We covered many kilometers today. The ground is rising; as the jungle thins we can move much more swiftly. It is not for nothing that a Korun does not speak of distance in kilometers, but in travel time.

The same thinning of the jungle that increases our speed also leaves us more exposed to the gunships that seem now to be patrolling in an organized search pattern.

I have much to tell of this day that has passed, and yet it's difficult for me to begin. I can only think of tomorrow, of meeting Nick, and finally calling down the Halleck to carry us away.

I burn for it.

I have discovered that I hate this place.

Not very Jedi of me, but I cannot deny it. I hate the damp, and the smell, and the heat, and the sweat that trickles constantly around my eyebrows, trails down my cheeks, and drips from the point of my chin. I hate the stupid bovine complacency of the grassers, and the feral snarls of the half-wild akk dogs. I hate the gripleaves, and the brass-vines, the portaak trees and thyssel bushes.

I hate the darkness under the trees.

I hate the war.

I hate what it's done to these people. To Depa.

I hate what it's doing to me.

The Halleck will be cool. It will be clean. The food will have no mold or rot or insect eggs.

I know already what I will do first, aboard ship. Before I even visit the bridge to salute the captain.

I will take a shower.

The last time I was clean was on the shuttle, in orbit. Now I wonder if I'll ever be clean again.

When I stepped off the shuttle at the Pelek Baw spaceport, I remember looking up at the white peak of Grandfather's Shoulder, and thinking that I had spent far too much time on Coruscant.

What a fool I was.

As Depa described me: Blind, ignorant, arrogant fool.

I was afraid to learn how bad things might be here, and the worst of my fears didn't even approach the truth.

I can't- I feel my lightsaber coming this way. I will continue later.

FROM THE PRIVATE JOURNALS OF MACE WlNDU Kar was ostensibly stopping at Depa's tent to discuss tomorrow's march before she settles in for the night; I suspect that his true aim was to check on me.

I hope he is satisfied by what he found.

This morning, I asked Depa why she hadn't left when the Separatists pulled back to Gevarno and Opari. Why she clearly would stay even now, were I not extorting her cooperation.

"There is fighting to be done. Can a Jedi walk away?" Her voice was muffled, coming through the curtains. She did not invite me inside this morning, and I did not ask why.

I'm afraid that she was in a state that neither of us wanted me to see.

"To fight on after the battle is done-Depa, that is not Jedi," I told her. "That's the dark." "War is not about light or dark. It is about winning. Or dying." "But here you've already won." I thought back to the words of my strange waking dream.

Her words, or the Force's, I did not know.

"Perhaps I have. But look around you: is what you see a victorious army? Or are they ragged fugitives, spending the last of their strength to stay a step ahead of the gallows?" I have enormous sympathy for them: for their suffering and their desperate struggle. It is never far from my thoughts that only chance-a whim of Jedi anthropologists and the choice of some elders of ghosh Windu-separates their fate from my own.

I could too easily have grown to become Kar Vaster myself.

But I said none of this to Depa; my purpose here was not to muse upon the twists in the endless river that is the Force.

"I understand their war," I told her. "It's very clear to me why they fight. My question is: Why are you still fighting?" "Can't you feel it?" And when she spoke, I could: in the Force, a relentless pulse of fear and hatred, like what I had felt from Nick and Chalk and Besh and. Lesh in the groundcar, but here amplified as though the jungle had become a planetwide resonance chamber. It was hate that kept the Korunnai fighting on, as though this whole people shared a single dream: that all Balawai might have a single skull, bent for a Korun mace.

She said: "Yes: our battle is won. Theirs goes on. It will never be over, not while one of them still lives. The Balawai will never stop coming. We used these people for our own purposes- and we got what we wanted. Should I now throw them away? Abandon them to genocide, because they are no longer useful? Is that what the Council orders me to do?" "You prefer to stay and fight a war that is not yours?" Her voice gathered heat. "They need me, Mace. I am their only hope." That heat quickly faded, though, and she went back to her exhausted mumble. "I've done. things. Questionable things. I know. But I have seen. Mace, you cannot imagine what I have seen. As bad as it is-as bad as I am. Search the Force. You can feel how much worse everything could be. How much worse it will be." With this, I could not argue.

"Look around you." Her mumble took on a bitter edge. "Think about everything you've seen.

This is a little war, Mace. A little sputtering on-again, off-again series of inconclusive skirmishes. Until the Republic and the Confederacy mixed into it, it was practically a sporting event. But look at what it's done to these people. Imagine what war will do to those who've never known it. Imagine infantry battles in the fields of Alderaan. DOKAWs striking spacescrapers on Coruscant. Imagine what the galaxy will be if the Clone War turns serious." I told her it was already serious, and she laughed at me. "You haven't seen serious yet." I told her I was looking at it.

And I think, now, of the clone troopers on the Halleck, and how their clean crisp unquestioning bravery and discipline under fire is as far from these ragged murderers as it is possible to be for members of the same species. and I remember that the Grand Army of the Republic numbers 1.2 million clone troopers-just enough to station a single trooper-one lone man-on each planet of the Republic, and have a handful of thousands left over.

If this Clone War escalates the way Depa seems to think it will, it will be fought not by clones and Jedi and battle droids, but by ordinary people. Ordinary people who will face one stark choice: to die, or to become like these Korunnai. Ordinary people who will have to leave forever the Galaxy of Peace.

I can only hope that war is easier on those who cannot touch the Force.

Though I suspect the truth is exactly opposite.

There were hours, too, when we did not speak. I sat beside the how-dah while she dozed in the afternoon heat, drowsy myself with the ankkox's rocking gait and the unchanging flow of the trees and vines and flowers, and I listened to her dream-mumbles, and was shocked, sometimes, by her sudden nightmare shrieks, or the agonized moans that her migraines might pull from her lips.