Herding Memories

On Ryloth the hour creeped forward. The safe strip of dusk, known as the Twilight band, ran between the Bright Lands’ heat and the Nightlands’ cold. In that narrow place, the wind tasted like iron. Shakka walked a ledge over a red canyon. The herd spread below her. She kept her breath quiet so she wouldn’t spook animals that heard better than they saw. Dave, the little droid, rode in her satchel with his light dimmed to a soft ember.

She had left Deet’s cove yesterday. The path from there to here was dry and known. Her boots fit the same old holds in the rock.

I saw Deet’s laugh shake the cups on the shelf. My mother felt the tightness in my shoulders and eased it with her hands. My father didn’t say much; our silence felt like a bridge we were testing to see if it would hold. Dave translated what I couldn’t make myself say, and we all pretended that was normal.

A warning rumble rolled through the herd. Shakka slid down a rope and landed light. A pregnant blurrg had drifted to the edge of the group. The old dam’s skeptical eye softened when Shakka came close.

I used to call this “non-attachment,” like the trick was to keep oneself removed from feeling emotion for another. But pain has sharp edges. It asks to be understood. I have known it before.

Clicks rose from the treeline: gutkurrs, counting bodies in the dusk. Deeper in the brush, a lylek stayed still, armor-hard and patient. Shakka checked the cave mouth behind them, the rope that could pull down a mesh curtain, and the loose rocks she could roll if something charged.

Dave nudged the satchel flap and chirped. She touched a dent in his dome with her thumb. He settled.

By late afternoon the Bright Lands pushed heat into the canyon until the air shimmered. The herd tangled, calmed, and drew close around the dam, as if doing the math of risk on their own. Shakka moved among them with steady patience. She rigged a square of shade with a tarp.

A glint flashed on the ridge. Maybe armor, maybe a stone. She let the question go. Ryloth ate answers and left bones.

Her transceiver chirped a small, coded sound she had not heard in months. Dave’s light woke. Shakka drew the unit out carefully, holding it by the edge like it knew her name.

Three pulses. Then two, one, and three. The meaning was plain: Rendezvous, dusk plus one, south rim, enclave route.

I could picture the little room it meant. Mats on the floor. A ring of wide eyes. A teacher’s small, calm smile. My post. The place where my circle of defense had become a lesson plan. The message pressed against an old bruise.

I used to think the choice was simple: them before me, the Order before us all. But what is “us”? A herd? A canyon? Deet’s kitchen steam?

She clipped the transceiver to her belt and let it hang, heavy.

Near evening, the dam went to her knees. Shakka knelt too, hands sure, voice low. The calf came fast and wet. Shakka cleared its nose and rubbed until the lungs learned how to work. The mother’s rumble changed from warning to pride. The herd made space without being told.

The gutkurrs chose that moment to test the line. Clicks grew sharp. Shadows stepped out. One, then two, then many, quick legs and hard shells. Shakka moved between hunger and herd. Not a wall, a hinge.

“Easy,” she signed to the blurrgs. She did not light her saber. In a narrow canyon the glare would blind the wrong eyes and draw worse ones.

She breathed and let the calm run outward: over her skin, into the dust, into the gaps where panic tries to live. The young ones stilled. The dam set a front foot down like a promise. When the first gutkurr skittered close, Shakka sent three stones sliding down the slope with a flick of her wrist. The little rockfall rattled like a larger predator’s hiss. The pack paused and measured again. She shifted the sound once more, then again, shaping a curve of “not worth it” the way she had once traced circles with a blade.

Behind her, Dave chirped a steady rhythm that meant, without words: not prey not prey not prey. The herd believed him. So did the gutkurrs. They backed off an inch, then two, then enough.

I once held my own blood in check and called it mastery. Today the same control keeps a calf from learning fear as its first lesson.

When the canyon was itself again, Shakka let out the breath she had been saving for years.

The transceiver pulsed at her belt: dusk plus one.

She looked south. With the herd, the rim was a day and a half away. Alone, she could reach it by morning if she burned what speed she had left. Alone.

After my injury, I practiced calm in the courtyard so the Younglings would not learn terror from me. I called it service. When I left home yesterday, my mother tucked two small beads into my palms, veined pale like moss. “For your Order,” she said, releasing the red bead. “For your family,” she shaped, releasing the green bead.

Shakka climbed to the cave mouth and found a flat patch of wall where other hands had left small signs: a twist of wire, a knotted cord, a chalk spiral. On Ryloth, some shrines you build yourself.

She set the transceiver on the stone and opened the back with her thumbnail. Dave peered from the satchel and whistled a question. She met his lens and let him see what choice looked like: not refusal, not surrender, but a rope that catches you at the waist if the cliff gives way.

Inside, the crystal was small and bright. She could have crushed it. Instead, she turned it sideways and slid it in crooked so the unit would listen and not answer. She closed the casing and pressed her thumb to the seam. Then she slid the red bead from her head wrap under the strap, against the metal… Family against call, Ryloth against everywhere else. She tucked the unit into the niche with the other everyday offerings and tied a strip of tarp over it to keep the grit out.

No oath. No fire. Just leaving a thing where people who needed her somewhere else would not find it.

A youngster drifted toward the canyon lip after a bit of moss. Shakka stepped into its path and became the easier answer. It bumped its head against her thigh to check if the world was steady. She bumped back.

The Code says there is no passion, there is serenity. To me, serenity is the air when a creature takes a full breath because I stayed.

Later, when the heat thinned and the cold leaned forward, she brought the herd to the handler’s cave. A child ran out, bare feet loud on stone. The new calf made a creaky sound and then a braver one. Inside, the handler’s partner handed Shakka a bowl and tried not to say thank you too many times.

Shakka ate with her back to the wall and listened to the cave settle. She watched the child fall asleep against the dam’s shoulder with simple trust. The wind moved the hanging ropes with a soft hum. Shakka loosened the wrap on her lekku and rewound it, threading the green bead deeper so it wouldn’t catch. The new knot made her head sit right, like a small fix you only notice when you finally feel it.

When they offered her a place to sleep, she took the watch instead. She stood at the cave mouth where the canyon cut the sky to a clean line. Her saber rested at her hip, quiet. Her hands warmed around a cup. She counted the old way: breaths, heartbeats, changes in the wind against the mesh. She counted a new way too… Not how long until she could leave, but how long she could hold this shape so others could sleep.

I thought duty meant distance. But the farther I stood, the easier it was to see people as problems to solve instead of names to keep alive. Deet’s steam on my skin. My mother’s bead against metal. The herd pressed close in the dark. A rope I didn’t know I wanted until it held taught.

Near morning, a shadow tested the threshold. Shakka let it go with the dignity she wanted for anything that turned away hungry. She set her palm on the calf’s ribs until its breath steadied, then on the dam’s shoulder until the rumble fell quiet.

Dawn didn’t arrive so much as thin out the dark. The canyon had made it through another almost-night.

Shakka rose, checked straps, and fixed one with better rope and a simple knot her father had taught her when her lekku were still too short to tangle. She tied the mesh curtain so a child could lift it. She left a spare coil of line and a half jar of salve.

On her way out she passed the small shrine again. The tarp lay smooth over the quiet machine. Her fingers brushed the edge, as if checking the pulse she had made when she angled the crystal.

She did not look south.

She turned with the herd onto the ledge path and set her feet to the old holds in the stone. The new calf bumped her knee. She bumped back. The choice sat like a rope around her waist. Firm, not choking, holding where it should. This is what she wanted.

Far away, a room with mats would count heads and notice one missing. No message would go out. The unit would listen and stay silent. In the cave, a child snored against a blurrg’s warm side and woke to a world that had been watched over.