I don’t think that’s necessary.”

  To his own great distress, his words turned out to be prophetic, as he discovered some hours later when he tripped over the barge captain’s dead body in the corridor leading to the lower regions of the servants’ quarters …

  Panic had had its effect. After searching the kitchen for another half hour, dogged by the sullen Phlegmin (“How come you let Ak-Buz take a beignet and not me? There’s nuthin’ in that box … What you lookin’ for, anyway, boss?”), Porcellus had discovered, to his horror, that though the time was approaching to begin preparing that night’s feast, he hadn’t the smallest inspiration about what to prepare. Poached icefish imported from Ediorung on a bed of Ramorean capanata? What if Jabba should choke on a bone? A ragout of Besnian sausage with orange-Madeira sauce? If the spices should disagree with his already irritated digestion, what would his immediate assumption be? Vegetable broth, thought Porcellus, vegetable broth and unspiced rice pudding … He reflected upon the crimelord’s probable reaction to such a menu, and the images conjured to mind were not pleasant ones.

  In quest of inspiration for the first time in his life, he retreated to his room to consult his cookbooks, take a nap in the relative cool, and relax … he had to relax …

  And there was Ak-Buz’s body, sprawled in the corridor halfway to his room, arms outflung and eyes glaring fixedly in the sunken stare of death.

  Porcellus knelt beside
the corpse. Still warm. Shreds of sugar topping speckled the Weequay’s quilted vest.

  Maybe after consuming seventy-five kilos of dewback offal the rancor won’t be terribly hungry tonight …?

  Snuffle, snort, demanded a deep, gluey voice. “What happened here?”

  The chef leaped to his feet in a panic of shock and horror, to find himself facing one of Jabba’s Gamorrean guards.

  Porcellus had always hated the Gamorreans. They were among the worst of the food-cadgers, and he was forever cleaning up drool, dirt, and miscellaneous vermin in their wake. Last week five of them had come to blows in his kitchen over who was going to lick out the bowl from a Chantilly crème, with the result that the bowl ended up broken, two rather delicate processors were smashed, and Porcellus was nearly beheaded by an ill-aimed vibro-ax. The Chantilly crème had suffered, too.

  “Going on?” squeaked Porcellus. “Nothing’s going on.”

  The guard’s porcine brow furrowed in a long moment of thought. Then he gestured with his spike-gloved hand at the barge captain’s body. “He’s dead?”

  “He isn’t dead,” said Porcellus. “He’s asleep. He’s resting. He said he was tired and he was going back to his quarters to take a nap. He must have … he must have fallen asleep right here in the hall.”

  Ak-Buz’s sightless eyes continued to stare at the ceiling.

  The guard frowned, turning the information laboriously over in his mind. “Looks dead.”

  Porcellus could feel the rancor’s claws closing around his body. “Have you ever seen a Weequay asleep?”

  “Uh … No.”

  “Well, there you are.” Porcellus bent down and heaved the body to its feet, draping an arm around his shoulders. For a horrible moment he wondered what he’d do if rigor mortis had begun to set in, but in that heat there was little chance of it. The glaring head with its filthy braids lolled against his cheek. “Now I’m going to get him to his quarters—er—before he wakes up.”

  The guard nodded. “Want help?”

  “Thank you,” smiled the chef. “I’m fine.”

  He concealed Ak-Buz’s body in the scrap pile in the machine yard, a heartstoppingly tricky operation because he had to lug it through the dungeons and then out past the barracks where the Weequays lived. The Weequays—silent, deadly, vicious enforcers—were part of Ak-Buz’s sail-barge crew, and though they showed little loyalty to anyone, Porcellus had the impression that being found in possession of the body of their commander wouldn’t be such a good idea. But they weren’t anywhere in sight—probably in my kitchen stealing the beignets, thought Porcellus gloomily—and neither was the sail barge’s mechanic, Barada. With luck nobody would look under the monumental pile of rusting speeder parts in the yard’s corner until decomposition was sufficiently advanced, something which shouldn’t take too long in this heat. Ordinarily, on Tatooine, one would have to worry about Jawas raiding the scrap heap for metal, but the pieces of the last Jawa caught doing so were still fairly fresh, nailed to the gate.

  Porcellus hastened back to his kitchen, wondering what he was going to do about the banquet tonight and bereft of the smallest crumb of inspiration.

  “You call this food?” The Hutt crimelord’s huge copper-red eyes swiveled slowly, the pupils contracting slightly with anger as they fixed their gaze upon his unfortunate servant.

  Porcellus had never understood Huttese very well, but when Jabba raised one of the exquisite vegetable crepes in a hand surprisingly small and delicate in comparison with the rest of his yellowish, gelid bulk and squeezed it so that the contents plopped thickly to the floor, it was entirely unnecessary for his new translator droid, C-3PO, to explain, “His Excellency is most displeased with the food you have been serving of late.”

  Porcellus, standing before the Hutt’s dais on the ornamental trapdoor that covered the rancor’s pit, managed to make a small sound, but that was all. Eight meters below his boot soles, the rancor snuffled softly in the dark.

  The horrible eyes narrowed. “You seek maybe to do me ill?”

  “Never!” Porcellus dropped to his knees—causing the rancor in the pit below to rear up to its full height and sniff at the grille—and clasped his hands pleadingly. “How can I prove my goodwill?”

  Jabba chuckled, a sound like a bantha being gutted—slowly. “We’ll let my little one prove,” he said, and dragged on the chain he held. From the dais beside him rose the lovely Twi’lek dancer Oola, Jabba’s newest pet. Her delicate face showed apprehension, as well it might.

  Porcellus had never learned exactly what Jabba did with his “pets”—usually female but always young, lithe, and beautiful—but he knew they seldom lasted long and he’d heard some truly horrible tales from his friend and fellow slave Yarna the Askajian.

  At the moment, however, all the Hutt did was scoop up a fingerful of the vegetable-crepe stuffing and hold it out to her, and after a moment, with visible distaste, Oola licked the subtly flavored concoction from his slimy hand.

  “Now bring me real food,” gurgled the Hutt, turning back to Porcellus. “Fresh—live—untouched.”

  By the time Porcellus returned to the palace hall with a glass bowl of live Klatooine paddy frogs—in flavored brandy to prevent them from attacking and killing each other, as was the wont of the ill-tempered little creatures—Oola, far from suffering any ill effects from the vegetable crepes, was dancing, swinging her long head-tails in sensual invitation, the chain still around her neck. Her performance, Porcellus thought, should lay aside Jabba’s suspicions of fierfek—of poisoning—for good.

  Ordinarily, Porcellus stayed as far away from Jabba’s court as was possible within the confines of the palace, for the vicious and violent rabble of bounty hunters, mercenaries, and intergalactic scum terrified him. But tonight he leaned his shoulders against the arch of a doorway, thin and graying and nervous-looking in his unspeakably stained cook’s whites, listening to the jizz-wailers—he’d always been fond of good wailing—and watching the dancing and hoping desperately the beautiful Oola wouldn’t drop dead of some unknown cause as Ak-Buz had.

  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 stem 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 crème.

  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—er—just like this—down the hall—near the tunnel to Ephant Mon’s quarters! And I brought him here to perform—uh—emergency culinary resus-susperation! 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.