Circle of healing

VIII.

Well the moon is broken
And the sky is cracked
The only things that you can see
Is all that you lack
-- Waits/Brennan --

***

Dark clouds moved over the pale-silver disk of the moon in the sky as the healer-priestess allowed her eyes to move away from the unmoving figure of the young man in front of her. A cold gust of wind came through the open windows and caused her to shiver. Next to her the priestesses got ready to move the queen into another part of the temple.
It stayed a mystery for Reaja why the other priestesses could hold such an open grudge against the Jedi even now, after the ritual was finished. They should have felt what he was going through, should have seen that he wasn’t any more guilty than any given person.
But that had always been one of the problems in the temple. The novices weren’t coming up fast enough, and even though the profession of a healer was very highly regarded in Naboo’s society, only very few of the young women took the responsibilities that came along with the life of a healer priestess. What happened, was inevitable. The older priestesses with their rigid feeling for moral and values that arose from their generation were the hard core of the temple’s hierarchy and influenced the view on this particular problem. For them Kenobi remained responsible for everything that had happened so far.
For a few moments the moon vanished completely behind the dark clouds that promised rain, and the room that had been scarcely lit for the ritual was bathed in a cool semi-darkness.
Under her hands that lay quietly on the Jedi’s forehead she felt the muscles of his eyes move rapidly. The convulsions soon began to spread all over the Jedi’s body. His jaw tightened and she felt him start. Every single one of his muscles cramped so badly that it hurt Reaja to just look at it.
On a quick gesture a novice brought her a glass phial. The girl had never heard about complications like the ones she witnessed here and she pondered calling for the high priestess. But just looking at Reaja told her that it wasn’t necessary. The priestess was small, even for a Naboo. She had bedded the Jedi’s head safely in her lap and put her hands on his temples in a reassuring gesture, while her long black hair that was lined with fine silvery grey streaks fell forward and hid her face.
Even though she stayed calm on the outside, Reaja’s mind was troubled. She, too, didn’t know of such complications, but she knew that she was responsible for Kenobi. Carefully she let her eyes travel over the cramped up bundle in her lap. Droplets of blood poured from under his fingernails, even though she could not find an injury.
The clouds outside the window wandered and for a short period of time the moon lit up Kenobi’s face.
Ashen and with deep dark rings under his eyes he looked more like a ghost than like a living, breathing being. Reaja shivered. She had never taken part in this ritual - it hadn’t been practised in far too long a time, but was all of this really part of the ritual?
She clearly felt that something stopped Kenobi from waking. Would he understand her when she talked to him? Reaja decided that it couldn’t do any harm to at least try.
She reached for Obi-Wan’s hand that was clawed into his tunic and murmured softly: "Let go."
Her words seemed to free elemental forces out of their bonds. A glaring light surrounded Kenobi for a fraction of a second and died down so fast that Reaja doubted that anyone except for her had seen it.
Once more he cramped in her lap and then his eyes flew wide open.
Strange eyes. The colours changed so fast that Reaja could barely follow: blue, green and grey whirled around like in a tsunami. The healer saw enough to realise that he didn’t recognise her. If only she could read what was going on inside of him!
"Let go, Jedi Kenobi," she whispered again.
A tidal wave of emotions surged through Obi-Wan and was clearly visible in his eyes.
One last time his weakened body cramped - and as reality found its way into his mind, he screamed like a wounded animal.

***

The process of waking up was more painful for Obi-Wan than Reaja ever would have imagined. For a long time he lay in a delirious dozy state, never actually awake, but never actually asleep. The bruises on his back had come back, raven-black and going deeper than they should have. The inner injuries were detected nearly too late. It took the joined strength of three healers to start the healing process.
None of the other priestesses shared her worries about Kenobi’s status. It had to be expected was the casual answer when she tried to voice her thoughts. He had insisted on going through with the ritual even though he hadn’t been perfectly healthy before. The outcome of this wasn’t surprising.
More than once she heard it say that she wasn’t bringing honour to her priesthood when she was letting her personal feelings for this patient guide her that much.
Reaja stayed with Kenobi. She didn’t leave his side, was with him when he hallucinated, eased cool cloths over his forehead when he suffered nightmares.
The Jedi had talked in his nightmares; confused, incoherent words, which had, however, gathered whisperingly together in the darkness of the night to form one terribly threatening whole.

***

"You are awake, Jedi Kenobi?"
The high priestess pushed opened the door, from behind which she had heard the quiet voice of Reaja and came inside the narrow room with quick steps. Without waiting for a reaction from the Jedi, she leant across him and removed a part of the protective bandages that had been wrapped around his back.
"The healing process is making good progress, I see."
Kenobi didn’t answer, he barely reacted to the less than careful feeling hands of the priestess. Aethra rose briskly and turned towards Reaja, without a second glance at the young man. "I need to talk to you. Follow me."
Reaja bowed her head slightly. "As you wish."
The thought of leaving Kenobi on his own after seeing him just wake up didn’t appeal to Reaja, but she knew that she had had too many missteps for this moon to afford angering Aethra. She flashed Obi-Wan a reassuring smile and left the room behind the tall priestess.
The door was barely closed when Aethra turned around to face Reaja with a speed that could not be expected from her dignified way of carrying herself and her tall figure.
Or Reaja was hard pressed to keep herself from laughing. She knew Aethra’s methods for intimidating her subordinates, had lived with them long enough and looked through every single one of them. Then why did the high priestess still manage to force such a fearful respect out of her with such a small movement?
"You are spending a lot of time with this patient, Reaja," she stated. "I hope you still remember the vows of your initiation?"
The warning hung between the dissimilar women like a fine mist. Aethra - tall, slim, dark-haired and with the austere beauty of the mountain region women, radiated no warmth whatsoever in this beauty, and Reaja - short, a little round, with a kind, slightly imperfect face, that was lined from a life full of hard work and that still showed the traces of a not yet lost sense of humour that were still visible whenever she smiled.
She didn’t feel like smiling as she watched the high priestess coolly. Quite the opposite. She had fallen out with Aethra about this a lot of times before, and she knew the way those conversations went from the beginning.
"Yes, Aethra, I remember. But do you remember that we vowed to never give up before everything is done? To never judge?"
The grey eyes of the high priestess pierced into the ones that opposed hers. For a moment Reaja believed to see flickering anger in those eyes - then Aethra’s face relaxed and she gave the smaller priestess a thin-lipped, dishonest smile.
"The queen asked for your patient."
The tone of her voice said clearly that the high priestess didn’t enjoy bringing her this piece of news. But why did she come for this herself? She could have sent a novice. Reaja didn’t understand what was going on behind the high priestess's unreadable eyes. Was it just the confrontation? Reaja knew that Aethra had no real negative feelings about her. They weren’t what they called best friends but they were also far away from being enemies. Antipathies like those were unbecoming of a priestess of the healer temples and so they had decided on a truce in the regularly occurring confrontations. And sometimes Reaja even looked forward to those confrontations, since they meant that Aethra valued her opinion and and did not just overlook her.
The reason for today’s visit was still hidden from her. Surely Aethra hadn’t come all the way up here just to see whether the Jedi was all right or not. Soon after his first waking she had declared with icy determination that she would not take care of his recovery. But what else brought her here into this distant part of the temple? It couldn’t just be the queen’s message.
Reaja realised that she stared at Aethra for some blinks of an eye, without having answered her last words.
"How is the queen?"
A quiet smile lit up the high priestess's usually strict features.
"We hope that her royal highness can return to the palace soon," she replied.
As fast as it had come, the smile disappeared. Reaja felt the tall woman’s inquisitive look on her.
"What are you not telling me, Aethra?"
Without losing a fraction of the elegance and authority that surrounded her, Aethra breathed the air out of her lungs and walked a few steps towards an open archway, from where she could overlook one of the steep slopes that surrounded Theed and from where a roaring waterfall poured forth more than hundred meters into the depth. Up here in the height of the healer temple the sound was only audible as a slight murmur.
"I’ve been to the consecrated vaults."
Reaja held her breath. No one had set foot into the consecrated vaults since time immemorial and even now, after such an old ritual had taken place, it shocked Reaja that Aethra had gone to the consecrated halls twice in such a short time. A lot of priestesses never got the permission to set foot into those vaults, and stepping into them without having been invited . . . it was a sacrilege
Reaja knew that the high priestess had worked hard to get certain privileges, and she knew what was kept in the consecrated vaults, but she had thought . . .
"Why?"
Aethra’s steadily kept mask crumpled a little as she looked back at Reaja.
"This is not important now. Important is what I have to tell you now." She breathed deeply and tried to keep the upcoming emotions from taking over her voice. "I have read the old records again . . ."
Again she stopped. Reaja gazed at the high priestess's usually calm face in utter confusion. It wasn’t like Aethra to speak so vaguely. Had something been overlooked? Aethra saw the seed of understanding waking up in the shining brown eyes of the smaller priestess.
"A mistake?" Reaja whispered, barely able to keep the terror out of it.
"That depends," Aethra answered with a strong voice.
"What happened? What did you read in the records?"
The high priestess took her eyes off the waterfalls far below them and gazed in Reaja’s eyes. "The ritual isn’t finished. Especially not for you, carrier of the runes."

***

Obi-Wan had the feeling of walking through a thick fog he couldn’t find a way out of. Voices came through to him, but only muffled, the pain of which he knew he should feel it, had died down to a dull pounding and even his thoughts were so slow that he could have held on to every single one of them and vivisected them. He didn’t know whether the healer’s had given him a sedative or not.
The same scenes played on in his head over and over again, without him being able to stop them.
Failure. A fall. A scream.
He heard how Reaja softly talked to him, how she carefully fed him, he felt that other priestesses looked at him, how he was being medically treated , but nothing seemed to have any meaning and took place far, far away.
Just like now.
He did feel his legs moving just as he felt Reaja’s calm, warm presence that pillowed him softly, but everything seemed strangely distant, just as if his body would act without his mind.
The room looked vaguely familiar to him. He had been here before . . . Right. When the ritual had started. Small and fragile the queen had laid on the blue cloth on the warm floor. So weak.
The same scenes again.
They had trusted him with her life.
‘You are the only one who can help, Jedi.’
He hadn’t been fast enough. The queen had died because he hadn’t been fast enough. Qui-Gon had died, because he hadn’t been fast enough. And why? Why was he the only one who was alive still? He, who of all the people deserved it the least bit to still be alive. He, who had those lives on his consciousness? Why him?

***

Reaja was noticeably pale when she entered the room where the ritual had started, carefully supporting Obi-Wan with her arm. Acolytes scurried hurriedly around in the hallways and softly talked to each other, trying to hide their curiosity about the Jedi’s visit. He walked indifferently next to Reaja, and he didn’t seem to notice anything about his surroundings. His bodily wounds had healed and his health was nearly completely up to par once again. Now and then he even had had little meaningless conversations with her, that made her believe in his ongoing healing. What had stayed behind, were unsure movements.
She carefully directed him into the middle of the vault and closed the high door behind her. The last thing she needed now was a group of acolyte’s that followed her every movement with curiosity and tried to interpret it. She needed time to prepare the Jedi and herself for what Aethra had said. The ritual wasn’t over yet. What was that supposed to mean? Couldn’t the high priestess have spoken any more cryptically?
"Sit down, Jedi Kenobi."
His movements had gotten more fluid again, but they had lost a lot of the litheness that was usual for a young man his age. Nevertheless it seemed that at least this posture was comfortable for him. He looked relaxed.
Bodily relaxed.
She vaguely remembered having called him with his first name before and the wish to not care about formalities and do it again arose inside of her, to achieve a more personal bond that might help him to overcome his self-doubts.
"You know why you’re here?"
She had sat down opposing the Jedi on the warm marble floor and gazed questioningly into his troubled eyes. There still raged the same storm she had seen when he had first opened his eyes after the ritual. A nasty feeling crept up her spine like an icy hand.
Was she overlooking something? He was alright again.
Or wasn’t he?
His gaze returned from the far away regions of his mind and focused on her face. It could be read plainly that he didn’t know why he was here. Why he was here at all. Reaja clearly read the emotions in the green-blue eyes, but couldn’t place them. She suppressed the slight flicker of insecurity before it had the chance to grow into a full fledged premonition. This wasn’t the time for prophecies of doom.
Obi-Wan bowed his head and looked at the marble-floor that was divided into even octogonals with interest. With a little too much interest for Reaja’s taste
"The ritual isn’t over yet, young master."
That sentence brought the attention she had wanted. Kenobi’s head shot up and his eyes fastened on Reaja with vague unease. Hundreds of emotions flickered through his face and his eyes at the same time before he brought them under control.

***

 

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