Dune (10 page)

Again that strange nod, and the woman peered upward at Jessica with a sly questioning. “There's a wife, then?”

“There is not, nor has there ever been. I am the Duke's only . . . companion, the mother of his heir-designate.”

Even as she spoke, Jessica laughed inwardly at the pride behind her words.
What was it St. Augustine said?
she asked herself.
“The mind commands the body and it obeys. The mind orders itself and meets resistance.
”
Yes—I am meeting more resistance lately. I could use a quiet retreat by myself.

A weird cry sounded from the road outside the house. It was repeated: “Soo-soo-Sook! Soo-soo-Sook!” Then: “Ikhut-eigh! Ikhut-eigh!” And again: “Soo-soo-Sook!”

“What is that?” Jessica asked. “I heard it several times as we drove through the streets this morning.”

“Only a water-seller, my Lady. But you've no need to interest yourself in such as they. The cistern here holds fifty thousand liters and it's always kept full.” She glanced down at her dress. “Why, you know, my Lady, I don't even have to wear my stillsuit here?” She cackled. “And me not even dead!”

Jessica hesitated, wanting to question this Fremen woman, needing data to guide her. But bringing order of the confusion in the castle was more imperative. Still, she found the thought unsettling that water was a major mark of wealth here.

“My husband told me of your title, Shadout,” Jessica said. “I recognized the word. It's a very ancient word.”

“You know the ancient tongues then?” Mapes asked, and she waited with an odd intensity.

“Tongues are the Bene Gesserit's first learning,” Jessica said. “I know the Bhotani Jib and the Chakobsa, all the hunting languages.”

Mapes nodded. “Just as the legend says.”

And Jessica wondered:
Why do I play out this sham?
But the Bene Gesserit ways were devious and compelling.

“I know the Dark Things and the ways of the Great Mother,” Jessica said. She read the more obvious signs in Mapes' actions and appearance, the petit betrayals. “Miseces prejia,” she said in the Chakobsa tongue. “Andral t're pera! Trada cik buscakri miseces perakri—”

Mapes took a backward step, appeared poised to flee.

“I know many things,” Jessica said. “I know that you have borne children, that you have lost loved ones, that you have hidden in fear and that you have done violence and will yet do more violence. I know many things.”

In a low voice, Mapes said: “I meant no offense, my Lady.”

“You speak of the legend and seek answers,” Jessica said. “Beware the answers you may find. I know you came prepared for violence with a weapon in your bodice.”

“My Lady, I. . . .”

“There's a remote possibility you could draw my life's blood,” Jessica said, “but in so doing you'd bring down more ruin than your wildest fears could imagine. There are worse things than dying, you know—even for an entire people.”

“My Lady!” Mapes pleaded. She appeared about to fall to her knees. “The weapon was sent as a gift to
you
should you prove to be the One.”

“And as the means of my death should I prove otherwise,” Jessica said. She waited in the seeming relaxation that made the Bene Gesserit-trained so terrifying in combat.

Now we see which way the decision tips,
she thought.

Slowly, Mapes reached into the neck of her dress, brought out a dark sheath. A black handle with deep finger ridges protruded from it. She took sheath in one hand and handle in the other, withdrew a milk-white blade, held it up. The blade seemed to shine and glitter with a light of its own. It was double-edged like a kindjal and the blade was perhaps twenty centimeters long.

“Do you know this, my Lady?” Mapes asked.

It could only be one thing, Jessica knew, the fabled crysknife of Arrakis, the blade that had never been taken off the planet, and was known only by rumor and wild gossip.

“It's a crysknife,” she said.

“Say it not lightly,” Mapes said. “Do you know its meaning?”

And Jessica thought:
There was an edge to that question. Here's the reason this Fremen has taken service with me, to ask that one question. My answer could precipitate violence or . . . what? She seeks an answer from me: the meaning of a knife. She's called the Shadout in the Chakobsa tongue. Knife, that's “Death Maker” in Chakobsa. She's getting restive. I must answer now. Delay is as dangerous as the wrong answer.

Jessica said: “It's a maker—”

“Eighe-e-e-e-e-e!” Mapes wailed. It was a sound of both grief and elation. She trembled so hard the knife blade sent glittering shards of reflection shooting around the room.

Jessica waited, poised. She had intended to say the knife was a
maker of death
and then add the ancient word, but every sense warned her now, all the deep training of alertness that exposed meaning in the most casual muscle twitch.

The key word was . . .
maker.

Still, Mapes held the knife as though ready to use it.

Jessica said: “Did you think that I, knowing the mysteries of the Great Mother, would not know the Maker?”

Mapes lowered the knife. “My Lady, when one has lived with prophecy for so long, the moment of revelation is a shock.”

Jessica thought about the prophecy—the Shari-a and all the panoplia propheticus, a Bene Gesserit of the Missionaria Protectiva dropped here long centuries ago—long dead, no doubt, but her purpose accomplished: the protective legends implanted in these people against the day of a Bene Gesserit's need.

Well, that day had come.

Mapes returned knife to sheath, said: “This is an unfixed blade, my Lady. Keep it near you. More than a week away from flesh and it begins to disintegrate. It's yours, a tooth of shai-hulud, for as long as you live.”

Jessica reached out her right hand, risked a gamble: “Mapes, you've sheathed that blade unblooded.”

With a gasp, Mapes dropped the sheathed knife into Jessica's hand, tore open the brown bodice, wailing: “Take the water of my life!”

Jessica withdrew the blade from its sheath. How it glittered! She directed the point toward Mapes, saw a fear greater than death-panic come over the woman.
Poison in the point?
Jessica wondered. She tipped up the point, drew a delicate scratch with the blade's edge above Mapes' left breast. There was a thick welling of blood that stopped almost immediately.
Ultrafast coagulation,
Jessica thought.
A moisture-conserving mutation?

She sheathed the blade, said: “Button your dress, Mapes.”

Mapes obeyed, trembling. The eyes without whites stared at Jessica. “You are ours,” she muttered. “You are the One.”

There came another sound of unloading in the entry. Swiftly, Mapes grabbed the sheathed knife, concealed it in Jessica's bodice. “Who sees that knife must be cleansed or slain!” she snarled. “You
know
that, my Lady!”

I know it now,
Jessica thought.

The cargo handlers left without intruding on the Great Hall.

Mapes composed herself, said: “The uncleansed who have seen a crysknife may not leave Arrakis alive. Never forget that, my Lady. You've been entrusted with a crysknife.” She took a deep breath. “Now the thing must take its course. It cannot be hurried.” She glanced at the stacked boxes and piled goods around them. “And there's work aplenty to while the time for us here.”

Jessica hesitated.
“The thing must take its course.”
That was a specific catchphrase from the Missionaria Protectiva's stock of incantations—
The coming of the Reverend Mother to free you.

But I'm not a Reverend Mother,
Jessica thought. And then:
Great Mother! They planted
that
one here! This must be a hideous place!

In matter-of-fact tones, Mapes said: “What'll you be wanting me to do first, my Lady?”

Instinct warned Jessica to match that casual tone. She said: “The painting of the Old Duke over there, it must be hung on one side of the dining hall. The bull's head must go on the wall opposite the painting.”

Mapes crossed to the bull's head. “What a great beast it must have been to carry such a head,” she said. She stooped. “I'll have to be cleaning this first, won't I, my Lady?”

“No.”

“But there's dirt caked on its horns.”

“That's not dirt, Mapes. That's the blood of our Duke's father. Those horns were sprayed with a transparent fixative within hours after this beast killed the Old Duke.”

Mapes stood up. “Ah, now!” she said.

“It's just blood,” Jessica said. “Old blood at that. Get some help hanging these now. The beastly things are heavy.”

“Did you think the blood bothered me?” Mapes asked. “I'm of the desert and I've seen blood aplenty.”

“I ... see that you have,” Jessica said.

“And some of it my own,” Mapes said. “More'n you drew with your puny scratch.”

“You'd rather I'd cut deeper?”

“Ah, no! The body's water is scant enough 'thout gushing a wasteful lot of it into the air. You did the thing right.”

And Jessica, noting the words and manner, caught the deeper implications in the phrase, “the body's water.” Again she felt a sense of oppression at the importance of water on Arrakis.

“On which side of the dining hall shall I hang which one of these pretties, my Lady?” Mapes asked.

Ever the practical one, this Mapes,
Jessica thought. She said: “Use your own judgment, Mapes. It makes no real difference.”

“As you say, my Lady.” Mapes stooped, began clearing wrappings and twine from the head. “Killed an old duke, did you?” she crooned.

“Shall I summon a handler to help you?” Jessica asked.

“I'll manage, my Lady.”

Yes, she'll manage,
Jessica thought.
There's that about this Fremen creature: the drive to manage.

Jessica felt the cold sheath of the crysknife beneath her bodice, thought of the long chain of Bene Gesserit scheming that had forged another link here. Because of that scheming, she had survived a deadly crisis. “It cannot be hurried,” Mapes had said. Yet there was a tempo of headlong rushing to this place that filled Jessica with foreboding. And not all the preparations of the Missionaria Protectiva nor Hawat's suspicious inspection of this castellated pile of rocks could dispel the feeling.

“When you've finished hanging those, start unpacking the boxes,” Jessica said. “One of the cargo men at the entry has all the keys and knows where things should go. Get the keys and the list from him. If there are any questions I'll be in the south wing.”

“As you will, my Lady,” Mapes said.

Jessica turned away, thinking:
Hawat may have passed this residency as safe, but there's something wrong about the place. I can feel it.

An urgent need to see her son gripped Jessica. She began walking toward the arched doorway that led into the passage to the dining hall and the family wings. Faster and faster she walked until she was almost running.

Behind her, Mapes paused in clearing the wrappings from the bull's head, looked at the retreating back. “She's the One all right,” she muttered. “Poor thing.”

 

THE DOOR stood ajar, and Jessica stepped through it into a room with yellow walls. To her left stretched a low settee of black hide and two empty bookcases, a hanging waterflask with dust on its bulging sides. To her right, bracketing another door, stood more empty bookcases, a desk from Caladan and three chairs. At the windows directly ahead of her stood Dr. Yueh, his back to her, his attention fixed upon the outside world.

Jessica took another silent step into the room.

She saw that Yueh's coat was wrinkled, a white smudge near the left elbow as though he had leaned against chalk. He looked, from behind, like a fleshless stick figure in overlarge black clothing, a caricature poised for stringy movement at the direction of a puppet master. Only the squarish block of head with long ebony hair caught in its silver Suk School ring at the shoulder seemed alive—turning slightly to follow some movement outside.

Again, she glanced around the room, seeing no sign of her son, but the closed door on her right, she knew, let into a small bedroom for which Paul had expressed a liking.

“Good afternoon, Dr. Yueh,” she said. “Where's Paul?”

He nodded as though to something out the window, spoke in an absent manner without turning: “Your son grew tired, Jessica. I sent him into the next room to rest.”

Abruptly, he stiffened, whirled with mustache flopping over his purpled lips. “Forgive me, my Lady! My thoughts were far away . . . I . . . did not mean to be familiar.”

She smiled, held out her right hand. For a moment, she was afraid he might kneel. “Wellington, please.”

“To use your name like that . . . I. . . .”

“We've known each other six years,” she said. “It's long past time formalities should've been dropped between us—in private.”

Yueh ventured a thin smile, thinking:
I believe it has worked. Now, she'll think anything unusual in my manner is due to embarrassment. She'll not look for deeper reasons when she believes she already knows the answer.

“I'm afraid I was woolgathering,” he said. “Whenever I . . . feel especially sorry for you, I'm afraid I think of you as . . . well, Jessica.”