[Legacy Of The Force] - 08(67)

“Hate, “Jaina said, taking the club. It felt like a feather after the beskad.

“No, not hate. Me or him. Total war.”

It sounded rote; it sounded like what she’d been warned to avoid from the time she first held a lightsaber. About Briila’s age. Yes, I was. It was just another way of saying that you didn’t give up when you got knocked down. It was resilience. Jaina stood a couple of meters back from Beviin, less self-conscious now and ready to give him a pounding. She couldn’t kill him with this.

Jaina lunged first, smashing Beviin as hard as she could Force-unaided across shoulders, forearms, even his head when he dropped his guard. It was such a light stick. She drove him back, grunting with the sheer effort of putting all her weight into the blows and not feeling that they were making any impression. He didn’t fight back. She ground to a halt, pulse pounding.

“Good try.” Beviin sounded a little different. “Now feel this.”

He came straight at her, stick raised, with an animal explosion of breath. Instantly she felt him change in the Force into complete lack of all emotion except a single… word, yes, almost a word: end. He closed in and rained blows on her like a machine, no style, no grace, no pause, until she fell back and he still kept hammering her while she lay in a ball and instinctively shielded her head. She wondered for a terrifying irrational moment if he really was going to beat her to death with this small stick. Was he ever going to stop? There was no hatred in there, just a terrible focus, the rest of the world shut out. Then something flipped a switch in her and she threw him back with the Force, scared for both of them.

When she finally uncoiled and looked up at him, he had his helmet in one hand and his face was red. He felt embarrassed. She could sense it.

“There, “he said, getting his breath back. “Just as well you did that. I’m not getting any younger. If I dropped dead after a Jedi hit me with a shabla twig, I’d never live it down.”

“You’d be dead anyway.” Jaina laughed, not finding it funny but on that edge between giggling and tears.

“So… I wouldn’t stop in battle until I saw you were dead or completely out of action. Did that feel different to you? I lost it.”

“If you’d had a saber…. yes, I can feel the difference.”

“Can you get yourself into a state of mind where nothing, but nothing will stop you? Not even your opponent screaming at you to stop? When all you can see is blood and stuff that’ll give you nightmares?”

The silence that followed was the lesson, and she learned it. Beviin seemed quite disoriented by it.

“Food, “he said, packing away the weapons and hauling her upright to take off her plates. “Medrit hates it when I keep the kids waiting for lunch.”

Jaina swung onto the saddle behind him and couldn’t pin down what she felt. They skimmed over fences and hedges, catching strong scents of cut wood, manure, and wood smoke. Nerfs seemed to be watching suspiciously in every other field. “Can we talk about what just happened?”

“Scared you, did I? Scared me, too. Always does.”

“You went nuts for a few minutes. And then you went sane again. And you can choose when?”

“It’s a technique. We start young.”

Well, that’s a new one in meditative technique. “First guy to die loses, huh?”

“Pretty much. I don’t see anything except the end of the fight. I don’t even see a living being. I don’t have any con-fection to the opponent at all. I just see something I have to remove, stop, get past, any way I can, to get what I want-or die.”

“Wow.”

“Some fancy doctor said we can switch on psychopathy. ” Beviin banked the speeder bike so steeply that Jaina had to hang on with both hands and her knees. “We all seem to have that trait, whether we inherit it or learn it. Maybe we even adopt kids who show it. I don’t know. But we’ve been a fighting culture for so many centuries that we’ll never really be sure.”

He started whistling to himself, a pretty tune whose rhythm Jaina couldn’t work out because he kept breaking and picking up again. Jaina had heard of many cultures where the warriors stoked up their aggression with strange herbs and infusions before going into battle, but this berserker tactic was new. They seemed to visualize their way into psychopathy.

Do I have to do that?

This was the dark side. It truly was. Beviin could switch it on when he really needed it, and then switch it off and become a man that anyone would welcome as a neighbor or uncle. Jaina wondered if this was how Jacen started, with just a quick desperate need to win, to survive, and then he fell to it a step at a time.