An Incident on Dantooine - Dantari

I woke much later to the sound of several voices, pitched low. I couldn't quite make out what they said, but I didn't hear anything I took to be threatening, so I kept my eyes closed and listened.

The language sounded like some dialect of Basic, with similar inflections and all, but one that I couldn't quite seem to understand. Some words sounded familiar, but they were just being used too fast for me to pick up on them. Two people, their voices lowered, were in some kind of argument. One was a youngish but adult male, with some level of authority. The other was a somewhat older female, also with some authority. The female seemed to be repeating the same phrase again and again, and the male was being reassuring.

Their voices sounded human, if a bit rough, but that really didn't mean much. Plenty of nonhumans had human-sounding voices. I didn't feel at all threatened so, again, I slept.

I woke again later for no particular reason, simply because my body had had enough sleep. My head was feeling much better, and my arms weren't quite as sore as they had been yesterday, although the abdominal cramps continued to roll slowly through me and now my stomach was hurting. Someone had plastered something rough and mossy-textured over the split in my eyebrow. It itched a little, but not bad enough that I had scratched it.

I smelled acrid woodsmoke and some kind of sour meat, cooking. The scent made my stomach roil, yet it gurgled insistently. Opening my eyes, I saw only the darkened roof of the vacant speeder. It was night. I'd been asleep for quite a while.

I'd better get up, tell these people that I have to get back to the Enclave and... face them. The Masters are going to be furious. Particularly Master Nisi; this is her speeder that I stole and wrecked. I would not be surprised if they revoked all my privileges on the Archives and on Temple grounds, and if they took away the pieces of my lightsaber... probably cut my stipend, too. As long as they don't burn my braid and stick me into the Service Corps, it'll be fine. I can take any punishment, as long as my life's mission doesn't become figuring out how I get the bugs off of plants.

The thought continued. If Malak were here, he'd gripe about it endlessly, but we would've come up with some excuse for us being out here, and the Masters would be gentler. I can't ever seem to do anything right by myself. I pushed it away. Can't be helped. I need to get back.

To my further displeasure, I had the sense that the roll of bandage in my drawers had not been sufficient to contain the flow. Since I didn't feel any eyes watching me, I checked. It wasn't as bad as it had felt, but still. Meh. I've had worse stains from a bloody nose. Of course, that one was on my shirt... Removing the offending roll, I set it aside to be cleaned and replaced it. Okay. Enough procrastinating.

I levered myself first to hands and knees, then to a stooped-over position, and came out from under the propped-up airspeeder, blinking as I saw the firelight maybe fifty meters away. Farther than I would have chosen to put it, but who was I to judge? There were figures crouched around it, humanoids with wild dark hair. They were eating. A carcass of some sort had been spitted and set over the fire; the source of the smell. It was green.

I walked closer.

A flicker of warning from the Force - a face in the darkness - made me turn to see who was approaching. My automatic identification reflex showed me that this was the one I had strived so hard to contact earlier. Yesterday. Whenever it had been.

Definitely a near-human, I decided after a moment of blankness. A bit on the short side and with a stocky, robust muscular build- not too different from mine, maybe from a high-gravity world originally, I couldn't help thinking - what showed of his skin seemed to have a considerable amount of hair. He wore what looked like semi-cured kath hide, which had been crudely stitched together into something like a tunic.

Of more interest was his rather reddish face; huge-nosed, thick-lipped, a somewhat flattened forehead, prominent ridges over his eyes, a projecting face, and hardly any chin. None of these details were particularly unusual in and of themselves, no, but he didn't match any of the near-humans I knew about. There also seemed to be numerous markings, either skin pigments or some kind of paint, on the stranger's face. In the dim light, I couldn't really make much out, but a vertical line ran down from the outer corner of each eye for a few centimeters before curving inwards, making a bowed line on either side to that recessed chin. I realized that the reddish color, barely visible in this light, was also pigment, and not flushed capillaries as I had assumed.

He must have been standing near the speeder, guarding me, I realized. The near-human was eying me with as much interest as I had given him, lingering on my face, my robe, and on the Padawan braid that had draped itself over my cheekbone.

I licked my lips. "Hi," I said cautiously.

"Hyeeh," he replied politely, making me blink. I was beginning to get the feeling that these people were not what or who I had hoped to find. Somehow, I doubt they'll be taking me back.

I forged on. "Look, I did something stupid in running away. Could you help me get back? To the Enclave?" Seeing no comprehension, I repeated this in Ryl, Bothese, Durese, Chistori, Sullustese, and a couple of trade languages.

For each, his head tilted to the side, and when I had finished he said something short and absolutely unintelligible. I sighed. He doesn't speak Basic or any of the other languages I know and can pronounce. Force-Sensitive or not, he's definitely not someone from the Order. An illegal settler maybe? Even as I thought it, I knew how unlikely that was.

But really, is it any more likely that he'd be some native? Dantooine is sparsely settled, sure, but it is settled. I suppose primitive tribal sentients are less likely to be discovered than a more advanced civilization. Even so.

Lacking any other idea, I followed holodrama tradition and touched the hollow of my throat, where collarbones met sternum. "Revan." Took the hand away, touched the same place again. "Revan." Lowered my hand and looked at the stranger questioningly.

He grinned, keeping his lips drawn so no teeth showed. I noted that detail, realizing that, as far as I could tell, he was youngish. Under twenty, at any rate.

"Dantari." A little jerk of his head took in both him and the figures around the fire.

I felt a little thrill running up and down my spine. I knew the history of this planet. Millenia before Master Vodo-Siosk Baas came to this planet and established the training enclave that drew the current batch of settlers, there had been sentients, perhaps human, on Dantooine. They might have been colonists, or refugees, and some historians held that they had been slaves who had overthrown their masters. At any rate, they had built themselves a civilization, not particularly advanced but still creating roads and cities and monuments to their dead, even a written language. Then they had gone into a slow decline, their technology and population dwindling rapidly. From the things they left behind - they were absolutely everywhere on the habitable parts of Dantooine; there were at least four burial mounds within ten klicks of the Enclave itself - we knew a lot about them, but by the time Master Baas's ship landed, they were extinct.

Or possibly not. Primitive nomadic tribes are fairly hard to track and find. They've gone undiscovered on colonized worlds before. And this region doesn't have any estates or spaceports or even settlements. I chose this particular cavesite at random, but maybe the Force was pushing me towards it. 'No coincidence for a Jedi', Master Vrook likes to say... I didn't think it was particularly likely that I'd encountered a real Dantari remnant, but for all I knew these were a somewhat more recently-arrived people who had claimed the same name. It happens on other planets. Why not here?

While I had been standing and staring blankly into space, the Dantari had trotted to the fire and come back with something in his hands. A haunch of meat, the green skin still on, hair burned up in the cookfire. It looked, now that I was close, like it had been one of the subspecies of iriaz. He offered it towards me.

I knew from the new pain in my stomach, which had merged into the abdominal cramping pain, that it had been far too long since my last meal. But the thought of actually taking the haunch - it was green, and it smelled terribly sour - and eating it... My gorge rose, and I swallowed hard, turning my head away. I'm not going to throw up. I'm not going to throw up. My stomach gurgled despite me. Laury could probably make something for this. But Laury isn't here; most of the stuff she gives me is for cuts and bruises, too.

The Dantari said something in a confused tone of voice, then, after a few seconds of silence, laughed and called something out. Someone back by the fire shouted back before padding over. If they're shouting to each other, there can't be any big predators around, can there?

The newcomer, a little stockier and hairier than "my" Dantari, and with a rough tunic that looked like iriaz hide rather than kath, looked me up and down. If I was any judge at all, he was only faintly connected to the Force, and somewhat older than "my" Dantari, possibly a relative. A reddish triangle, similar to his fellow's but less ornate, marked his face, like some kind of ridiculously thin mask. I didn't get much of a chance to look, though, because he reached over, grabbed me by the arm, and pulled me close.

It was a move that my earliest combat instructors had taught, back in the early lessons when "fighting" and "dancing" and "chase games" were one and the same. I knew how to avoid it, how to twist out of the initial hold, where to dig my fingernails in if he wouldn't let go, what to do with my feet. My automatic response to being grabbed is very fast; not the record by anyone's count, but quite impressive for a human.

But this time, I froze up. Perhaps because I didn't pick up on that split-second Force warning, that faint sense of unpleasant intent, which always preceded the attempts of all my teachers and classmates and Bolook. I froze in shock like a spoiled, milk-fed headblind being mugged by a professional thief.

By the time I'd gathered my wits, he had spun me around and was holding both of my arms from behind in a grip like steelite bands. I tried first to wrench my arms away or twist my fingers to get at his, then to knock his teeth in with the back of my head, then to stamp on his feet, but the Dantari was too canny and avoided my attempts. The first stirrings of panic started to build in my chest, a feeling completely at odds with the utter lack of malice in the Force. I may be a Temple child, but I know what some men will do with young girls...

I stared with bulging eyes as the smaller Dantari came closer to me, tipping a palmfull of something that looked vaguely like leaf powder of some sort into his mouth, chewing it with an expression that looked like distaste. Not swallowing, he tore a bite of stringy viridian muscle from the haunch in his other hand and chewed for a long moment while my heart, pounding wildly, propelled itself into my mouth. He set the remainder of the meat down and stepped closer.

"What are you-"

Cutting me off, he tilted his head, seized my face in his hands, leaned in, and met my lips with his.

Shocked despite the fact that I had half been expecting this, I opened my mouth, trying vainly to get my hands up and push him away. His tongue shoved a sticky mass of softened meat - and it was sour, acidic even - past my teeth. Automatically I tried to push it out, but his lips, now pressed together, kept mine closed. Saliva welled up and pooled. I tasted stringy sour mammalmeat and bitter herbs and something else, something strange.

Swallow, came the wordless command. Trying not to vomit, I resisted. Swallow. There was a sense of using my tongue, shunting the mass into the back of my mouth, squeezing it down my throat. I resisted, tried to pull away. His leathery hands were firm, immobile. Swallow.

I swallowed.

The lump compressed my windpipe painfully as it rolled down my throat, leaving a residue and scraps of gristle stuck to my teeth. The Dantari lowered his hands and pulled away. A strand of saliva connected us for a moment more before snapping.

Trying to control my revulsion, I found that it was not nearly as difficult as I had expected. Most of my nausea was gone, and I was suddenly far more aware of nagging hunger pangs. There must have been something in those herbs... ugh. Ugh. How dare he?! I wish I'd thought to bite his tongue.

The desire to evacuate my stomach had faded, but I still felt unclean. Violated. I spat out the residue of meat and the taste of his mouth, shuddering. The larger Dantari's grip loosened, and I wrenched free, rekindling the ache in my shoulders. I didn't care.

"In a civilized society, you would be taken before a jury on charges," I managed, as coldly as I could. It sounded less cold than frightened, but I still heard an echo of Kreia in my words, and this silenced me more surely than the Dantari had.

"My" Dantari grinned at me, again not showing teeth, and said something that sounded jocular. His friend uttered a very human-sounding laugh and padded back to the fire. I stared at the first one, completely at a loss. The negative part of my mind whispered That's it? I thought they were going to do something worse.

The first one offered me the haunch of meat again. Hearing my stomach make odd sounds, feeling it start to wrap around my backbone, I snatched it like a wild animal and scuttled back to the shelter of the speeder. I was not followed, and was able to devour the meat without interference, hardly noticing the color or the weird taste.

That wasn't what I thought it would be. That was... that was food transfer. Nothing more. Otherwise, it would have took longer, and there would have been touching, and... other things. Remembering the times I had spied on headblind teenagers, my face heated up, burning my scalp and cheeks. I rubbed my mouth on my sleeve, taking off meat juices and saliva and some kind of reddish pigment which had previously covered the Dantari's lips.

I knew about how plenty of cultures saw nothing particularly sexual or even intimate in an exchange like that. Not my culture. I knew that there were plenty of Jedi who would go through that and worse, never batting an eye. Not me. I knew it was likely that I would go through worse as a Jedi. Not yet! Ashla and Bogan, Light Side and Dark, I am not ready!

I knew that what had just happened was innocuous, as exchanges went. But somehow, the thought of the future, vast and unknowable... despite all the warnings, all the lessons, all the injuries, it had never sunk in on me before. I can die. I can be changed out of all recognition. I can be forgotten.

Letting the remains of the meat fall, I hugged my knees to my chest and stared out into nothingness.

When I cared to venture out from my shelter, I was met, to my relief, by a new Dantari, a female. She didn't seem any older than the first two, and although I couldn't understand a word she said, I could tell by the way her voice was kept lowered that she was either low-status, or she just didn't want to wake anyone up. Since the figures around the fire, no more than dying coals now, were sprawled about like dolls and the sky was just starting to lighten, I could understand that.

The woman seemed to have been set as my guard; she became agitated whenever I started to walk more than a dozen meters away from the speeder. I could have escaped easily enough, but what would the point have been? She would only have called out and alerted her fellows. I had nowhere to run to; they would have found me, and I would have gained nothing for my efforts but more mistrust.

So I tried another trick that sees a lot of use in the holos; pointing at things and trying to get her to tell me what they were. I was patient this time, using the Force as much as I dared to pick up on the connotations of the words. It worked relatively well. "Well" because I managed to learn a scattering of nouns, modified by "relatively" because this Dantari, like the first one I had asked, went blank and uncomprehending quite often, and she didn't seem to understand that I was asking for her name. No matter how I asked, her reply was always "Dantari". They had names for each other, but I was never quite able to catch them. After a day or so I decided to refer to her as my Keeper, if only in my own thoughts.

My Keeper was on the smallish side. Her facial features seemed rather more humanlike than the other Dantari's had looked; the ridges over her eyes were less apparent, her mouth did not protrude so much, and her forehead bore less of a slope. This is a fairly prevelant trait among humanoids; females often appear far more humanlike than males. I managed to get her to tell me what the reddish triangle on her face was called - khmsah. From what I could gather through the Force, it seemed to have much of the same meaning as "mask", warding away evil spirits and telling something of the history or personality of its "wearer".

It seemed rather impractical to me, considering that the things were essentially made of layers of some kind of kohl-type soot and pigments from huito and mehendi leaves, each of which washed or wore off within a few weeks. I did have to admit, though, that the khmsah were oddly beautiful; a red-orange base with intricate darker patterns and hints of yellow and brown. The symbols and figures in them didn't seem particularly representational, but they were certainly striking. And they helped me to identify the Dantari by more than just their Force - signatures.

The first one I had seen became, to me, "Shaman", because of his slightly stronger Force-Sensitivity and the way the others, particularly my Keeper, seemed to regard him with respect. There was a strange jagged shape, almost a winged egg, on one side of his forehead; on the other was a circle-in-an-oval that might have been an eye, and in between was a sort of tangled knot. Out of those I had a chance to see, Shaman's kmsah were by far the most detailed. In daylight, I had to prevent myself from staring. My arts appreciation teacher would have been delighted. She had always accused me, rightly, of not taking her class seriously.

I vaguely resented Shaman for the force-feeding, but in truth the memory had already started to blur at the edges, becoming less and less important. Maybe it was the recovering concussion, maybe there'd been something in the meat or the leaf-powder that came with it, but hardly a day had passed before I didn't think of it at all. The only remainder was a slight dislike, which in truth had transferred itself to Shaman's companion.

My ability to come up with monikers kind of failed with Shaman's friend. I disliked him, but not strongly. He stood out only in that he was slightly less wary of me than the others of the group. There seemed to be a connection between him and his friend, but I honestly could not tell what kind of connection it was. Eventually, I started to think of him as "Bry", a naval lieutenant in one of my namesake's war films. There was a sort of knot in his kmsah up between his heavy eyebrows, similar to Shaman's. Bry was, if anything, even harder to talk to than my Keeper; he seemed blank no matter how I addressed him. It was frustrating.

The other Dantari, the rest of the group, were wary of me. I never found out just how many there were. Surely no more than a dozen. They watched me from shadows and in the brush, or by standing many meters away. As far as I could tell they regarded me with some combination of fear and awe. I couldn't really blame them. I had no idea how to ask about religion, but the Dantari who had erected structures all over Dantooine in the distant past had worshiped "sky gods" in their "metal moons". Casus Sandral had once explained, in a state of excitement, that they seemed to have been referring to spacers in their ships. If these Dantari retained any of those old beliefs, well, here I was, a rather young sky god in a rather young moon. Even Shaman and my Keeper would not come too close to the wrecked speeder. What changes would I bring to them?

I spent the next few days simultaneously trying to learn the language and deal with the slow, disgusting bloody ooze dribbling out of me, with roughly equal success in both attempts. I would have gladly maimed for a bath; when I slept the flow seemed to lessen, but it still managed to get around whatever I had put into my underdrawers to soak it up. It smelled terrible, not like blood at all, but thicker and much like ammonia.

And I hate ammonia.

I might have sponged myself clean with a square of cloth and the water collected by the moisture vaporator I had set up, but I disliked the thought of letting the Dantari see me unclothed. It was bad enough already, thinking that they might be watching when I relieved myself.

It amused me, at least, to see that such a simple device as the moisture vaporator was so impressive to them. Here was a piece of entirely unknown technology that made clear, pure water out of air, and here I was tending it and collecting the water without a second thought. One and all, even Shaman and my Keeper, watched with wide eyes whenever I touched it, and none would go near. It seemed that they expected it to burst into flames or something.

Anyway, after a couple of days, when the ooze had lessened a bit and started getting rusty in color, it became clear that the Dantari were waiting for me to do something. I had no idea what it was, but I decided to wait it out. It would resolve itself in time, surely.

Apparently the Dantari didn't feel the same way.

[thanks, beta Charamei]