Dune (57 page)

And he wondered again about his mother, how the moving montage of the future
would incorporate her . . . and the daughter she bore. Mutable time-?awareness
danced around him. He shook his head sharply, focusing his attention on the
evidences that spoke of profound depth and breadth in this Fremen culture that
had swallowed them.

With its subtle oddities.

He had seen a thing about the caverns and this room, a thing that suggested
far greater differences than anything he had yet encountered.

There was no sign of a poison snooper here, no indication of their use
anywhere in the cave warren. Yet he could smell poisons in the sietch stench–
strong ones, common ones.

He heard a rustle of hangings, thought it was Harah returning with food, and
turned to watch her. Instead, from beneath a displaced pattern of hangings, he
saw two young boys–perhaps aged nine and ten–staring out at him with greedy
eyes. Each wore a small kindjal-?type of crysknife, rested a hand on the hilt.

And Paul recalled the stories of the Fremen–that their children fought as
ferociously as the adults.

= = = = = =

The hands move, the lips move —
Ideas gush from his words,
And his eyes devour!
He is an island of Selfdom.
-description from “A Manual of Muad’Dib” by the Princess Irulan
Phosphortubes in the faraway upper reaches of the cavern cast a dim light
onto the thronged interior, hinting at the great size of this rock-?enclosed
space . . . larger, Jessica saw, than even the Gathering Hall of her Bene
Gesserit school. She estimated there were more than five thousand people
gathered out there beneath the ledge where she stood with Stilgar.

And more were coming.

The air was murmurous with people.

“Your son has been summoned from his rest, Sayyadina,” Stilgar said. “Do you
wish him to share in your decision?”

“Could he change my decision?”

“Certainly, the air with which you speak comes from your own lungs, but–”

“The decision stands,” she said.

But she felt misgivings, wondering if she should use Paul as an excuse for
backing out of a dangerous course. There was an unborn daughter to think of as
well. What endangered the flesh of the mother endangered the flesh of the
daughter.

Men came with rolled carpets, grunting under the weight of them, stirring up
dust as the loads were dropped onto the ledge.

Stilgar took her arm, led her back into the acoustical horn that formed the
rear limits of the ledge. He indicated a rock bench within the horn. “The
Reverend Mother will sit here, but you may rest yourself until she comes.”

“I prefer to stand,” Jessica said.

She watched the men unroll the carpets, covering the ledge, looked out at
the crowd. There were at least ten thousand people on the rock floor now.

And still they came.

Out on the desert, she knew, it already was red nightfall, but here in the
cavern hall was perpetual twilight, a gray vastness thronged with people come to
see her risk her life.

A way was opened through the crowd to her right, and she saw Paul
approaching flanked by two small boys. There was a swaggering air of self-
importance about the children. They kept hands on knives, scowled at the wall of
people on either side.

“The sons of Jamis who are now the sons of Usul,” Stilgar said. “They take
their escort duties seriously.” He ventured a smile at Jessica.

Jessica recognized the effort to lighten her mood and was grateful for it,
but could not take her mind from the danger that confronted her.

I had no choice but to do this, she thought. We must move swiftly if we’re
to secure our place among these Fremen.

Paul climbed to the ledge, leaving the children below. He stopped in front
of his mother, glanced at Stilgar, back to Jessica. “What is happening? I
thought I was being summoned to council.”

Stilgar raised a hand for silence, gestured to his left where another way
had been opened in the throng. Chani came down the lane opened there, her elfin
face set in lines of grief. She had removed her stillsuit and wore a graceful
blue wraparound that exposed her thin arms. Near the shoulder on her left arm, a
green kerchief had been tied.

Green for mourning, Paul thought.

It was one of the customs the two sons of Jamis had explained to him by
indirection, telling him they wore no green because they accepted him as
guardian-?father.

“Are you the Lisan al-?Gaib?” they had asked. And Paul had sensed the jihad
in their words, shrugged off the question with one of his own–learning then
that Kaleff, the elder of the two, was ten, and the natural son of Geoff. Orlop,
the younger, was eight, the natural son of Jamis.

It had been a strange day with these two standing guard over him because he
asked it, keeping away the curious, allowing him the time to nurse his thoughts
and prescient memories, to plan a way to prevent the jihad.
Now, standing beside his mother on the cavern ledge and looking out at the
throng, he wondered if any plan could prevent the wild outpouring of fanatic
legions.

Chani, nearing the ledge, was followed at a distance by four women carrying
another woman in a litter.

Jessica ignored Chani’s approach, focusing all her attention on the woman in
the litter–a crone, a wrinkled and shriveled ancient thing in a black gown with
hood thrown back to reveal the tight knot of gray hair and the stringy neck.

The litter-?carriers deposited their burden gently on the ledge from below,
and Chani helped the old woman to her feet.

So this is their Reverend Mother, Jessica thought.

The old woman leaned heavily on Chani as she hobbled toward Jessica, looking
like a collection of sticks draped in the black robe. She stopped in front of
Jessica, peered upward for a long moment before speaking in a husky whisper.

“So you’re the one.” The old head nodded once precariously on the thin neck.
“The Shadout Mapes was right to pity you.”

Jessica spoke quickly, scornfully: “I need no one’s pity.”

“That remains to be seen,” husked the old woman. She turned with surprising
quickness and faced the throng. “Tell them, Stilgar.”

“Must I?” he asked.

“We are the people of Misr,” the old woman rasped. “Since our Sunni
ancestors fled from Nilotic al-?Ourouba, we have known flight and death. The
young go on that our people shall not die.”

Stilgar took a deep breath, stepped forward two paces.

Jessica felt the hush come over the crowded cavern–some twenty thousand
people now, standing silently, almost without movement. It made her feel
suddenly small and filled with caution.

“Tonight we must leave this sietch that has sheltered us for so long and go
south into the desert,” Stilgar said. His voice boomed out across the uplifted
faces, reverberating with the force given it by the acoustical horn behind the
ledge.

Still the throng remained silent.

“The Reverend Mother tells me she cannot survive another hajra,” Stilgar
said. “We have lived before without a Reverend Mother, but it is not good for
people to seek a new home in such straits.”

Now, the throng stirred, rippling with whispers and currents of disquiet.

“That this may not come to pass,” Stilgar said, “our new Sayyadina Jessica
of the Weirding, has consented to enter the rite at this time. She will attempt
to pass within that we not lose the strength of our Reverend Mother.”

Jessica of the Weirding, Jessica thought. She saw Paul staring at her, his
eyes filled with questions, but his mouth held silent by all the strangeness
around them.

If I die in the attempt, what will become of him? Jessica asked herself.
Again she felt the misgivings fill her mind.

Chani led the old Reverend Mother to a rock bench deep in the acoustical
horn, returned to stand beside Stilgar.

“That we may not lose all if Jessica of the Weirding should fail,” Stilgar
said, “Chani, daughter of Liet, will be consecrated in the Sayyadina at this
time.” He stepped one pace to the side.

From deep in the acoustical horn, the old woman’s voice came out to them, an
amplified whisper, harsh and penetrating: “Chani has returned from her hajra–
Chani has seen the waters.”

A sussurant response arose from the crowd: “She has seen the waters.”

“I consecrate the daughter of Liet in the Sayyadina,” husked the old woman.

“She is accepted,” the crowd responded.

Paul barely heard the ceremony, his attention still centered on what had
been said of his mother.
If she should fail?

He turned and looked back at the one they called Reverend Mother, studying
the dried crone features, the fathomless blue fixation of her eyes. She looked
as though a breeze would blow her away, yet there was that about her which
suggested she might stand untouched in the path of a coriolis storm. She carried
the same aura of power that he remembered from the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen
Mohiam who had tested him with agony in the way of the gom jabbar.

“I, the Reverend Mother Ramallo, whose voice speaks as a multitude, say this
to you,” the old woman said. “It is fitting that Chani enter the Sayyadina.”

“It is fitting,” the crowd responded.

The old woman nodded, whispered: “I give her the silver skies, the golden
desert and its shining rocks, the green fields that will be. I give these to
Sayyadina Chani. And lest she forget that she’s servant of us all, to her fall
the menial tasks in this Ceremony of the Seed. Let it be as Shai-?hulud will have
it.” She lifted a brown-?stick arm, dropped it.

Jessica, feeling the ceremony close around her with a current that swept her
beyond all turning back, glanced once at Paul’s question filled face, then
prepared herself for the ordeal.

“Let the watermasters come forward,” Chani said with only the slightest
quaver of uncertainty in her girl-?child voice.

Now, Jessica felt herself at the focus of danger, knowing its presence in
the watchfulness of the throng, in the silence.

A band of men made its way through a serpentine path opened in the crowd,
moving up from the back in pairs. Each pair carried a small skin sack, perhaps
twice the size of a human head. The sacks sloshed heavily.

The two leaders deposited their load at Chani’s feet on the ledge and
stepped back.

Jessica looked at the sack, then at the men. They had their hoods thrown
back, exposing long hair tied in a roll at the base of the neck. The black pits
of their eyes stared back at her without wavering.

A furry redolence of cinnamon arose from the sack, wafted across Jessica.
The spice? she wondered.

“Is there water?” Chani asked.

The watermaster on the left, a man with a purple scar line across the bridge
of his nose, nodded once. “There is water, Sayyadina,” he said, “but we cannot
drink of it.”

“Is there seed?” Chani asked.

“There is seed,” the man said.

Chani knelt and put her hands to the sloshing sack. “Blessed is the water
and its seed.”

There was familiarity to the rite, and Jessica looked back at the Reverend
Mother Ramallo. The old woman’s eyes were closed and she sat hunched over as
though asleep.

“Sayyadina Jessica,” Chani said.

Jessica turned to see the girl staring up at her.

“Have you tasted the blessed water?” Chani asked.

Before Jessica could answer, Chani said: “It is not possible that you have
tasted the blessed water. You are outworlder and unprivileged.”

A sigh passed through the crowd, a sussuration of robes that made the nape
hairs creep on Jessica’s neck.

“The crop was large and the maker has been destroyed,” Chani said. She began
unfastening a coiled spout fixed to the top of the sloshing sack.

Now, Jessica felt the sense of danger boiling around her. She glanced at
Paul, saw that he was caught up in the mystery of the ritual and had eyes only
for Chani.
Has he seen this moment in time? Jessica wondered. She rested a hand on her
abdomen, thinking of the unborn daughter there, asking herself: Do I have the
right to risk us both?

Chani lifted the spout toward Jessica, said: “Here is the Water of Life, the
water that is greater than water–Kan, the water that frees the soul. If you be
a Reverend Mother, it opens the universe to you. Let Shai-?hulud judge now.”

Jessica felt herself torn between duty to her unborn child and duty to Paul.
For Paul, she knew, she should take that spout and drink of the sack’s contents,
but as she bent to the proffered spout, her senses told her its peril.

The stuff in the sack had a bitter smell subtly akin to many poisons that
she knew, but unlike them, too.

“You must drink it now,” Chani said.

There’s no turning back, Jessica reminded herself. But nothing in all her
Bene Gesserit training came into her mind to help her through this instant.

What is it? Jessica asked, herself. Liquor? A drug?

She bent over the spout, smelled the esters of cinnamon, remembering then
the drunkenness of Duncan Idaho. Spice liquor? she asked herself. She took the
siphon tube in her mouth, pulled up only the most minuscule sip. It tasted of
the spice, a faint bite acrid on the tongue.

Chani pressed down on the skin bag. A great gulp of the stuff surged into
Jessica’s mouth and before she could help herself, she swallowed it, fighting to
retain her calmness and dignity.

“To accept a little death is worse than death itself,” Chani said. She
stared at Jessica, waiting.

And Jessica stared back, still holding the spout in her mouth. She tasted
the sack’s contents in her nostrils, in the roof of her mouth, in her cheeks, in
her eyes–a biting sweetness, now.

Cool.

Again, Chani sent the liquid gushing into Jessica’s mouth.

Delicate.

Jessica studied Chani’s face–elfin features–seeing the traces of Liet-
Kynes there as yet unfixed by time.

This is a drug they feed me, Jessica told herself.