Chapter Two - A SLAVE OF KI-KI

This is not how I imagined my homecoming. I wanted flowers, jubilant cheers of welcome, wine poured over me as I walk through my small town on Udjein Major and into the waiting arms of my beloved sister.

I am given passing glances and the odd nod and I realise that most of these people, individuals I remember as I grew up here, do not seem to recognise me. Had my time away as a soldier changed me so much? Or were their stares concentrated more on the fact that I was some one-armed soldier and not a citizen of this town?

Some give me quizzical stares but are probably wondering why this road-dirtied legionary is walking through their town. I do not know why I wore the armour or why I had my vibrosword strapped to my hip. It has always been there and now it gives me security. All I was missing was my energy shield and the blaster I had lost in the battle. There were others worthier of those items now and it was nought but a gracious offer, and probably sympathy for my wound, that made the officer of my company allow me to keep my vibrosword and uniform.

The road to my small house is shorter than I remember it. My idea of a journey’s length has been downtrodden, now, after my days in the army. Thirty-mile marches in a day. Vast distance, light-years travelled in mere hours. What I remember to be a long stroll down the main street is now little more than a brisk walk.

My house looms before me and I realise my thoughts are not on my home. I think of Anto and his words of parting.

You may not be a whole man, but you have proved to us all that you are whole Soldier of Fedarn.

My friend Anto. He cared for me during those days of healing and accompanied me during the whole time of our army’s journey south to the off-planet ships. We were, or rather they are now, under the command of a new Commander who seems to have less regard for his men than he does for the enemy we fought.

I stare at the door to my house a long time and am barely aware that it has been opened.

 The young woman with the long dark hair watches me nervously as she exits the house with a container she obviously was about to tip into a garbage disposal ‘droid. She frowns and looks around me to see if there is anyone else with me. I am so pre-occupied by the fact that my home looks in a state of disarray, with cracked painted walls and the hanging flowers all stripped from the eaves, that I barely see that it is my sister.

   “What is it, legionary?” she asks quietly. Always polite has Dia been. Always pleasant to strangers and friends with never a bad word to be said about anything. It amazed me that she had never married – all in the town thought she would have no trouble in finding a husband.

I stammer my answer, “Dia...” and then realise that my voice is deeper, grave and resonant. I know my face is covered in a light down as I have not shaved my hair away for a long time.

But my voice does not make here wonder who I am. The container drops to the ground and shatters, the liquids and lumps of material it contain splash over the road. The garbage ‘droid squeals it’s disgust. Her hand is to her mouth and her eyes glaze over and then, unheeding the fact that I must smell like the rear of a riddabeast, she throws her arms around me and shouts my name, all the while weeping and crying out.

I cannot hold her. I dare not. Only one of my hands could encircle her and I so desperately wanted it to be both of them. To draw her close, to smell her hair, to grip her fiercely and never let her go. My sister. My sister.

She notices my lack of movement and she stands back to regard me. Her smiles are wide but she is concerned, that is obvious.

A man passing in the street notices our embrace and calls out to her, asking if she will be long with me. She ignores him and before I can question the enquiry she has reached out to pull me into the house. She reaches for my left arm.

I am amazed she does not notice my lack of limb. She hauls me into the small room by the shoulder and slams the heavy door behind her, the broken container and the liquid it had deposited on the street forgotten.

Again, she is all smiles. She still has hold of my shoulder and she takes a deep breath. She takes my right hand in hers and slides her other down my left arm to take my other hand. When her hand meets nothing she jumps back in shock.

Her reaction makes me feel dejected, tortured. I turn away but she reaches out and turns me back.

   “This is why you are home?” she asks, lifting my half-arm up to inspect the bandages it still required whilst the new flesh healed over the bone.

   “It is.”

   “Then you are no longer a soldier of Ki-Ki?”

The words bite me in the heart but I do not show my pain. “I will always be a soldier of Ki-Ki,” I answer. “I will always be a soldier as long as I draw breath. That man outside...”

   “I have missed you,” she says softly, although loud enough to talk over my question. “Now you are home. Life can return to as it was. We are together again, you and I.”

My eyes stray over the room, which seems bare and neglected, and I shake my head at her. “You have been here, alone, this whole time?” I ask with a little more anger than I realise. She appears perturbed.

   “I have been awaiting my brother,” she says defiantly, standing and placing her hand on my arm. My whole arm.

   “But what if I never returned?”

   “My brother? A heroic soldier? Not return? That thought did not even enter my mind. I knew you would come back. I knew it.”

Heroic soldier? How could I tell her? How could I tell her that during my first combat I fled like a mouse to hide deep in a forest from the enemy? What reason could I give for such cowardice, such heartless actions that had one in every ten of my company put to death?

Even as I think such things I know she will not fully believe my shame. Not that she will think I am not telling the truth, but she will convince me that there was obviously another reason as to why I ran, another side to the story that I did not perceive.

   “The streets appear empty, quiet,” I ponder and seat myself down in my late father’s chair. “The town seems lacking in the gaiety I remember.”

   “It has not been a good few years,” she says. “The crops have been failing us, many artisans have left for the army or been conscripted and the trade of the town has changed.”

   “To what?”

Her voice is tinged with sadness and I cannot help but be aware of it. It was supposed to be a time of celebration – I had returned home, after all – but after the misery I had seen and the long journey from Zelon I seemed to thrive on negativity. “A slave master has set up his trade just outside the town in the old garrison fort,” she says in a small voice. “Now the streets, once bright and filled with sounds of joy, have been replaced by the sound of chains, binders and misery. The town is not as it once was, brother. I am afraid you have come home to another place.”

Oh, what foul fate had brought me to this? What sounds the Gods must be making with their laughter as their cruel joke descends upon me! The yearning, the longing to return to my home and this is what has become of it!

   “Then what have you done to continue living here?” I ask. “Why did you not leave when the crops failed, moved to somewhere where the fields were lush to ply your skills?”

   “I could not leave!” she wails. “I could not leave here, thinking that any day you could walk through the streets and return to me. I had to stay! What would you have thought of me? I promised to stay here and welcome you home. It has been hard but I kept my vow.”

It is hard for me, the next few moments. I could not understand what she had done to stay here, in this shell of the town I once knew, but as the conversation goes quiet I remember the man in the street. His words, his question, and as that knowledge enters my mind I want to cry out, to roar.

I cannot understand why I do not do such a thing. I blame it on the weariness of the journey, of the sadness that had engulfed me as I walked through the town. Maybe it was the final stab to my soul and it did nothing to increase my pain. Maybe, when I think of the lives lost to my cowardice and my violence, I do not care.

As I stare at the room I know to be her bedchamber and see that her bed is covered in the finest of silks, draped with cloth of exquisite embroidery and surrounded by wine-jugs and fruit-bowls, I cannot help myself but weep.

She does not try to comfort me. In a way, she does not know me anymore. The shy, skilled sculptor she once knew was dead, killed as soon as he had been struck with a poweraxe that destroyed his skills. I had no home, now. The last of my money used to pay for my return home, not enough money to even buy the simplest artificial limb. My idyllic life has been shattered. I could not cut stone and Dia, my beautiful Dia, had changed her skills with the caring for harvests to skills for the caring of men.

And as I realise that, as I realise that she had not left the town because she had been waiting for my return, I know I was once again guilty for leaving those that trusted me.

Why I showered guilt upon myself so easily is unknown to me. I was willing, nay wanting, to be punished in every way possible for my actions in the army. Was this, then, the retribution of the Gods? Not only would they take my skill as a sculptor, they would also remove my home and destroy all I love? If they were then they were sore of my crime indeed – no man should have to endure the sorrow of this kind of homecoming. I could not imagine what could be worse than this. It is then that I realise that I do not belong here anymore.

Well, I think, then let this next sacrifice placate the Gods. Let my actions be judged by my fate, let what I am about to do settle the score between my guilt and my need for redemption.

I have no money left from the army for the journey to my ‘home’ cost me dear. I have no way to earn more money, my stump and lack of remembrance of what I once did has seen to that. I know, however, that I will not allow this indignity to continue to my sister and that I will take care of her, as I should have years ago.

   “You must leave this place,” I say in a low voice that trembles with the aftermath of my grief.

   “How?” she replies, her own speech breaking under the strain of holding back her own emotion. “I have no money. I only... earn... enough to buy food and clothes. I cannot afford travel.”

   “You will have enough,” I say. “You will have a ticket off-world and provisions to make it to a good place that has not been stripped of its soul by young men’s need to prove themselves in war.”

She looks at me with confusion. I know she cannot comprehend what I am about to do and I decide not to tell her – I do not want her screaming at me, trying to drag me back home as I walk to the slave master’s fort. I try not to imagine her face as she learns of my decision; I do not want to hear her wails of sorrow, or maybe her curses of hate for leaving her so soon. All I know is that if I do not rise from the seat of my father and walk from that house then I never will, and I will have done nought but pile more guilt upon the furnace of my anger.

I know she is safely out of the town as I head for Fedarn. I know she took the money she was sent and she bought the off-world ticket and provisions. I am glad she left without trying to find me, or convince me that what I was doing was not what she wanted. Maybe she does hate me. If she does, then I am glad of that also. For that will strengthen her resolve and then maybe she will find a love, find a man that could take care of her and father the children I knew she wanted.

Or maybe she did try to find me. Maybe she ran through the streets, shouting my name, crying in the night for my return. I had come home, and in less time than it took to walk the street to my house I had left again.

Truth be told, the army had changed me. As an innocent young man I had played and wandered the town, divulged in games and hobbies and found my skill with hammer and chisel and stone. I had no idea of the dangers beyond the walls. I had seen combat in the theatre and that was all I knew of the lands beyond my home. It had seemed glamorous, daunting... but had turned out to be so fundamentally brutal.

Now, as I look on the streets as the slave ship blasts through the void towards Fedarn, the capital of the Ki-Ki Sector, I wonder if the town has changed at all, or whether it is me that changed to something darker and less recognisable from that I remember.

Maybe that was why I did what I did because I no longer wanted to be responsible for my own future.

The slave master, Maru, was a picture of amazement as I approached him and offered to sell myself into slavery. He is a rotund Twi-lek with a thick head of curls and a strangely kind face.

   “What do you intend to do with the money?” he laughs as he rises from his seat on the rough porch of his house.

   “The money will be forwarded to my sister,” I explain. He seems momentarily surprised but then waves me away.

   “What can I do with a one-armed slave?” he scoffs. “Perhaps you could cook half a meal? Or clean half a home? I do not think you would fetch such a good price. Even I am not willing to buy you and I have to scrabble for bodies on this forsaken planet.”

   “I was a soldier,” I explain. “I suffered this wound fighting the final battle of the campaign in the Setnin Sector. That alone should give a price worthy of your trouble.”

Maru studies my armour and vibrosword, and smiles to himself with a hidden thought. He shakes his head again. “And you think that somehow means that people will think different of you as they stare at your stump? Why, soldier? Why would you allow yourself the indignity of that?”

I see no reason as to why I should explain myself to this man. Would he understand? Could he understand? Surely a slave that has allowed himself to become property could not be wholly sane?

But how else could I explain to him the reasons for my need for the money, for my overwhelming need to make up for all the pain and the shame my sister had endured as she waited for me to come home.

I explain by simply saying, “My sister has suffered much during my time in the army and I cannot help but share the blame for that. I wish to make sure her future is secure.” I hold up my crippled arm. “I have no such future worth speaking of.”

Maru simply nods. If he has sympathy for my cryptic words I cannot tell.

The price he pays is not as much as I envisaged, my knowledge of slavery is little, but soon after I am stripped of my armour and vibrosword and placed in simple grey clothing. Maru studies my belongings and, with a strange reverence that I do not fully comprehend, he wraps them in cloth and places them with his own belongings.

The flight to Fedarn will be long. What fate awaits me there I cannot tell, but I know that my sister is safe and away from that old, cursed town, and that is all that matters to me now. That fact, coupled with the knowledge that whatever she does now is far better than what she was, allows me a little satisfaction.

And maybe, somewhere in my soul, a little redemption.