[A pilgrim's card: thick pressed paper, soft at the corners. Jedhan script on the face, Basic on the back in a careful hand.]
Walk toward the light you cannot see. Someone has walked there before you.
Wayfarers' House · Level 1289 Your guide: O. Nammas Keep this card. Give it to someone when you go home.
I. The Climb
His father counted the pilgrims the way other men counted credits: twice, slowly, and without once looking down.
"Eight," Oreth Nammas said, to no one, and then, to the pilgrims, in his warm, slow Basic with Jedha still rounding every vowel: "Good morning. We walk together today. Nobody walks ahead and nobody walks behind. If you need to stop, we all stop. The Temple has been there for a very long time. It will wait for us."
The pilgrims smiled at him. People always smiled at his father. Namren, leaning against the doorframe of the Wayfarers' House with his hands in his coat pockets, had spent most of his childhood trying to work out how he did it.
The hostel's lobby was a long low room on Level 1289 with a mosaic floor worn soft by six generations of feet, and a smell of spiced tea that never quite went away. It was barely dawn, which down here meant the glowpanels had shifted from blue to a pale, hopeful yellow. Namren had left Keefer at the stall, standing guard by his crate with his lens on the market entrance, and had told him he'd be back by dark. Keefer had said, "The subject is leaving," and Namren had decided not to take it personally.
He was here because his father had asked him to come. That was all. His father had asked, and it was one day, and he'd said yes before he'd thought about it, and now he was here, in yesterday's shirt, being a guide's son for the first time in years. He felt about twelve.
The pilgrims were eight, as advertised. A Sullustan grandmother in a shawl embroidered with tiny stars, who had already given Namren a sweet. A young couple from somewhere in the Mid Rim who held hands and kept looking at everything as if it might vanish. Three quiet brothers in grey robes who might have been monks. A solemn Rodian child with its mother. And at the back, leaning on a cane with great dignity, an elderly Cerean woman whose tall, domed head nearly brushed the lintel of the door. Her name was Ammaline. She'd told Namren so, very formally, and shaken his hand.
Oreth wore his guide's scarf. It was the only thing he'd brought from Jedha that he still wore every day: a long length of sand-coloured cloth, wrapped loose at the throat, with the names of his family stitched along one edge in the thin, looping script of the Whills. His grandfather's name. His great-grandfather's. The guides who had walked the Holy City before him. Namren had asked once, when he was small, if his own name would go on it one day. His father had said, When you've walked somewhere.
Namren had stopped asking after that.
They set out. And here was the first thing Namren learned about his father's job, which was that his own stage bit was a lie.
Oreth did not take the stairs twelve hundred levels. Nobody could. They rode a public turbolift up through the first nine hundred, packed in with shift workers and a Gamorrean carrying a crate of live fish, and the pilgrims clutched their prayer cards and stared at the level numbers falling, and the Mid Rim couple held hands so tight their knuckles went pale. Only at the upper transit hub did they step out into light, real light, grey and enormous, and see ahead of them the long rising avenue of the Processional Way, and the stairs.
"You told me you took the stairs," Namren said quietly.
"I take the stairs," said his father. "I never said all of them."
Namren decided to keep the bit exactly as it was. The truth had never once improved a joke.
On the Processional Way, Oreth changed.
It was nothing you could point to. He walked at the same pace. He talked in the same voice, pointing out a statue here, a fountain there, the old Senate towers catching the morning. But Namren, watching, saw it: the way his father's eyes moved over the group every few steps. Not counting. Reading. The Sullustan grandmother tiring on the long flights. The couple too excited to notice they were thirsty. The Rodian child dawdling at every fountain.
Ammaline's hip.
Namren saw it a full minute after his father did. The Cerean hadn't complained, hadn't slowed, but on the third flight her cane had begun to land a fraction harder on the left. Oreth said nothing. He simply stopped at the next landing, admired a carving that did not deserve admiring, and when they set off again he had turned the whole group down a side ramp, gentler and longer, which avoided the next four flights altogether. And he had moved Ammaline to the front.
"The slowest walks first," he said, when Namren raised an eyebrow. "Then nobody is left behind, and nobody has to say why."
Ammaline, at the head of the group, did not look back. But her shoulders came down, just slightly, like someone setting down a bag.
Namren walked on with a strange feeling in his chest.
He knew that. He knew that. Sectors and tells, reading a crowd one table at a time. It was the thing he did every night on the stage at the Low Lantern. He'd always thought he'd invented it.
Except his father did it without a punchline. His father did it and then just... helped.
It unsettled him more than he could say, so he did what he always did with things he couldn't say. He made a joke.
"Keep up, everyone," he called, when the Rodian child stopped at its eleventh fountain. "The Jedi have a very strict policy. Anyone who arrives late has to do the meditation. The long one. Nine hours. No snacks."
The child hurried. The grandmother laughed so hard she had to stop. The Mid Rim couple laughed, and the monk brothers pretended not to, and even Ammaline, at the front, made a sound that might have been a Cerean chuckle.
Namren glanced at his father, braced.
Oreth didn't stop him. Oreth just walked on, and there was something at the corner of his mouth that on any other man would have been a smile. For a hundred steps the two of them worked the group together: the father keeping them moving, the son keeping them light.
"It's heavy today," his father said, after a while, looking up.
"The Force?"
Oreth considered the sky, the towers, the far-off flash of gunships crossing the upper lanes.
"Everything," he said.
II. The Steps
Namren had seen the Temple every night of his life for six years. A single golden point, at the top of the shaft outside the Low Lantern, so high and small it was barely a star.
He had not been ready for it to be a wall.
It rose ahead of them at the top of the Processional Way, and it did not stop rising. Five great spires, four around one, the central one so tall that when he tipped his head back to find its tip his neck ached and his balance went. The stone was pale and ancient and the colour of old bone in the grey morning. The public steps ran up to it in a vast unbroken slope, wide enough for an army, and the doors at the top were so far away and so enormous that the people passing through them looked like dust.
Twelve hundred levels up. All those nights, looking at a light. It had been this.
The pilgrims went quiet. Nobody told them to. The Sullustan grandmother pressed her card to her chest. The Mid Rim couple let go of each other's hands for the first time all day, as if they needed both of their own. Ammaline lowered herself onto the lowest step, her cane across her knees, and closed her eyes, and Namren watched her lips move.
Oreth knelt beside her. He didn't pray aloud. He just knelt, with his palms open on his knees, and the scarf with the family names lifted a little in the wind.
Namren stood. He didn't know what else to do.
And the Jedi went past.
They came down the great steps in twos and threes, and up them, and across them, on business that had nothing to do with anyone kneeling. Brown robes and pale robes. Boots. Hurried, purposeful strides. He'd grown up hearing about Jedi the way you heard about weather on other planets. He'd imagined them serene. Calm. Glowing, a little, like the light at the top of the shaft.
They were not serene. They were tired.
A woman with a bandaged hand, the wrapping grey with old blood, talking low and fast to the man beside her. A tall man whose robe was scorched along the hem. A boy, and he was a boy, younger than Namren, with a padawan braid behind his ear and a face that had forgotten how to be young, walking with his eyes fixed on some point a long way off. Three years of war was written on all of them, in the set of their shoulders and the shadows under their eyes. Not one of them looked down at the pilgrims kneeling on their steps. Not unkindly. They just didn't see them. They had somewhere to be, and it was always somewhere worse.
Namren felt the reflex rise in him the way it always did in a room that had gone flat: find the table that's hurting, and make it laugh. He had a line. He had six lines. He looked at the boy with the braid and wondered what it would take.
He had never seen people who needed a laugh so badly and so obviously wouldn't take one.
What are you so tired of? he wanted to ask them. What's out there that I don't know about?
Then one of them stopped.
An older Jedi, a man, human, grey in the beard, coming down the steps alone. His robe was plain and worn at the elbows. He slowed as he passed the pilgrims, and his eyes went over them, and stopped on Oreth, kneeling at Ammaline's side.
Oreth looked up.
The Jedi nodded. Once. Not the brief, polite nod of a stranger. The nod of someone who recognised him, who had seen him on these steps a hundred mornings with a hundred groups of strangers, and knew exactly what he did and why.
And Oreth nodded back. Not bowing. Not grateful. Just a nod, level, one working man to another.
Then the Jedi reached down and patted Oreth gently on the shoulder, once, and was gone, down the steps into the crowd. His father turned back to Ammaline as if nothing had happened.
Namren stared after the Jedi. Something tightened in his throat.
He had never seen his father be known. In the lower levels Oreth Nammas was a quiet man from a dusty moon who walked tourists up stairs, the man neighbours were polite to and never thought about. Namren had been a little embarrassed by him for six years. He'd made a whole bit out of him.
And up here, on the steps of the Jedi Temple, a Jedi had stopped on his way to a war to nod at his father.
Namren didn't say anything about it on the way down. He didn't know how.
III. Two Mirrors
The family apartment was two rooms and a kitchen alcove in lower Uscru, a long way above Namren's room and a long way below anywhere that mattered. His mother had covered every wall with shelves and every shelf with books: real books, paper and bound, which on Coruscant was either an eccentricity or a small fortune depending on who was asking. There were more of them every time he visited. He suspected they were breeding.
Idrenne Sael set a bowl of stew in front of him and looked at him the way she'd looked at him when he was nine and had come home with a split lip. Once, top to bottom. Taking inventory.
"You look thin," she said.
"I'm a working artist, Mother. Thin is the uniform."
"You look like a starving artist. There's a difference. One of them's a choice." She sat. "How were the pilgrims?"
It was a good question. It was a very good question. It was a question with no stage in it at all, and he saw exactly what she was doing, and he let her do it. She asked about the Sullustan grandmother. She asked about the couple from the Mid Rim, and whether the monks had spoken, and she asked, with real concern, about Ammaline's hip. She steered the whole meal like a pilot threading an asteroid field, calmly and without ever looking at the rocks.
His father ate in silence.
That was the first thing. Oreth was quiet, but not like this. Normally he'd have told the story of the day himself, slowly, in his own way, with long pauses that you learned to wait through. Tonight he just ate, and listened, and said nothing. Namren watched his hands. They were steady. Too steady. Like a man keeping them still on purpose.
His mother was watching the same hands. Namren saw her see it. Saw her decide to keep talking anyway.
So Namren did what he was good at. He riffed. He did the Gamorrean with the fish on the turbolift, which got a snort out of his mother. He did the Senate district, the towers up there so high the air-taxi drivers needed oxygen, the senators who hadn't seen the ground since the Battle of Naboo.
"I knew some people who went up there," his mother said, lightly. "Old friends. From home. They went into the delegation, years ago, when Chandrila was sending its best and brightest to save the Republic." She turned her cup a quarter turn on the table. "A former student of mine wrote to me from there once. Terribly earnest. All about how things would be different now."
"Did you write back?"
"No."
It was one word, and it closed like a door. She picked up her spoon. Subject over.
Namren looked at her. His mother, the scholar, who'd come to Jedha to write about the Whills and stayed for a guide. Who'd followed that guide to Coruscant and filled two rooms with books and never, as far as he knew, gone anywhere near the Senate district. Who had old friends there. He'd never heard her say that before.
"Well," she said, into the pause. "Dining with you two is like eating between a pair of mirrors. Everyone's reading, no one's eating."
He laughed. He couldn't help it. His father didn't.
Oreth set down his cup. He did it carefully, precisely, with a small click on the table that sounded, in that little room, like a gavel.
"There is a porter at the Wayfarers' House," he said. "Kellan. A good man. He drinks at a cantina on Level 1331." He looked across the table, and for the first time all evening he looked straight at his son. "The Low Lantern."
The room went very still.
His mother closed her eyes. Just for a moment.
IV. Where Do You Walk Them?
"He says you're very funny," said his father.
It wasn't an accusation. That was the worst part. Oreth said it plainly, as a fact, the way he'd said it's heavy today. He didn't raise his voice. He never had, not once in twenty years.
Namren put down his spoon. "I am very funny."
"He says you stand on a stage in a cantina at the bottom of the city and tell jokes about the Jedi." A pause. "And about me."
"They're affectionate."
"The lift."
Namren winced. Of course Kellan had told him about the lift.
"Father—"
"What do you do there?" Oreth asked. He folded his hands on the table. "Tell me. I want to understand. What do you do?"
He wanted Namren to say it. Namren knew that. He wanted him to have to put it into words, here, at this table, under the books. So Namren did.
"I stand up," he said, "in front of a room full of people who've had a terrible day. Dockworkers. Shift workers. Clones who've just come off a patrol where they saw who knows what. And for five minutes, I make them laugh." He heard his voice getting stronger. He knew this argument. He'd had it in his head a hundred times. "For five minutes a man who unloads munitions for a living forgets there's a war. That's not nothing. That's somewhere."
His father listened. He didn't interrupt. He never interrupted.
"And the jokes?" he said. "About the Temple?"
"Everybody makes jokes about the Temple. The Jedi can take it."
"The Jedi are dying," said his father quietly. "Did you see their faces today?"
Namren had seen their faces. He'd been seeing them all afternoon, every time he closed his eyes. The boy with the braid. The bandaged hand. He didn't want to talk about their faces.
So he went for the wound instead.
"And what do you do, Father? Every day. You take them up. Hundreds of them. Thousands. They come from across the galaxy, they spend everything they have, and you walk them up those stairs and sit them down on the steps and they kneel there, and the Jedi walk right past them." It was coming out of him now, faster than he could stop it. "You walk them up to a door that never opens for them. I at least let them in."
Silence.
His mother's hand had gone flat on the table.
Oreth didn't flinch. He sat with it, the way he'd sat with Ammaline on the steps: completely still, as if he was letting it land somewhere inside him and settle. It took a long time. The only sound was the hum of the city through the walls and a neighbour's HoloNet two doors down, some announcer's voice rising and falling about a victory somewhere.
When his father spoke, his voice hadn't changed at all.
"A guide walks people somewhere," he said. "Where do you walk them?"
Namren opened his mouth.
Nothing came.
He had a joke. Of course he had a joke; he always had a joke. Where do I walk them? To the bar, mostly. Throop gives me a percentage. It was right there. It was even a good one.
It would not come out of his mouth.
His mother had closed her eyes again.
Namren stood. His chair scraped. He took his coat from the hook by the door, and put it on, and stood there with his hand on the door release, and tried one more time to find the answer.
"Thank you for dinner," he said instead, to his mother, and left.
The lifts down to his level were crowded with night-shift workers, and he stood among them with his hands jammed in his coat pockets and his jaw tight and the argument going round and round in his head. He won it every time, in his head. In his head he had the answer and he said it perfectly and his father nodded, the way he'd nodded at that Jedi, one working man to another.
In his head. Not at the table.
His hand closed on something in his right pocket.
He drew it out. A card. Thick pressed paper, soft at the corners. Jedhan script on the face, and on the back, in his father's careful hand, the words he'd grown up reading on a hundred cards pressed into a hundred pilgrims' palms.
Walk toward the light you cannot see. Someone has walked there before you.
Your guide: O. Nammas.
He stood there in the packed lift with the card in his fingers and his heart doing something he didn't like.
He hadn't felt it go in. He went back over the day, step by step. The lobby. The turbolift. The long flights. The steps, the Jedi, the nod. Dinner. His father had never been close enough. Namren would have noticed. He noticed everything. It was the one thing he was sure of about himself.
And he had no idea when it had happened.
That bothered him more than the argument. It bothered him all the way down.
END OF EPISODE 3
Next: Episode 4: Cold Read