Dune (65 page)

Or, was that a thing yet to happen?

No, he reassured himself, for Alia-the-Strange-One, his sister, had gone there with his mother and with Chani—a twenty-thumper trip into the south, riding a Reverend Mother's palanquin fixed to the back of a wild maker.

He shied away from the thought of riding the giant worms, asking himself:
Or is Alia yet to be born?

I was on razzia,
Paul recalled.
We went raiding to recover the water of our dead in Arrakeen. And I found the remains of my father in the funeral pyre. I enshrined the skull of my father in a Fremen rock mound overlooking Harg Pass.

Or was that a thing yet to be?

My wounds are real,
Paul told himself.
My scars are real. The shrine of my father's skull is real.

Still in the dreamlike state, Paul remembered that Harah, Jamis' wife, had intruded on him once to say there'd been a fight in the sietch corridor. That had been the interim sietch before the women and children had been sent into the deep south. Harah had stood there in the entrance to the inner chamber, the black wings of her hair tied back by water rings on a chain. She had held aside the chamber's hangings and told him that Chani had just killed someone.

This happened,
Paul told himself.
This was real, not born out of its time and subject to change.

Paul remembered he had rushed out to find Chani standing beneath the yellow globes of the corridor, clad in a brilliant blue wraparound robe with hood thrown back, a flush of exertion on her elfin features. She had been sheathing her crysknife. A huddled group had been hurrying away down the corridor with a burden.

And Paul remembered telling himself: You always know when they're carrying a body.

Chani's water rings, worn openly in sietch on a cord around her neck, tinkled as she turned toward him.

“Chani, what is this?” he asked.

“I dispatched one who came to challenge you in single combat, Usul.”

“
You
killed him?”

“Yes. But perhaps I should've left him for Harah.”

(And Paul recalled how the faces of the people around them had showed appreciation for these words. Even Harah had laughed.)

“But he came to challenge
me!”

“You trained me yourself in the weirding way, Usul.”

“Certainly! But you shouldn't—”

“I was born in the desert, Usul. I know how to use a crysknife.”

He suppressed his anger, tried to talk reasonably. “This may all be true, Chani, but—”

“I am no longer a child hunting scorpions in the sietch by the light of a handglobe, Usul. I do not play games.”

Paul glared at her, caught by the odd ferocity beneath her casual attitude.

“He was not worthy, Usul,” Chani said. “I'd not disturb your meditations with the likes of him.” She moved closer, looking at him out of the corners of her eyes, dropping her voice so that only he might hear. “And, beloved, when it's learned that a challenger may face me and be brought to shameful death by Muad'Dib's woman, there'll be fewer challengers.”

Yes
, Paul told himself,
that had certainly happened. It was true-past. And the number of challengers testing the new blade of Muad'Dib did drop dramatically.

Somewhere, in a world not-of-the-dream, there was a hint of motion, the cry of a nightbird.

I dream,
Paul reassured himself.
It's the spice meal.

Still, there was about him a feeling of abandonment. He wondered if it might be possible that his ruh-spirit had slipped over somehow into the world where the Fremen believed he had his true existence—into the alam al-mithal, the world of similitudes, that metaphysical realm where all physical limitations were removed. And he knew fear at the thought of such a place, because removal of all limitations meant removal of all points of reference. In the landscape of a myth he could not orient himself and say: “I am I because I am here.”

His mother had said once: “The people are divided, some of them, in how they think of you.”

I must be waking from the dream,
Paul told himself. For this had happened—these words from his mother, the Lady Jessica who was now a Reverend Mother of the Fremen, these words had passed through reality.

Jessica was fearful of the religious relationship between himself and the Fremen, Paul knew. She didn't like the fact that people of both sietch and graben referred to Muad'Dib as
Him.
And she went questioning among the tribes, sending out her Sayyadina spies, collecting their answers and brooding on them.

She had quoted a Bene Gesserit proverb to him: “When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement become headlong—faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it's too late.”

Paul recalled that he had sat there in his mother's quarters, in the inner chamber shrouded by dark hangings with their surfaces covered by woven patterns out of Fremen mythology. He had sat there, hearing her out, noting the way she was always observing—even when her eyes were lowered. Her oval face had new lines in it at the corners of the mouth, but the hair was still like polished bronze. The wide-set green eyes, though, hid beneath their overcasting of spice-imbued blue.

“The Fremen have a simple, practical religion,” he said.

“Nothing about religion is simple,” she warned.

But Paul, seeing the clouded future that still hung over them, found himself swayed by anger. He could only say: “Religion unifies our forces. It's our mystique.”

“You deliberately cultivate this air, this bravura,” she charged. “You never cease indoctrinating.”

“Thus you yourself taught me,” he said.

But she had been full of contentions and arguments that day. It had been the day of the circumcision ceremony for little Leto. Paul had understood some of the reasons for her upset. She had never accepted his liaison—the “marriage of youth”—with Chani. But Chani had produced an Atreides son, and Jessica had found herself unable to reject the child with the mother.

Jessica had stirred finally under his stare, said: “You think me an unnatural mother.”

“Of course not.”

“I see the way you watch me when I'm with your sister. You don't understand about your sister.”

“I know why Alia is different,” he said. “She was unborn, part of you, when you changed the Water of Life. She—”

“You know nothing of it!”

And Paul, suddenly unable to express the knowledge gained out of its time, said only: “I don't think you unnatural.”

She saw his distress, said: “There is a thing, Son.”

“Yes?”

“I do love your Chani. I accept her.”

This was real, Paul told himself. This wasn't the imperfect vision to be changed by the twistings out of time's own birth.

The reassurance gave him a new hold on his world. Bits of solid reality began to dip through the dream state into his awareness. He knew suddenly that he was in a hiereg, a desert camp. Chani had planted their stilltent on flour-sand for its softness. That could only mean Chani was near by—Chani, his soul, Chani his sihaya, sweet as the desert spring, Chani up from the palmaries of the deep south.

Now, he remembered her singing a sand chanty to him in the time for sleep.

And she had sung the walking song lovers shared on the sand, its rhythm like the drag of the dunes against the feet:

He had heard someone strumming a baliset in another tent. And he'd thought then of Gurney Halleck. Reminded by the familiar instrument, he had thought of Gurney whose face he had seen in a smuggler band, but who had not seen him, could not see him or know of him lest that inadvertently lead the Harkonnens to the son of the Duke they had killed.

But the style of the player in the night, the distinctiveness of the fingers on the baliset's strings, brought the real musician back to Paul's memory. It had been Chatt the Leaper, captain of the Fedaykin, leader of the death commandos who guarded Muad'Dib.

We are in the desert,
Paul remembered.
We are in the central erg beyond the Harkonnen patrols. I am here to walk the sand, to lure a maker and mount him by my own cunning that I may be a Fremen entire.

He felt now the maula pistol at his belt, the crysknife. He felt the silence surrounding him.

It was that special pre-morning silence when the nightbirds had gone and the day creatures had not yet signaled their alertness to their enemy, the sun.

“You must ride the sand in the light of day that Shai-hulud shall see and know you have no fear,” Stilgar had said. “Thus we turn our time around and set ourselves to sleep this night.”

Quietly, Paul sat up, feeling the looseness of a slacked stillsuit around his body, the shadowed stilltent beyond. So softly he moved, yet Chani heard him.

She spoke from the tent's gloom, another shadow there: “It's not yet full light, beloved.”

“Sihaya,” he said, speaking with half a laugh in his voice.

“You call me your desert spring,” she said, “but this day I'm thy goad. I am the Sayyadina who watches that the rites be obeyed.”

He began tightening his stillsuit. “You told me once the words of the Kitab al-Ibar,” he said. “You told me: ”Woman is thy field; go then to thy field and till it.'”

“I am the mother of thy firstborn,” she agreed.

He saw her in the grayness matching him movement for movement, securing her stillsuit for the open desert. “You should get all the rest you can,” she said.

He recognized her love for him speaking then and chided her gently: “The Sayyadina of the Watch does not caution or warn the candidate.”

She slid across to his side, touched his cheek with her palm. “Today, I am both the watcher and the woman.”

“You should've left this duty to another,” he said.

“Waiting is bad enough at best,” she said. “I'd sooner be at thy side.”

He kissed her palm before securing the faceflap of his suit, then turned and cracked the seal of the tent. The air that came in to them held the chill not-quite-dryness that would precipitate trace dew in the dawn. With it came the smell of a pre-spice mass, the mass they had detected off to the northeast, and that told them there would be a maker near by.

Paul crawled through the sphincter opening, stood on the sand and stretched the sleep from his muscles. A faint green-pearl luminescence etched the eastern horizon. The tents of his troop were small false dunes around him in the gloom. He saw movement off to the left—the guard, and knew they had seen him.

They knew the peril he faced this day. Each Fremen had faced it. They gave him this last few moments of isolation now that he might prepare himself.

It must be done today,
he told himself.

He thought of the power he wielded in the face of the pogrom—the old men who sent their sons to him to be trained in the weirding way of battle, the old men who listened to him now in council and followed his plans, the men who returned to pay him that highest Fremen compliment : “Your plan worked, Muad'Dib.”

Yet the meanest and smallest of the Fremen warriors could do a thing that he had never done. And Paul knew his leadership suffered from the omnipresent knowledge of this difference between them.

He had not ridden the maker.

Oh, he'd gone up with the others for training trips and raids, but he had not made his own voyage. Until he did, his world was bounded by the abilities of others. No true Fremen could permit this. Until he did this thing himself, even the great southlands—the area some twenty thumpers beyond the erg—were denied him unless he ordered a palanquin and rode like a Reverend Mother or one of the sick and wounded.

Memory returned to him of his wrestling with his inner awareness during the night. He saw a strange parallel here—if he mastered the maker, his rule was strengthened; if he mastered the inward eye, this carried its own measure of command. But beyond them both lay the clouded area, the Great Unrest where all the universe seemed embroiled.

The differences in the ways he comprehended the universe haunted him—accuracy matched with inaccuracy. He saw it
in situ.
Yet, when it was born, when it came into the pressures of reality, the
now
had its own life and grew with its own subtle differences. Terrible purpose remained. Race consciousness remained. And over all loomed the jihad, bloody and wild.

Chani joined him outside the tent, hugging her elbows, looking up at him from the corners of her eyes the way she did when she studied his mood.

“Tell me again about the waters of thy birthworld, Usul,” she said.

He saw that she was trying to distract him, ease his mind of tensions before the deadly test. It was growing lighter, and he noted that some of his Fedaykin were already striking their tents.

“I'd rather you told me about the sietch and about our son,” he said. “Does our Leto yet hold my mother in his palm?”

“It's Alia he holds as well,” she said. “And he grows rapidly. He'll be a big man.”