Star Wars: Tales from Jabba's Palace Page 6

  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 Porcellus. “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 few 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 was engaged 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 boor 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 old Jedi 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 mouth …

  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.

  “His High Exaltedness has decreed you are to be terminated,” said the translator droid C-3PO, rather shakily. He looked a little the worse for his few days in Jabba’s palace, stained with the Bloated One’s slimy green exudations and fragments of sandmaggot kidney. “You are to be taken to the Dune Sea, and cast into the Pit of Carkoon, the abode of the Sarlacc. In his belly you will find new definitions of pain and suffering as you are digested over the course of a thousand years.”

  “You should have bargained, Jabba,” said Skywalker quietly. The guards shoved him, Solo, and the Wookiee toward the door; Leia, on the dais, half started up with anguish in her face, but the Hutt dragged her back by her chain. “That’s the last mistake you’ll ever make …”

  Porcellus leaned against the archway in which he stood, knees trembling with reaction and relief. Whatever else happened, the rancor was dead. The threat which had hovered over him for all those years …

  “And you!” Jabba turned suddenly on his dais, his copper-red eyes seeming to skewer Porcellus where he stood. Drool dripped from his enormous mouth and he pointed one finger. “You also are to die …”

  “What?” screamed Porcellus.

  “You cannot now deny putting fierfek into my food. Take him away!” Jabba beckoned to the few guards remaining in the room. “Take him to the deepest dungeon. When my sail barge returns from carrying me to watch the deaths of Skywalker and Solo, then I shall have the leisure to deal with you!”

  “But nobody who ate your food died of poison!” wailed Porcellus, as the guards closed in around him. “Jubnuk … and Oola … You can’t—”

  “Oh, fierfek doesn’t mean ‘poison.’ ” C-3PO bustled officiously down from the dais. “It’s extremely difficult to poison a Hutt, of course. But all Huttese words derive from food imagery, you see. Fierfek simply means a hex, a death curse … and you can’t deny that Jubnuk, and the unfortunate Oola, both succumbed quite soon after sampling your meals. It’s a natural misunderstanding.”

  And so it was, but Porcellus derived little comfort from the fact as he was dragged away screaming to a cell to await his doom.

  That’s Entertainment: The Tale of Salacious Crumb

  by Esther M. Friesner

  Melvosh Bloor had no spectacles to adjust, so he contented himself with polishing the screen of his datapad whenever he felt flustered. Like all good academics, one of his primary reactions to prolonged contact with the real world was to fidget. However, as with all things in his life (so he told himself), it must be fidgeting with a purpose. Melvosh Bloor did nothing without a purpose.

  On the face of things, one would imagine that his purpose in infiltrating the lair of the notorious crimelord Jabba the Hutt was a simple one: he wanted to die but lacked the strength of will to kill himself. This, of course, would be dead wrong. Then again, dead wrong might be a pretty good prediction for the fate of Melvosh Bloor.

  Oh dear, oh dear, the Kalkal thought as he blundered through the honeycombed underbelly of Jabba’s lair. Where is that fellow? You would think that at the price I paid him—in advance, sight unseen, solely on the recommendation of my colleagues—he would at least manage to be at the rendezvous point on time.

  His cumbersome boots stepped into something thick and sticky on the corridor floor. There was very little light in this part of Jabba’s palace but Melvosh Bloor had the excellent vision common to all Kalkals, day or night. Therefore he could not avoid noticing that part of the large and gooey mass he had just stepped in had eyes.

  “Mercy,” said Melvosh Bloor, placing a trembling hand to his lips as the acidic tide of queasiness surged up his wattled throat. His most recent meal had not been of the finest, to say the least—in fact, it made the refectory fare at dear old Beshka University seem attractive by comparison—so he had no desire to experience it a second time. (Although Kalkals were famous for their ability to eat anything, even university food, there were no guarantees that what they once downed would not make a reappearance if something upset them enough. The goop with eyes was enough to physic Jabba himself.)

  “Mercy? Mercy?” The dripping darkness exploded with a shrill, harsh voice that mocked Melvosh Bloor’s own erudite pronunciation to a tee. Cackling laughter bounced from the maze of pipes overhead and echoed back from the ends of gloomy passageways that led off into the who-knows-where.

  Melvosh Bloor gasped, huge yellow eyes rotating wildly in his head as he flattened himself against the nearest wall. “Who’s there?” he whispered, tiny flakes of scale falling from his wide, thin lips as he spoke.

  Silence answered.

  Shaking badly, the academic fumbled for the sidearm his Jawa guide had pressed upon him before they parted ways outside the palace. Far outside the palace. Much as he hated the thought of violence and as repulsed as he felt by any of its symbols, Melvosh Bloor thought himself capable of shooting another living being if need be (strictly in the interest of preserving academic freedoms, such as his life). He felt a fleeting spark of gratitude for the Jawa’s stubbornness in insisting he take the weapon.

  Perhaps the fact that he would be unable to pay the Jawa the remainder of his fee until they were both safely back in Mos Eisley had more than a little to do with the guide’s devotion to Melvosh Bloor’s personal safety. But that was a low, common thought, unworthy of Beshka University’s premier up-and-coming (albeit untenured) professor of Investigative Politico-Sociology. Melvosh Bloor pushed it far from his mind as he continued to scan the shadows.

  “Er … hello?” he ventured. A glimmer of hope as to the unseen speaker’s identity struck him. “Darian Gli, is that you? You’re—you’re late, you know.” He tried not to make it sound like an accusation. Wishful thinking made him certain that the voice he’d just heard coming out of the shadows belonged to his precontracted, pig-in-a-poke guide to Jabba’s palace and he didn’t want to alienate him. “And—and you were supposed to meet me farther back down t
his tunnel. Unless I was mistaken in our agreement. Which I probably was. All my fault. No hard feelings. I apologize.”

  Somewhere water was dripping, an eerie sound made even eerier by the fact that Jabba’s palace lay in the midst of the Dune Sea, a fierce, unforgiving wasteland where it was cheaper to let blood drip away than water. A faint breeze passed over Melvosh Bloor’s face as lightly as a dancing girl’s veil. His breath sighed from his wide, flat nostrils as he waited for some response to his words.

  A thunderous sound that was half bellow and half shriek shook the wall he clung to. Melvosh Bloor leaped forward, a pathetic cry of startlement involuntarily escaping his lips. Unfortunately for the academic, he landed squarely on the puddle of goo and his booted feet shot straight out from under him. He landed with a nauseating squosh. The orphaned eyeballs seemed to regard him with the dumb resentment of an overworked beast of burden.

  The same maniacal laughter heard earlier resounded over Melvosh Bloor’s head once more. This time, however, a small, rubbery shape detached itself from its hiding place and dropped right into the dazed academic’s lap. A wizened face twisted into a mindlessly malevolent grin shoved itself nose to nose with the professor.

  Melvosh Bloor was badly shaken by this ugly little apparition, but he had been trapped (and forced to make small talk) with uglier things at faculty teas. “Uh … salutations.” He raised his right hand in greeting, having forgotten it still clutched the Jawa’s parting gift. The creature in his lap gave a yodel of distress and scampered a short distance away. It stood there dancing from foot to taloned foot, chattering angrily.

  “I—I’m sorry,” Melvosh Bloor stammered, fumbling the weapon away. “I assure you, I have no intentions of shooting you. That would be a fine greeting, heh, heh.” He forced a sheepish smile in hopes that the creature had a sense of humor. “Heh?”