The party started forward again, Kyakhta's mount spitting out small bones as it walked. 'You see the problem Unity emissaries face. How can they make treaties and commerce with the Alwari if the clans will not stay in one place long enough to talk to them? Yet it is these same traditional rights of the nomads that Republic law protects. No wonder the cities are considering banding together to join this proposed secessionist movement. If they succeed in pulling Ansion out of the Republic, then they can deal with the Alwari as they choose.'
'And yet the Alwari think we may be here to support the claims of the Unity,' Luminara responded.
Kyakhta eyed her with an intelligence unsuspected prior to Barriss's healing ministrations. 'Isn't your primary task here to see that Ansion stays in the Republic?'
'Of course,' she replied without hesitation.
'Then the Alwari are entitled to question the means by which you might choose to make that happen. They'll know that they and their interests are not your priority.'
'So do the delegates of the Unity.' She sighed tiredly. 'You see, Kyakhta? Both sides are already united by their common suspicion of our motives. Not exactly a firm foundation for mutual understanding, but it's a beginning.'
The slope leading down from the last grasses to the river's edge was not acute enough to slow a crawling infant, much less the towering suubatars. The group paused on the bank while Kyakhta and Bulgan studied the flow with an eye toward picking the best place to cross. Finally, Bulgan started forward while Kyakhta directed their charges to hold back.
'The Torosogt runs deep, but Bulgan thinks he has found a sandbar shallow enough for the suubatars to walk most of the way. From there we will swim.'
Luminara leaned forward in her saddle. 'I suppose we could all do with a bath.'
'No, no.' A smiling Kyakhta hurried to correct the misun derstanding. 'We don't swim. The suubatars will carry us.' Ignoring the considerable distance to the ground, he leaned way over to indicate his steed's middle legs. 'See-a suubatar's fur is short, but runs all the way to its feet and down between the toes. With six legs and long toes, suubatars are very good swimmers.'
Luminara had to admit that a vision of swimming suubatars was one that had not occurred to her. As Kyakhta had pointed out, six churning legs would provide plenty of propulsion.
She had time to fill in the image while Bulgan made progress. Halfway across the river he stopped, turned in his saddle, and waved. By this time the water was up over his knees despite his high seat on the suubatar. Luminara wondered how deep the river ran on either side of the 'shallow' sandbar. Giving her mount a perfectly enunciated 'Elup!' she found herself starting forward in tandem with Kyakhta.
Water rose gradually until it was up to her stirruped feet. As her mount was slightly larger than Bulgan's, she remained dry. Barriss and Anakin were not so fortunate. She could hear them both grumbling quietly behind her. As for Obi-Wan, when the water reached his feet, he simply pulled them out of the stirrups and crossed them atop the saddle. A spectator would have thought he'd been riding suubatars all his life.
Bulgan waited for them to catch up before resuming his own forward movement. There was a brief sensation of dropping, a quick bob upward, and she realized the suubatars were no longer walking. If anything, their swimming motion was even smoother than their remarkable gallop. While paddling effortlessly forward, they held their long, narrow skulls just above the surface. That did not mean no exertion was involved. The snorting of their single, wide nostril was clearly audible.
The water lapping against her feet and calves was cold and bracing. Looking down, she could see schools of streamlined, multilegged backswimmers riding the wake generated by her mount. The finger-length water breathers had their multiple limbs folded flat against their sides to conserve energy.
She was already focusing on the opposite shore when Bulgan's mount was suddenly thrown sharply to the right. The two Alwari let out a simultaneous, though different, curse and drew their weapons. Her hand went automatically to her lightsaber, but search as she might, she could see nothing like an enemy.
Then her own steed was slammed violently sideways. If not for her feet being jammed firmly into the stirrups, she would have been thrown right off the saddle and into the water. Despite her concentration, she was aware of everything that was happening around her-especially Kyakhta's sharp but inexplicable warning cry of 'gairks!' What was a gairk? she wondered.
Then a warty, misshapen olive-green face emerged from the water entirely too close to her left foot, and her curiosity was instantly sated.
Full of bulges and protrusions, the maw of the gairk was un like any oral cavity she had ever seen. There was no symmetry to it at all. The thick, blubbery lips seemed to wander all over the pebbly-skinned face. From behind these gaping lips rose a pair of large, protuberant, gray-green eyes. Lightsaber raised high, she swung at the bloated, bottom-dwelling monstrosity, but it had already dived back beneath the surface before the blow could make contact. Another of the ugly creatures surfaced a short distance away.
She found herself drowning not in water, but in a rising din. The hum of Jedi lightsabers was interspersed with the bellowing of kicking, snapping suubatars, the shouts of her companions, and the intermittent crackle of their guides' newly bought blasters. She ought to have been more afraid, she knew, or at least felt a greater degree of apprehension.
Most peculiar of all, as near as she could tell, the gairk had no teeth.
If they weren't carnivores, then why were they attacking the crossing party? Did they rely on some other less apparent mechanism to catch and devour prey? Certainly, she saw as her mount reared sharply to kick out with both clawed forefeet at a gairk that crossed its path, their mouths were large enough to swallow a human whole. But she saw no biting apparatus, no sharp talons, not even potentially poisonous spines. Yet Kyakhta and Bulgan were treating them as if they were nothing but fang and claw.
Then she heard a yelp. Whirling in her saddle without regard to her own safety, she looked back at Barriss's suubatar. It was still behind her, holding the same position as when they had started to ford the river. There was only one difference.
The animal's embossed saddle was empty.
Barriss surfaced not far away, easily visible in the swirling tide because she was waving with her activated lightsaber. Kyakhta cursed violently. It struck Luminara that the Padawan was being carried downstream faster than the turgid current warranted. She pointed this out to Bulgan.
