Dune (49 page)

“Even though she has my countenance?”

“I invoke the amtal rule,” Jamis said. “It’s my right.”

Stilgar nodded. “Then, if the boy does not carve you down, you’ll answer to
my knife afterward. And this time I’ll not hold back the blade as I’ve done
before.”

“You cannot do this thing,” Jessica said. “Paul’s just–”

“You must not interfere, Sayyadina,” Stilgar said. “Oh, I know you can take
me and, therefore, can take anyone among us, but you cannot best us all united.
This must be; it is the amtal rule.”

Jessica fell silent, staring at him in the green light of the glowglobes,
seeing the demoniacal stiffness that had taken over his expression. She shifted
her attention to Jamis, saw the brooding look to his brows and thought: I
should’ve seen that before. He broods. He’s the silent kind, one who works
himself up inside. I should’ve been prepared.
“If you harm my son,” she said, “You’ll have me to meet. I call you out now.
I’ll carve you into a joint of–”

“Mother.” Paul stepped forward, touched her sleeve. “Perhaps if I explain to
Jamis how–”

“Explain!” Jamis sneered.

Paul fell silent, staring at the man. He felt no fear of him. Jamis appeared
clumsy in his movements and he had fallen so easily in their night encounter on
the sand. But Paul still felt the nexus-?boiling of this cave, still remembered
the prescient visions of himself dead under a knife. There had been so few
avenues of escape for him in that vision . . .

Stilgar said: “Sayyadina, you must step back now where–”

“Stop calling her Sayyadina!” Jamis said. “That’s yet to be proved. So she
knows the prayer! What’s that? Every child among us knows it.”

He has talked enough, Jessica thought. I’ve the key to him. I could
immobilize him with a word. She hesitated. But I cannot stop them all.

“You will answer to me then,” Jessica said, and she pitched her voice in a
twisting tone with a little whine in it and a catch at the end.

Jamis stared at her, fright visible on his face.

“I’ll teach you agony,” she said in the same tone. “Remember that as you
fight. You’ll have agony such as will make the gom jabbar a happy memory by
comparison. You will writhe with your entire–”

“She tries a spell on me!” Jamis gasped. He put his clenched right fist
beside his ear. “I invoke the silence on her!”

“So be it then,” Stilgar said. He cast a warning glance at Jessica. “If you
speak again, Sayyadina, we’ll know it’s your witchcraft and you’ll be forfeit.”
He nodded for her to step back.

Jessica felt hands pulling her, helping her back, and she sensed they were
not unkindly. She saw Paul being separated from the throng, the elfin-?faced
Chani whispering in his ear as she nodded toward Jamis.

A ring formed within the troop. More glowglobes were brought and all of them
tuned to the yellow band.

Jamis stepped into the ring, slipped out of his robe and tossed it to
someone in the crowd. He stood there in a cloudy gray slickness of stillsuit
that was patched and marked by tucks and gathers. For a moment, he bent with his
mouth to his shoulder, drinking from a catchpocket tube. Presently he
straightened, peeled off and detached the suit, handed it carefully into the
crowd. He stood waiting, clad in loincloth and some tight fabric over his feet,
a crysknife in his right hand.

Jessica saw the girl-?child Chani helping Paul, saw her press a crysknife
handle into his palm, saw him heft it, testing the weight and balance. And it
came to Jessica that Paul had been trained in prana and bindu, the nerve and the
fiber–that he had been taught fighting in a deadly school, his teachers men
like Duncan Idaho and Gurney Halleck, men who were legends in their own
lifetimes. The boy knew the devious ways of the Bene Gesserit and he looked
supple and confident.

But he’s only fifteen, she thought. And he has no shield. I must stop this.
Somehow, there must be a way to . . . She looked up, saw Stilgar watching her.

“You cannot stop it,” he said. “You must not speak.”

She put a hand over her mouth, thinking: I’ve planted fear in Jamis’ mind.
It’ll slow him some . . . perhaps. If I could only pray–truly pray.

Paul stood alone now just into the ring, clad in the fighting trunks he’d
worn under his stillsuit. He held a crysknife in his right hand; his feet were
bare against the sand-?gritted rock. Idaho had warned him time and again: “When
in doubt of your surface, bare feet are best.” And there were Chani’s words of
instruction still in the front of his consciousness: “Jamis turns to the right
with his knife after a parry. It’s a habit in him we’ve all seen. And he’ll aim
for the eyes to catch a blink in which to slash you. And he can fight either
hand; took out for a knife shift.“

But strongest in Paul so that he felt it with his entire body was training
and the instinctual reaction mechanism that had been hammered into him day after
day, hour after hour on the practice floor.

Gurney Halleck’s words were there to remember: ”The good knife fighter
thinks on point and blade and shearing-?guard simultaneously. The point can also
cut; the blade can also stab; the shearing-?guard can also trap your opponent’s
blade.“

Paul glanced at the crysknife. There was no shearing-?guard; only the slim
round ring of the handle with its raised lips to protect the hand. And even so,
he realized that he did not know the breaking tension of this blade, did not
even know if it could be broken.

Jamis began sidling to the right along the edge of the ring opposite Paul.

Paul crouched, realizing then that he had no shield, but was trained to
fighting with its subtle field around him, trained to react on defense with
utmost speed while his attack would be timed to the controlled slowness
necessary for penetrating the enemy’s shield. In spite of constant warning from
his trainers not to depend on the shield’s mindless blunting of attack speed, he
knew that shield-?awareness was part of him.

Jamis called out in ritual challenge: ”May thy knife chip and shatter!“

This knife will break then, Paul thought.

He cautioned himself that Jamis also was without shield, but the man wasn’t
trained to its use, had no shield-?fighter inhibitions.

Paul stared across the ring at Jamis. The man’s body looked like knotted
whipcord on a dried skeleton. His crysknife shone milky yellow in the light of
the glowglobes.

Fear coursed through Paul. He felt suddenly alone and naked standing in dull
yellow light within this ring of people. Prescience had fed his knowledge with
countless experiences, hinted at the strongest currents of the future and the
strings of decision that guided them, but this was the real-?now. This was death
hanging on an infinite number of miniscule mischances.

Anything could tip the future here, he realized. Someone coughing in the
troop of watchers, a distraction. A variation in a glowglobe’s brilliance, a
deceptive shadow.

I’m afraid, Paul told himself.

And he circled warily opposite Jamis, repeating silently to himself the Bene
Gesserit litany against fear. ”Fear is the mind-?killer . . . “ It was a cool
bath washing over him. He felt muscles untie themselves, become poised and
ready.

”I’ll sheath my knife in your blood,“ Jamis snarled. And in the middle of
the last word he pounced.

Jessica saw the motion, stifled an outcry.

Where the man struck there was only empty air and Paul stood now behind
Jamis with a clear shot at the exposed back.

Now, Paul! Now! Jessica screamed it in her mind.

Paul’s motion was slowly timed, beautifully fluid, but so slow it gave Jamis
the margin to twist away, backing and turning to the right.

Paul withdrew, crouching low. ”First, you must find my blood,” he said.

Jessica recognized the shield-?fighter timing in her son, and it came over
her what a two-?edged thing that was. The boy’s reactions were those of youth and
trained to a peak these people had never seen. But the attack was trained, too,
and conditioned by the necessities of penetrating a shield barrier. A shield
would repel too fast a blow, admit only the slowly deceptive counter. It needed
control and trickery to get through a shield.

Does Paul see it? she asked herself. He must!
Again Jamis attacked, ink-?dark eyes glaring, his body a yellow blur under
the glowglobes.

And again Paul slipped away to return too slowly on the attack.

And again.

And again.

Each time, Paul’s counterblow came an instant late.

And Jessica saw a thing she hoped Jamis did not see. Paul’s defensive
reactions were blindingly fast, but they moved each time at the precisely
correct angle they would take if a shield were helping deflect part of Jamis’
blow.

“Is your son playing with that poor fool?” Stilgar asked. He waved her to
silence before she could respond. “Sorry; you must remain silent.”

Now the two figures on the rock floor circled each other; Jamis with knife
hand held far forward and tipped up slightly; Paul crouched with knife held low.

Again, Jamis pounced, and this time he twisted to the right where Paul had
been dodging.

Instead of faking back and out, Paul met the man’s knife hand on the point
of his own blade. Then the boy was gone, twisting away to the left and thankful
for Chani’s warning.

Jamis backed into the center of the circle, rubbing his knife hand. Blood
dripped from the injury for a moment, stopped. His eyes were wide and staring–
two blue-?black holes–studying Paul with a new wariness in the dull light of the
glowglobes.

“Ah, that one hurt,” Stilgar murmured.

Paul crouched at the ready and, as he had been trained to do after first
blood, called out: “Do you yield?”

“Hah!” Jamis cried.

An angry murmur arose from the troop.

“Hold!” Stilgar called out. “The lad doesn’t know our rule.” Then, to Paul:
“There can be no yielding in the tahaddi-?challenge. Death is the test of it.”

Jessica saw Paul swallow hard. And she thought: He’s never killed a man like
this . . . in the hot blood of a knife fight. Can he do it?

Paul circled slowly right, forced by Jamis’ movement. The prescient
knowledge of the time-?boiling variables in this cave came back to plague him
now. His new understanding told him there were too many swiftly compressed
decisions in this fight for any clear channel ahead to show itself.

Variable piled on variable–that was why this cave lay as a blurred nexus in
his path. It was like a gigantic rock in the flood, creating maelstroms in the
current around it.

“Have an end to it, lad,” Stilgar muttered. “Don’t play with him.”

Paul crept farther into the ring, relying on his own edge in speed.

Jamis backed now that the realization swept over him–that this was no soft
offworlder in the tahaddi ring, easy prey for a Fremen crysknife.

Jessica saw the shadow of desperation in the man’s face. Now is when he’s
most dangerous, she thought. Now he’s desperate and can do anything. He sees
that this is not like a child of his own people, but a fighting machine born and
trained to it from infancy. Now the fear I planted in him has come to bloom.

And she found in herself a sense of pity for Jamis–an emotion tempered by
awareness of the immediate peril to her son.

Jamis could do anything . . . any unpredictable thing, she told herself. She
wondered then if Paul had glimpsed this future, if he were reliving this
experience. But she saw the way her son moved, the beads of perspiration on his
face and shoulders, the careful wariness visible in the flow of muscles. And for
the first time she sensed, without understanding it, the uncertainty factor in
Paul’s gift.

Paul pressed the fight now, circling but not attacking. He had seen the fear
in his opponent. Memory of Duncan Idaho’s voice flowed through Paul’s awareness:
“When your opponent fears you, then’s the moment when you give the fear its own
rein, give it the time to work on him. Let it become terror. The terrified man
fights himself. Eventually, he attacks in desperation. That is the most
dangerous moment, but the terrified man can be trusted usually to make a fatal
mistake. You are being trained here to detect these mistakes and use them. ”

The crowd in the cavern began to mutter.

They think Paul’s toying with Jamis, Jessica thought. They think Paul’s
being needlessly cruel.

But she sensed also the undercurrent of crowd excitement, their enjoyment of
the spectacle. And she could see the pressure building up in Jamis. The moment
when it became too much for him to contain was as apparent to her as it was to
Jamis . . . or to Paul.

Jamis leaped high, feinting and striking down with his right hand, but the
hand was empty. The crysknife had been shifted to his left hand.

Jessica gasped.

But Paul had been warned by Chani: “Jamis fights with either hand.” And the
depth of his training had taken in that trick en passant. “Keep the mind on the
knife and not on the hand that holds it, ” Gurney Halleck had told him time and
again. “The knife is more dangerous than the hand and the knife can be in either
hand.”

And Paul had seen Jamis’ mistake: bad footwork so that it took the man a
heartbeat longer to recover from his leap, which had been intended to confuse
Paul and hide the knife shift.

Except for the low yellow light of the glowglobes and the inky eyes of the
staring troop, it was similar to a session on the practice floor. Shields didn’t
count where the body’s own movement could be used against it. Paul shifted his
own knife in a blurred motion, slipped sideways and thrust upward where Jamis’
chest was descending–then away to watch the man crumble.

Jamis fell like a limp rag, face down, gasped once and turned his face
toward Paul, then lay still on the rock floor. His dead eyes stared out like
beads of dark glass.

“Killing with the point lacks artistry,” Idaho had once told Paul, “but
don’t let that hold your hand when the opening presents itself.”