S.T.
JAMIS
(10159-10191). Born at Sietch Tabr, the son of Deioces, noted for his ferocity in battle, and Madai, a gentle, intelligent woman who carefully supervised her son's education. It was she who insisted that the young Jamis attend Pardot Kynes' lectures on "ecological literacy." It might have been this early exposure to the charismatic Kynes that enflamed Jamis with Pardot's, and later Liet-Kynes', dream of bringing a paradisal planet to reality. Or perhaps Jamis felt a special affinity to the man who had saved the life of his father, for Deioces had been one of three youths rescued by Pardot when they had been trapped by Harkonnen soldiers. Jamis soon dedicated his life to the Kyneses' vision of open water, tall green plants, and a populace walking free of stillsuits.
To hasten the promised Edenic day (albeit hundreds of years in the future), Jamis eagerly embraced the knowledge and skills necessary to solve the water problem. In the sietch and in the desert, he soon learned to pole the sand for weather prediction; to read the language of the wind; to recognize the signs, no matter how vague, made by man or animal on the rocks and the sand; to walk silently over sand or rock; and to make the distinctive Fremen signals, the chirrup of a bird, or the faint thumping of a mouse jumping in the sand.
All was not work, however. Jamis enjoyed the usual childhood play — the pebble game, sandsearch, circles and squares — but his greatest pleasure was music. He tried the drum and the two-holed flute, but settled on — and became adept in playing — that most difficult of all instruments: the nine-stringed baliset. He also mastered the dance, especially the spirited Dance of the Whirlwind and the intricate Dance of the Birds. And as he applied himself to his endeavors, Jamis seated up the Fremen prophecies and legends like a stillsuit soaks up the body's water.
An inclination toward violence manifested itself early. It was noted that Jamis displayed a certain zest when the children swarmed on the battlefield to perform their accustomed task of slaying the wounded preparatory to the women's hauling them away to the deathstills. And when called upon, Jamis fought as ferociously as any adult. He was more than ready to receive his crysknife at the time of his initiation and to become a sandrider at age twelve.
In the rigid faufreluches structure wherein sons were trained to follow the father in skills and knowledge, Jamis far surpassed his father in both. Even as a young lad, Jamis showed those qualities that would make him contend for leadership: bravery, resourcefulness, and, perhaps most important, ambition — as well as the major flaw that would bar him forever from authority: faulty self-control. Those sietch records that have been translated list disciplinary action taken against Jamis for minor infractions of tribal practice, all seemingly motivated by anger or impatience.
Although the records of Jamis' early activities are sketchy, he apparently became a most valuable tribal member. Jamis evidently had the good fortune to work for a short time with Liet-Kynes, probably on expeditions to seek out soaks and sip-wells in the little-known southern regions. And in all probability he took his turn among those who paid the spice bribe to the Guild for keeping the skies above Arrakis clear of satellite.
Undoubtedly, Jamis' greatest usefulness to the tribe lay in his superiority as a fighting man; as a raider he was formidable. Stilgar in his Chronicle pays tribute to Jamis' bravery and skill. Even though Stilgar once bested Jamis in a fight, Jamis did not hesitate to save Stilgar's life at Hole-in-the-Rock. Stilgar also speaks of Jamis sharing his water during a siege at Two Birds and of his valiant sacrifice at Bight-of-the-Cliff. When a patrol pinned down a troop from Sietch Tabr, Jamis drew them off so the wounded could be saved. On the other hand, the fury that sustained him in battle also crippled him, for Stilgar further writes: "There's too much violence in Jamis for him ever to make a good leader — too much ghafla."
This exuberance, however, did not always work to his detriment; it won him a magnificent Fremen woman, Harah, for his wife. First made aware of Harah at a tau orgy, Jamis called out Geoff, her mate, and bested him handily. Curiously enough, Jamis’ tranquil domestic life was the antithesis of his tempestuous public one. Harah speaks lovingly of Jamis in her Memoirs. Admitting that "Jamis was quick to anger, she maintains that he was a tender lover and a good provider, bringing her many water rings after sorties against Harkonnen patrols. She says he loved their children; Kaleff, Geoff’s son, and Orlop, their own. He made no distinction between them and accorded the same devotion to their upbringing. He taught his sons the rules of water discipline and the Fremen way of fighting; then he proudly gave them, as his father before him, their crysknives when their time of initiation came.
As an important member of Sietch Tabr, Jamis was logically numbered among the troop sent into the desert by Liet-Kynes’ distrans message to seek the strangers: Paul Atreides and Jessica. When the troop came upon them at Tuono Basin, Jamis was distrustful of the outworlders and urged Stilgar to do his tribal duty: to eliminate those not trained to live with the desert. Although he agreed with Jamis regarding Jessica, Stilgar saw value in Paul — "possibility" was the term he used in his journal.
Unfortunately Jamis never realized the breadth of that possibility; he attributed Paul’s disarming him at the moment Jessica overpowered Stilgar to "witch-force." Burning with resentment at being bested by a mere "child," Jamis invoked the amtal rule once they reached the Cave of the Ridges. Unconvinced by Jessica’s mystical performance, he demanded the right to test her part in the legend through combat with her champion: Paul.
Jessica and Stilgar tried both persuasion and trickery to convince him otherwise, but Jamis persisted. Although Jamis was an expert with the crysknife in either hand, he was no match for one steeped in the devious ways of the Bene Gesserit and trained by the likes of Gurney Halleck and Duncan Idaho. He could have had no conception of the exquisite fineness of Paul’s skill, Jamis’ death bought Paul his sietch name, Usul, and made him one of the Ichwan Bedwine with the manhood name of Paul Muad’Dib.
Befitting a man of his standing, Jamis was given a full ritual funeral. Paul received Jamis’ water, as was the custom, and inherited his yali, possessions. (excluding the funeral gifts), and woman, Harah, The whole tribe rightly mourned Jamis’ passing, for indeed, they all lost on that unfortunate day his temper drove him to challenge Paul Atreides. The records of various sietches attest to Jamis’ value to the Fremen society and his embodiment of the best Fremen qualities: strength, superb fighting ability, desert wisdom, tribal loyalty and dedication to Fremen dreams and ideals.
The Songs of Muad'Dib by the Princess Irulan preserves for us the "Dirge for Jamis on the Funeral Plain":
Do you wrestle with dreams?
Do you contend with shadows?
Do you move in a kind of sleep?
Time has slipped away.
Your life is stolen.
You tarried with trifles,
Victim of your folly.
D.K.
Further references: HARAH; STILGAR; Harah, Memoirs of a Sietch Woman, tr. Steewan Duunalazan (Topaz: Carolus UP); Princess Irulan Atreides-Corrino, Songs of Muad’Dib, ed. J. Ruuverada Gabryel (Chusuk; Salrejina); Stilgar ben Fifrawi, The Stilgar Chronicle, tr. Mityau Gwulador, Arrakis Studies 5 (Grumman: United Worlds).
K
KANLY
A formal and highly ritualized feud or vendetta declared between two Houses Major, The rules of kanly were laid down in the Great Convention, primarily with the purpose of sparing the innocent bystanders who might otherwise be slaughtered in a House-to-House confrontation.
This regulation was considered important enough by the framers of the Convention to warrant its being detailed in twenty-five pages in the original manuscript; those interested in leading the exhaustive listings of the minutiae of the ritual may consult Section XXIV of that document. A broad sketch of the rules of kanly will be given here.
Kanly could be declared only by the acting, titular head of a Great House. Any person presenting such a declaration was required to notify the Landsraad High Council
and the Imperial Court, as well as the head of the House declared against, so that a Judge of the Rite could be appointed to supervise the kanly negotiations. Once such a Judge — authorized by both Council and emperor — was appointed, the opposing parties and their immediate families could open negotiations. No outside observers, apart from the Judge, were allowed to witness these proceedings.
The negotiations could take several forms. If neither party was willing to consider any other way of reconciling the differences, the "negotiation" consisted of a personal combat with knives only, unshielded, to the death. Even the combat was stylized, with certain phrases being employed on each side to call the other out. When one or both of the combatants had died, the option of either withdrawing the kanly or reopening negotiations was left to the heir(s). It was not completely unknown, in particularly bitter kanly, for all the possible heirs to a line to be wiped out. When this occurred, the Judge of the Rite was empowered to declare the House ended, put its remaining members wider Imperial protection, and redistribute its assets.
It should be noted that the victorious House was allowed only a small portion of those assets. (This parsimony helped keep the kanly proceedings from becoming a popular, and profitable, way of doing business.) A much larger share was allotted to the Crown, ostensibly to be earmarked for the support of the losing House's survivors.
If the combat were not chosen, kanly could be settled by the challenged House's agreement to meet certain terms set by the declaring House. Such terms most often included the transfer of a fief, and of large amounts of CHOAM holdings or other valuables; occasionally, the demand was made for permission to marry into the declared-against House, with the obvious intent of an eventual takeover.
For a number of reasons — the violent climate of the times not least among them — the settlement approach was seldom used. Kanly, except for those Houses too weakened or sparse of heirs to face the personal combat was chiefly settled by the blade.
One other solution, rarely invoked, also existed: the Judge's Ban. When a Judge of the Rite, acting either as an individual or as a messenger from the emperor or Council, decided that a particular act of kanly was detrimental to the Imperium as a whole, a Ban could be laid on both Houses. Until such time as the Ban was lifted, the House whose members acted against the other could be declared guilty of treason, stripped of all its holdings, and outlawed. In the face of such possible consequences, all but the most stubborn wishes for combat faded; the Ban was a most effective deterrent.
Historically, some of the best-known instances of kanly include: House Ginaz vs. House Sheay (Ginaz won the fief later lost to House Moritani in a War of Assassins), 6723; House Alexin vs. House Maros (only known case of both Houses ending as a result of personal combat), 8796; and House Harkonnen vs. House Atreides (invoked by Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen against Paul Atreides, in the presence of Shaddam IV; the sole case of an emperor acting as his own Judge of the Rite), 10193.
C.W
Further references: GREAT CONVENTION; HARKONNEN, FEYD-RAUTHA.
KOMOS
See Ix.
KRIMSKEL FIBER
(also, "Claw Fiber"). A lightweight rope woven from strands of hufuf vine, a growth native to Ecaz, later successfully transplanted to Yorba. It was the rope of choice for bonds, snares and similar uses for many centuries owing to special properties of the vines from which it was produced.
In his definitive book on the subject, The Strangler Vines of Ecaz, written in 6854, Holjance Vohnbrook describes the hufuf as One of the greatest natural dangers on that world. Or, in his words, as:
...traps for the unwatchful and the unwary. A mature growth of these vines can vary in length from fifty to one hundred meters, and various offshoots from the main vine can extend the plant's control to a radius equal to its overall length; the unfortunate human or animal who wanders into the heart of such a controlled area finds that the vines react violently to the slightest disturbance, snaking around the limbs responsible. Once the plant's grasp is secure, unaided escape is next to impossible, as the many skeletons found in hufuf patches will attest.
The plant's seed pods, prized for their oil, and lengths of the vine itself were considered so valuable that entrepreneurial groups often ventured into such areas, despite the dangers. Once severed from the trunkvine, the smaller vines could be split and woven into krimskel: the rope retained enough of the plant's natural characteristics that a knot tied in it would continue to draw itself more tightly together (by means of "claws," small hornlike protrusions) when lines leading to it were pulled.
The advantages inherent in such a rope were obvious. Captives tied with krimskel could choose between remaining still or having their bonds tighten unbearably. The fiber was often employed as well in boobytraps and other snares. Placing a loop of krimskel where a would-be thief or intruder would have to step was a time-honored method of insuring that the trespasser remained in that spot.
Krimskel fiber fell briefly from popular use when shigawire was introduced, but returned to favor when the hazards of using shigawire as its replacement were more widely known. (Because of its extreme thinness and tensile strength, shigawire was capable of severing the flesh that it bound at the slightest pressure. Krimskel fiber, while painful to those who struggled against it, was seldom fatal; shigawire often was.) It is still considered extremely useful on a number of worlds, primarily as a means of hobbling or securing livestock.
Further references: ECAZ; OIL LENS; SHIGAWIRE; Holjance Vohnbrook, The Strangler Vines of Ecaz (Grumman: United Worlds).
KYNES, LIET-
(10156-10191). Second planetary ecologist of Arrakis in the pre-Muad'Dib era. Born in Sietch Tabr to Pardot Kynes and his Fremen wife, Mitha, Liet-Kynes' life served as a focal point for many of the historic disturbances of his time. It was not a role he deliberately sought, but one continually chosen for him. Even his name — "Liet" — tied him to events over which he had no control; Uliet, or "Older Liet," had once been ordered to dispatch his father, Pardot Kynes, and had chosen suicide instead. This death set the course followed by generations of Fremen thereafter, a fact acknowledged fey Liet-Kynes' parents in their choice of name for their son.
Pardot Kynes desired a son chiefly to consolidate his position among the Fremen. He was shrewd enough to realize that even his leadership of the desert people did not make him one of them. Thus he married one of their women and fathered a son who could continue his work. (The elder Kynes became a widower shortly after his son's birth and, although he survived Mitha by some nineteen years, he never remarried. His duty had been done and he was freed, as he saw it, of further domestic responsibilities.)
Liet-Kynes saw little of his father during his earliest childhood. Many of the duties that would ordinarily have been filled by his father had been taken over by Stilgar, a Fremen fifteen years Liet-Kynes' senior, whom Pardot Kynes had seen joined to his son in blood-brotherhood in 10158. Raised with the rest of the sietch children, he was taught the ways of bled and sietch, palmary and desert. He learned Fremen history as related by the Sayyadina; water discipline and customs; and the fanatic hatred the Fremen had possessed for all those of House Harkonnen since the day Beast Rabban had been given jurisdiction over Arrakis in 10162. To anyone not knowing his parentage, the boy would have seemed like any other Fremen youngster, the product of generations of life on the desert planet.
This situation suited his father perfectly. Pardot Kynes had been forced to take dramatic, risky action in order to make a place for himself among the desert folk; it was essential that his heir be recognized as such. Whatever paternal feelings he might have felt for his son paled before his desire to hasten the effects of the palmaries on the Arrakeen ecology.
His upbringing suited Liet-Kynes as well. By the age of five, he was accompanying his mates to the outlying planting zones, and while not yet demonstrating the sort of brilliance which characterized his father's work, the younger Kynes acquitted himself well and was respected by the other young Fremen.
This respect was not earned only by his grasp of the workings of the ecological transformation. Like other boys his age, Liet-Kynes spent a good deal of time learning and polishing other skills for which the Fremen were known: tracking, hunting, and combat in many forms. He proved especially talented in knife-fighting, and by the time he essayed his first sandride, he had nothing to fear from any of his comrades in-sietch, nor, by extension, from any but the most skilled out-sietch fighters.
In 10168, after his successful initiation into the sandriders' ranks, Liet-Kynes found his father offering him more specialized training. Over the next seven years Liet-Kynes served as go-between for the older man, journeying to the palmaries and carrying reports on their progress back to his father. Afraid of drawing unwanted attention to the existence of these areas, Pardot Kynes rarely visited them himself. Liet-Kynes' position as lieutenant for Kynes-the-Umma did not exempt him from his duties as a member of Sietch Tabr, however, and Forad, Tabr's Naib, saw to it that his leader's heir-apparent did not forget it.
He was so much a part of Sietch Tabr that it was assumed he would try for Stilgar's burda after his blood-brother bested Forad in 10175. Stilgar's challenge had been one of many made throughout the Fremen sietches following Pardot Kynes' demise at Plaster Basin, and Liet-Kynes had been absent from Tabr at the time Stilgar took Forad's place as Naib. But when young Kynes returned, it was to convey his intentions to continue his father's work with the palmaries. Pardot Kynes had simplified this task for him by petitioning for, and receiving, permission from Shaddam IV to have his son succeed him in the Imperial service.
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