'Khabarakh told me his people needed help,' Leia said simply. 'I thought there might be something I could do.'
'Some will say you have come to sow discord among us.'
'You said that yourself last night,' Leia reminded her. 'I can only give you my word that discord is not my intention.'
The maitrakh made a long hissing sound that ended with a sharp double click of needle teeth. 'The goal and the end are not always the same, Lady Vader. Now we serve one overclan only. You would require service to another. This is the seed of discord and death.'
Leia pursed her lips. 'Does service to the Empire satisfy you, then?' she asked. 'Does it gain your people better life or higher honor?'
'We serve the Empire as one clan,' the maitrakh said. 'For you to demand our service would be to bring back the conflicts of old.' They had reached the wall chart now, and she gestured a thin hand up toward it. 'Do you see our history, Lady Vader?'
Leia craned her neck to look. Neatly carved lines of alien script covered the bottom two-thirds of the wall, with each word connected to a dozen others in a bewildering crisscross of vertical, horizontal, and angled lines, each cut seemingly of a different width and depth. Then she got it: the chart was a genealogical tree, either of the entire clan Kihm'bar or else just this particular family. 'I see it,' she said.
'Then you see the terrible destruction of life created by the conflicts of old,' the maitrakh said. She gestured to three or four places on the chart which were, to Leia, indistinguishable from the rest of the design. Reading Noghri genealogies was apparently an acquired skill. 'I do not wish to return to those days,' the maitrakh continued. 'Not even for the daughter of the Lord Darth Vader.'
'I understand,' Leia said quietly, shivering as the ghosts of Yavin, Hath, Endor, and a hundred more rose up before her. 'I've seen more conflict and death in my lifetime than I ever thought possible. I have no wish to add to the list.'
'Then you must leave,' the maitrakh said firmly. 'You must leave and not come back while the Empire lives.'
They began to walk again. 'Is there no alternative?' Leia asked.
'What if I could persuade all of your people to leave their service to the Empire? There would be no conflict then among you.'
'The Emperor aided us when no one else would,' the maitrakh reminded her.
'That was only because we didn't know about your need,' Leia said, feeling a twinge of conscience at the half truth. Yes, the Alliance had truly not known about the desperate situation here; and yes, Mon Mothma and the other leaders would certainly have wanted to help if they had. But whether they would have had the resources to actually do anything was another question entirely. 'We know now, and we offer you our help.'
'Do you offer us aid for our own sakes?' the maitrakh asked pointedly. 'Or merely to wrest our service from the Empire to your overclan?
We will not be fought over like a bone among hungry stava.'
'The Emperor used you,' Leia said flatly. 'As the Grand Admiral uses you now. Has the aid they've given been worth the sons they've taken from you and sent off to die?'
They had gone another twenty steps or so before the maitrakh answered. 'Our sons have gone,' she said softly. 'But with their service they have bought us life. You came in a flying craft, Lady Vader. You saw what was done to our land.'
'Yes,' Leia said with a shiver. 'It-I hadn't realized how widespread the destruction had been.'
'Life on Honoghr has always been a struggle,' the maitraldi said.
'The land has required much labor to tame. You saw on the history the times when the struggle was lost. But after the battle in the sky...' She shuddered, a peculiar kind of shaking that seemed to move from her hips upward to her shoulders. 'It was like a war between gods. We know now that it was only large flying craft high above the land. But then we knew nothing of such things. Their lightning flashed across the sky, through the night and into the next day, brightening the distant mountains with their fury. And yet, there was no thunder, as if those same gods were too angry even to shout at each other as they fought. I remember being more frightened of the silence than of any other part of it. Only once was there a distant crash like thunder. It was much later before we learned that one of our higher mountains had lost its uppermost peak. Then the lightning stopped, and we dared to hope that the gods had taken their war away from us.
'Until the ground shake came.'
