pronker

Part Ninety-Five

The next morning's not-yet-harsh sunslight slanted across Anakin and Cliegg and Shmi's grave. "You'll comm me when it's all over."

It wasn't a request. Anakin didn't bristle, however. "Yes."

"I can't look at them anymore, you know. We used to see them sometimes on the ridge over there" --- he pointed --- "right at sunsup. Shmi and I would get up before dawn like we always did, drink our caf on the top step of the compound and look around at the land. The land. Heh."

"Your land. Cliegg, Mom looked happy in the vids you sent. The land and you made her happy."

There was no need for thanks and Cliegg didn't offer any. "Tell them to stay away. Tell them the one-who-survived-the-Bloodrite-torture-the-longest's tomb will open and suck them in and the half-man in the saddle-that-floats will pursue them and never stop." Cliegg's breath hoarsened and he paused to cough. "Tell them they can have their Hubba melons and waterskins in reparation for their raid here, but do one thing for me, Anakin Skywalker: Don't give them any mushrooms, dried or uncured, vaporator or Gafsa well varieties. Do that much in honor of your Mom." He reached down to wipe grit from Shmi's weathered stone. "She was picking mushrooms for our breakfast that morning ... it was even earlier than usual. She'd wanted to surprise me, Beru figured out when it was all over with, when she was all over with ... "

"I know, Cliegg." After touching his mother's etched name, Anakin leaned on Cliegg's chair and rose from his knees. The chair bobbed under the extra weight. He clamped a hand on Cliegg's shoulder.

"You coming back?" Cliegg squeezed Anakin's hand and held on tight.

All the time you need there, take without counting. "I'll ... see, Cliegg. We need to do this for your farm and all the others in this area." Anakin had not told the Lars about his vengeance. It might reinforce hatreds, and he had had enough of hatred. "I'll comm you for sure. We'll go to look now for the water and Hubba melons."

"Don't let them cheat you, son. Five wupiupi apiece for melons, three truguts for waterskins ought to do it."

Sweet of him. Mom had picked a good man. "Thanks, Cliegg."

"Pick out something for Beru and the baby. Put it on my tab. We'll get it the next time we go to town, if you don't come back here."

"Huh?"

"Beru's pregnant. You didn't know?"

"No, I didn't." Living Force, you kept your mouth shut on this one. "Congratulate her for me, for us. And Owen, too." Owen was almost exactly Anakin's age and soon to be a father. Like Grunbi on Trow, Owen would lead a peaceful and steady life. Unlike Grunbi, Owen's existence would be bound by sand, not a river. There would be a few rough spots, some whirlwinds, and they would be dealt with until Owen's own end beneath the sand. "We need to go. I'll be in touch, Cliegg."

"Goodbye, son."

Anakin trotted up the Courier's ramp. Obi-Wan ran the preflight check industriously in the co-pilot's seat. "Guess what? Beru's pregnant!"

"Mmmmhm."

"Did you know?"

"Mmmmhm."

"Why doesn't anybody tell me these things?"

Obi-Wan finished the checklist. "That's all right, Anakin. You can't put a thirty-six --- "

" --- year-old head on twenty year-old shoulders, yeah, I realize that." Anakin input the calculations for the short hop to Mos Eisley. "I guess you are the Master, Master."

"And don't you forget it."

Two hours later, one hundred waterskins and six hundred Hubba melons richer and slightly less than two hundred credits poorer, Gafsa canyon's echoes hushed the two Jedi into silence. Anakin pointed his portable scanner to the water well. "They're over the next ridge, out of sight. Plan going into effect ... now," he whispered. From the rigged external sound system on the Courier groaned a reverberating rumble, reaching into subsonics. A mature wounded bantha call, blended with a youngling bantha's cry of distress, floated over the Jundland Wastes. Three hours later, two Tuskens, one marked with a shaman's blue goggles and the other, shorter one most like its apprentice, approached Anakin. Anakin had brushed up on his Huttese.

"Kee chai chai cun kuta?" The shaman spoke first, probably warier than normal about an intrusion so near to their sacred well.

"Je killya um pasa doe beeska wumpa." It warned me off, and I brought up killing right away. Good, blunt negotiations. Two hundred words later, Anakin had explained the reparations. Accompanied by fingers drawing in the sand to clarify the number of items offered, Anakin completed the parley, knowing Obi-Wan had his eyes and the weapons on the Courier trained on the Tuskens in case things got out of hand. The Tuskens agreed to the conditions. They seemed thin to Anakin's eyes; perhaps a famine blighted their existence and they were here at the well to recoup their strength. Anakin couldn't summon the words to convey Cliegg's personal warning, and settled for looking as fierce as he imagined the Tuskens looked under their wrappings.

"Wa wanna coe moulee rah?"

"'When can you expect payment?' Right now."

Anakin raised his mechno-hand and waggled its thumb and pinkie and Obi-Wan opened the Courier's ramp in reply. Two hours later and Obi-Wan and Anakin joined the Lars for the family's after-dinner Tatooni Junko in the homestead's pergola, although the two Jedi abstained from the strong ale themselves. Afterwards, Beru showed them their room with its stencils of baby banthas and dewbacks gamboling near the ceiling and trailing down to the wide bed. "It'll be the baby's room, but you can use it as long as you like," she said shyly.

The river acknowledged.

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Part Ninety-Six

In the four weeks that Obi-Wan and Anakin stayed on Tatooine, Beru's baby bump expanded to a bulge and Anakin freed his memories of his childhood more and more to the scrapbook section of his thoughts. Something to be opened and looked at occasionally, but not dwelled upon. It was too soon to put Shmi's tragedy into the scrapbook. Anakin thought about her every day, living here with Cliegg, befriending Beru, mothering Owen for all the years of his adolescence. He kept Shmi's memory alive. During their visits to Mos Espa, nearly everyone he knew had resettled with different owners or, like Jira, had died. Watto remained, obstreperous as ever. He hadn't bought any more slaves. The heat of the long days made for leisurely amorous early mornings. It was after a particularly athletic session between the sheets back at the Lars homestead that Anakin noticed Obi-Wan's right hand trembling longer than it should have after Obi-Wan had climaxed.

"Here." Anakin tossed the moistened cloth to Obi-Wan after using it. Obi-Wan wiped himself without saying a word. "How are you feeling, Master?"

"I'm feeling great, fantastic and marvelous all rolled up into one. The clear desert air, all this relaxation has done me so much good ... "

Obi-Wan nattered on. His smile is entirely too bright. The tremor didn't fully stop until Obi-Wan gathered the Force to him. "Excuse me, Anakin. Be right back, darling." He rose from their bed, swayed a little, said, "Got up too quick," and headed for the 'fresher next to the small closet.

He and Obi-Wan were pleasantly surprised to have their own 'fresher, something Owen recently installed for the Lars nursery. It saved awkward revelations in the passageway. Anakin didn't know what Cliegg and Owen and Beru thought, and the Lars were too polite to pry. All in all, it was the thick adobe walls of the compound that saved Obi-Wan and Anakin from enduring knowing looks or fits of giggling. Life here had a rhythm as old as time: up at dawn, meditation, make love, breakfast with the family. Most mornings, they joined Owen and Cliegg, heading to work in a landspeeder, crowded shoulder to shoulder, Cliegg's chair strapped onto the fender. Anakin increased vaporator production by eight per cent, Obi-Wan learned much at his side, and the Lars said little, but looked their thanks. Anakin rigged a vegetable steamer for Beru by rewiring an automatic Kopi tea brewer and Obi-Wan led her through some basic pain relieving exercises and meditations for the ongoing pregnancy, as well as for when labor began. He told her privately about a Calming-Down kata he had used with a ten year-old Anakin. She laughed a long time over it, and promised to use it when he had adapted it for a non-Force-sensitive child.

Obi-Wan closed the 'fresher door firmly after himself and locked it, something he had taken to doing lately. Anakin frowned at him when he emerged. "Master, we need to leave tomorrow." It came out more authoritative than he meant.

Obi-Wan agreed readily. "Yes. Dooku and Grievous have had their setbacks, but they aren't captured yet. I'm concerned about Jabiim. The environment would wreak havoc on our armor."

"I don't think we'll be sent to Jabiim." Keep on talking about the war. Keep it all business. "Maybe back to Muunilinst for a recon mission."

Obi-Wan held his right hand with his left one and nodded. He rose to dress, saying something under his breath that sounded like "need to be ... to be effective," but Anakin ignored it. They ate a usual solid breakfast of Beru's --- no stoneslugs here --- and finished the day uneventfully. Beru sucked in her breath at their dinnertime announcement of departure. Cliegg and Owen offered them a Tatooni Junko in a farewell toast and for once the two Jedi partook. It did nothing for them.

The next morning was, as usual, clear and warmer. "Goodbye, goodbye, take care, brother ... "

"Come back to see us, the war can't last forever ... "

Cliegg pulled Anakin's sleeve so that Anakin would need to lean down. "Keep the cooling duct closed next time you come, ah, for a visit. Embarrassed Owen a little." Cliegg remained straight-faced. "I don't care what you do as long as you don't do it in the compound and frighten the eopies. You're a good boy."

xxxxx

Two and-a-half days later, Luminara smoothed Obi-Wan's right thumb into his palm and folded the fingers on top of it. "How's that?"

"It's all right, Lulu. No shakes."

Lulu? "And you've been reciting your lesson twice daily? Taken your vitamins?"

"Yep."

Over a month of this. Time to call for help. "Obi-Wan, I'm calling in Master Koon. It's time" --- she smiled encouragingly --- "we got you well." If Koon's imprinting technique has caused this, I'll ... I'll ... ice up his mask.

Obi-Wan swung his legs as he squirmed on the exam table. "Tomorrow's the picnic, Lulu. I don't want to miss it. Can't it wait?"

She hadn't seen that pleading look on Obi-Wan's face in thirty years. "Very well. I'll go over your case with Master Koon in the meantime and we'll hypothesize its etiology."

"Big words, Lulu." Obi-Wan's lower lip protruded.

"We'll think about you and try to --- no, we will --- figure out why your body is doing this."

Obi-Wan whooped, jumped down from the exam table and ran out the door. It barely had time to open for him. At Luminara's bewildered look, Anakin shouted over his shoulder as he followed his Master at a gallop, "Delayed intoxication from a Tatooni Junko three days ago. You should have seen him in hyperspace this morning. Worse than the Yimpian incident!" He tore off down the hallway.

The river imbibed.

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