Nar Shaddaa was a city world. Countless billions of sentients, piled atop one another, with every piece of land parceled out for exploitation, built up and up and up until it seemed that if one climbed the highest towers, one could climb right off the moon and into the swamps of Nal Hutta. There was not a single patch of wilderness left on the surface. Any vegetation was locked away either in the private gardens of the rich on the upper levels or in the industrial hydroponics facilities that fed the moon's teeming masses.
Yet while the Yashura rituals might have been made for nature, all they needed was a hidden space, of which Nar Shaddaa had many – even ones accessible to those who had nothing. It was in one of those that Shmi Skywalker cradled a living plague rat as she drew an array onto the ground with her own blood, dripping slowly from her palm.
She took a deep breath as she finished the array. “Shatik-aratta,” she said, calling on the chief god of twelve, the Sky-walker. In the Yashura tongue, she continued, “Give me a son who is tall and handsome and free.”
She lifted the plague rat with the power of the gods and broke its neck without touching it. The corpse and the array both vanished into the air.
Her owner would expect her back soon. She left the little corner and walked home, hand grazing her flat stomach.
The Twi'lek who'd bought her was incensed that she'd fallen pregnant. Shmi endured the whipping and cleaned the brothel's floors, grateful she was spared spreading her legs.
Eventually, the brothel madam sold her. A Hutt's acquisitions manager saw her unborn son as a future investment, and so she ended up cleaning a Hutt's office, used when its owner wanted to meet with members of the underworld for business purposes. Spice, slaves, illegal armaments, Shmi cared not, as long as she was not part of the transaction.
Her son was born in the office's slave quarters. She took him from the midwife and memorized the location they'd placed his explosive chip.
The office overlooked one of the vast vertical holes that went all the way to the moon's forgotten surface. A wind blew from the depths, powerful and unpredictable. Sometimes it sang.
Once she'd cleaned up the mess of her childbirth and spent a few days recovering amid her incessant duties, she slipped to another little secluded spot with her son. The plague rats didn't come this far up, so she had grabbed a cricket from one of the trash piles instead.
Shmi drew a different array with a stub of chalk she had found in another trashcan months ago. She sat down in the center, her son in front of her, and told the gods: “I will bring him my water. I will bring him my food. Here is my child, Yashura, child of the Sky-walker. May his children be born free.” Silently in her mind she named her son Anakin for the wind that blew from the depths to the heights and crushed the cricket.
Its corpse and the chalk disappeared. The gods had acknowledged Anakin Skywalker as her son and given him all the knowledge of a Yashura.
They were sold to Sleyheyron when Anakin was two and thence to Tatooine. Tatooine was an unbearable itch between Shmi's shoulder blades, sun baking at her as she did her best to keep herself and Anakin beneath Gardulla's notice. At least it was easy enough to draw an array into the sand and sacrifice a lizard to the gods in exchange for fortune.
Gardulla lost them both to a Toydarian when Anakin was a bit over three. Watto was present like Gardulla never was, but also less likely to blow her up to prove a point or for entertainment. Shmi and Anakin moved to the general slave quarters, and sacrifice became as easy as breathing.
Then, when Anakin was nine, the Jedi came, offering to free him. Shmi felt the gods run a finger down her spine and felt how Anakin's destiny shifted. “Yes,” she said, because her son would be tall and handsome and free and this way he would also be a Jedi.
She watched him leave, happy for him and sad for herself. Then she slipped into the desert and drew an array into the sand. “May my son be safe,” she whispered as she snapped the neck of another desert lizard.
Dusk came and turned the Chain-maker into the Chain-breaker. “May I be free,” she whispered at the heart of another array, offering another death to the gods.
The Chain-breaker granted her request, for early one morning, a man called Cliegg Lars came to Watto's shop to buy her from slavery. Then the suns rose and he bound her once more, this time in marriage. Shmi was acutely aware of the explosive beneath her skin, the allegedly inactive detonator in his hands, when she said yes to his proposal.
“May my son be safe.”
“May I be free.”
Shmi breathed slowly through her nose lest she aggravate her injuries. The gods were capricious, the Chain-breaker doubly so. Shmi had offered sacrifice to her, and she had granted her supplicant's wish – for was death not the greatest freedom of them all? Shmi Skywalker hung suspended in a Tusken tent, whipped and injured, all for some purpose she had never been told.
Her wounds stung. She tried to drift off into a haze.
A snap-hiss came from the other side of the tent wall. In an instant, a pillar of blue light, brighter than anything Shmi had seen in weeks, cut through the gloom and also the tent. She watched the piece of sky – the color of freedom – slowly draw an arc across the wall until it fell down.
A young man, tall and handsome – oh, it could only be her Anakin; she saw the mark of the Yashura on his presence – stepped in. “Mom?”
“Anakin,” Shmi said with a broken voice.
Anakin freed her from her restraints and said something that tried to be reassuring. She'd shielded him from death, young as he'd been, and it seemed the Jedi had continued in her footsteps.
“You cannot stop change any more than you can stop the suns from setting,” she said. She touched her perfect son on his perfect cheek and let herself go into the dark.
It was night. The stars, toys of the Sky-walker, shone down indifferently. A duskbird called from the other edge of the desert.
“What have you done?” Shmi Skywalker asked her wayward son.
“I brought you back.” Anakin had a stubborn set to his chin. “I couldn't just let those, those monsters kill you!”
Shmi pushed herself to a seated position. All the aches of torture and some of age had left her. Even the knee that had twinged ever since a cruel owner had kicked it in in her teens was silent as she sat on sand that vibrated with the residual energy of the touch of the gods. “What did you give?”
“A Tusken.” Anakin bent his neck. An odd guilt rose on his features. “I grabbed one of the guards outside the tent.”
Not his name, then. Good. He hadn't forgotten the rules. “The gods will know you, now.”
“I know.” Anakin swallowed. “I have a speeder nearby.”
Shmi rose and followed her son. Once the site of her resurrection had faded to the distance, she asked, “Do you have a spaceship?”
“Well, it's technically not mine, but yes, I came in a spaceship. It's at the Larses'.”
A knee-jerk negative emotion twisted in Shmi. “I do not wish to see them ever again.”
Anakin blinked in surprise, then drew to his full height and slid his hands into his sleeves. In an instant he turned from someone from and of this blighted ball of sand into a Jedi. “Where do you want to go, then?” he hesitantly asked.
Shmi looked up at the night sky. The Sky-walker had made the galaxy, laid out the hyperlanes and tossed out the stars, and even today she ran amok, the stardust her playground as she tossed celestial objects astray and forged and destroyed new hyperlanes at her whims. “The stars,” said Shmi, Yashura, child of the Sky-walker. “Where else?”