At every opportunity Tarkin’s parents would emphasize what it meant to live in deprivation. Their sermons were designed to drill into their son the fact that everything they owned was the product of having overcome adversity. Worse, affluence could vanish in an instant; without constant vigilance and the drive to succeed, everything one had could be wrested away by someone stronger, more disciplined, more committed to personal glory.
“How do you imagine we came to the point where we have so much,” his father might say over dinner, “while so many outside the gates of this elegant home have to struggle to survive? Or do you imagine that we have always resided in such luxury, that Eriadu was accommodating from the start?”
Early on, young Wilhuff would only stare down at his plate of food in silence or mutter that he had no answers to his father’s questions. Then, during one supper, his father — tall and straight-backed, with deep forehead creases that curved down past his eyes like parentheses — ordered the family’s servant to remove Wilhuff’s meal before he’d had a chance to take so much as a bite from it.
“You see how easy it is to go from having everything to having nothing?” his father asked.
“How would you fare if we now banished you to the city streets?” his mother added. Nearly as tall as her husband, she dressed in expensive clothes for every meal and affected elaborate hairstyles that were sometimes hours in the making. “Would you do what you needed to do to survive? Could you bring yourself to wield a club, a knife, a blaster, if weapons were what it took to keep you from starving?”
In an effort to calculate the expected response, Wilhuff glanced between the two of them and puffed out his chest. “I would do whatever I had to do.”
His father only grinned in disdain. “A brave one, are you? Well, you’ll have that bravery put to the test when you’re taken to the Carrion.”
The Carrion.
There it was again: that strange word he had heard so often growing up. But just then he asked: “What is the Carrion?”
His father seemed pleased that his son had finally wondered aloud. “A place that teaches you the meaning of survival.”
In the quiet comfort of the family dining room, rich with the heady odors of exotic spices and long-simmered meats, the statement had no meaning. “Will I be afraid?” he said, again because he sensed he was meant to ask.
“If you know what’s good for you.”
“Could I die there?” he said, almost in self-amusement.
“In ways too numerous to count.”
“Would you miss me if I did die?” he asked them both.
His mother was the first to say, “Of course we would.”
“Then why do I have to go there? Have I done something wrong?”
His father placed his elbows on the table and leaned toward him. “We need to know if you are simply ordinary or larger than life.”
To the best of his ability, he mulled over the notion of being larger than life. “Did you have to go there when you were young?”
His father nodded.
“Were you afraid?”
His father sat back into his tall, brocaded armchair, as if in recall. “In the beginning I was. Until I learned to overcome fear.”
“Will I have to kill anything?”
“If you wish to survive.”
With some excitement, Wilhuff said: “Will I get to use a blaster?”
His father shook his head in a grave manner. “Not always. And not when you’ll need one most.”
Wilhuff grappled with imagining the place, this Carrion. “Does everyone have to go there?”
“Only certain Tarkin males,” his mother said.
“So Nomma never had to go?” he asked, referring to their diminutive, heavily jowled near-human servant.
“No, he didn’t.”
“Why not? Are Tarkins different from Nomma’s family?”
“Who serves whom?” his father responded with force. “Have you ever placed a meal in front of Nomma?”
“I would.”
His mother’s expression hardened. “Not in this house.”
“What you learn on the Carrion will one day allow you to show Nomma how to be content with his station,” his father went on.
Wilhuff struggled with the word station. “To be happy about serving us, you mean.”
“Among other things, yes.”
Still on unsure ground, Wilhuff fell silent for an even longer moment. “Will you be taking me there — to the Carrion?” he asked finally.
His father narrowed his eyes when he smiled. “Not me. Someone else will come for you when the time is right.”
A more delicate, impressionable child might have lived in fear of that day, but to Wilhuff the threat of sudden change, the abrupt undermining of his effortless life, and the need to forge his own future eventually became a promise: a parable, an adventure on which he yearned to embark, made real in his imagination long before it actually came to be.
The day arrived shortly after his eleventh birthday; Wilhuff was, by then, a shipshape kid burning with desire for bigger things, already something of a dreamer, an actor, an exaggerator. He was seated with his parents for the evening meal. The litany of harsh reminders was about to commence when three men looking as if they had just crawled out from beneath a mine collapse barged through the front door and into dining room. Tracking mud across the polished stone floors, they began to stuff the pockets of their ragged longcoats with food snatched from the dinner table. When Wilhuff looked to his suddenly silent parents, his mother only said, “They’ve come for you.”
But if his parents and the three intruders thought they had taken him by surprise, he had one of his own in store for them. “First I need to get my gear,” he said, hurrying up the curving stairway as expressions of puzzlement began to form on the faces of the uninvited guests.
The looks were still in place when he returned a moment later, dressed in cargo pants and a multipocketed vest he had stitched together in secret over many weeks. Dangling from his neck was a pair of macrobinoculars that had been a birthday gift. His gear, his outfit, his uniform for when it would be needed.
Scanning Tarkin from head to toe, the tallest and grimiest of the three launched a short laugh that shook the anteroom chandelier. Then he stepped forward to take the boy by shoulders that would remain bony and narrow throughout his life, shaking him as he said: “That’s a beauty, it is. A uniform fit for a future hero. And you know what? It’ll look even better with blood on it.”
His father stepped forward to say: “Wilhuff, meet my father’s brother, your grand-uncle Jova.”
Jova grinned down at him, showing even teeth, whiter than Wilhuff would have expected considering his uncle’s dirt-streaked face.
“Time to go,” Jova announced.
So: whisked from his home without a reassuring embrace from either parent, the two of them standing instead in each other’s arms, expressions of sad resolve on their faces. This was something he needed to experience. And through the gate into Eriadu’s pitch-black pall, safe for the moment within the uniform, exhilaration stifling the hunger he was already feeling. Whisked not only from the manicured grounds but also from the city itself in an aged airspeeder, on a shaky flight across the finger-shaped bay and up into the hills beyond to follow the meandering Orrineswa River to a region he had never known to exist on his homeworld, one that seemed more the stuff of holodramas and escapist literature: an untamed expanse of flat-topped mesas separated by surging boulder-strewn rivers, and in the far distance volcanic mountains that were perhaps still active. Even more shocking was Jova’s explanation that while vast areas of Eriadu were much like this one, everything the boy’s wide blue eyes could take in from horizon to horizon was family land — Tarkin land, procured twenty generations earlier and never allowed to fall into the hands of developers, miners, or anyone with designs on the region. A protected place and more: a natural monument, a reminder of what the planet could devolve into should sentient beings lose their grip and surrender their superiority to nature, to savagery. For young Wilhuff, a place of initiation; and central to it all, the Carrion Plateau.