Star Wars: Tales from Jabba's Palace by Kevin J. Anderson Read Free Book Online Page A

Choice: The Tale of Jabba’s Chef
by Barbara Hambly
    I t started the day Jabba the Hutt acquired his two new droids.
    Not that the arrival of new slaves in the isolated desert palace of the Bloated One made a great deal of difference to Porcellus, the crimelord’s harassed chef; his only question, when informed of the new additions by Malakili, keeper of the Hutt’s rancor, was, “What do they eat?”
    â€œThey’re droids,” said Malakili. He was perched on the end of the long and massive kitchen worktable at the time, picking through two cubic meters of dewback offal and eating a beignet. Minor religions had been built around Porcellus’s beignets in Mos Eisley—scarcely the oddest objects of veneration in that port, it should be added. Porcellus had a huge pot of them going on one of his four stoves, and the heat in the long, low-vaulted kitchen was tremendous.
    â€œGood,” said Porcellus. It wasn’t that he objected to real people coming around his kitchen to cadge snacks. It was just that most of the people in the court of the Tatooine crimelord who
did
come around his kitchen made him extremely nervous.
    â€œQuite polite, too,” added Malakili. “High-class social programming.”
    â€œThat’ll be a switch.” Porcellus gently tonged the last beignets from the boiling oil at their exact moment of apotheosis, set them on the paper toweling on the counter, dusted them reverently with powdered sugar, and activated the portable electric fence around them. He smiled across at his friend. “Present company excepted.”
    â€œOh, the guards and stuff ain’t so bad.” Malakili paused as Phlegmin the kitchen boy came in carrying a box of the fragile Belsavian bowvine fruit which had just been delivered. The pimple-faced youth sniffled, wiped his nose on his fingers, and started to take the fruit from their box, looking sullen and offended when Porcellus motioned him sharply to wash his hands. “Well, maybe some of ’em,” the rancor keeper conceded. He hopped down from the table, and crossed to where the chef was examining the fruit for subcutaneous bruises with the delicate fingers of an artist. Phlegmin tried in passing to steal a beignet—the electric fence hurled him several feet against the nearest wall. He retreated, sucking his burned hand.
    â€œA word in your ear, friend,” Malakili whispered.
    Porcellus turned from his work, the familiar sensation of cold panic clutching at his chest. “Eh?”
    Back in the days when he had been chef to Yndis Mylore, governor of Bryexx and Moff of the Varvenna Sector and that Imperial nobleman’s most prized possession—and how not, when he was a triple Golden Spoon and winner of the Tselgormet Prize for gourmandise five years running?—Porcellus had not been a particularly nervous man. Concerned about the perfection of his art, yes, for what great maestro is not? Worried, from time to time, about the firmness of a meringue served when the Emperor was Governor Mylore’s guest, of course, or the precise combinationof textures in a sauce to be presented at an ambassadorial banquet …
    But not prey to chill terror at every unexpected word.
    Five years as a slave in the palace of Jabba the Hutt had had its effect.
    â€œJabba, he had indigestion again last night.”
    â€œIndigestion?” Later Porcellus realized his immediate reaction should have been uncontrolled horror; it was actually, at first hearing, only a laugh of utter disbelief. “You mean there’s actually a substance he can’t digest?”
    Malakili lowered his voice still further. “He says he thinks it’s
fierfek
. As far as I can make out, that’s the Hutt word,” he went on softly, “for poison.”
    Then the uncontrolled horror took over. Porcellus felt himself go white and his hands and feet turned cold despite the oven heat of the kitchen.
    The