From one of the outbuildings Glossu Rabban emerged, fully dressed in his finest uniform and accompanied by the work supervisor, who also wore a dark, clean uniform. The scrawny, potbellied man had eschewed his nostril filters for the occasion.
Rabban stepped in front of Gurney, who wanted nothing more than to leap to his feet and throttle the man. But he couldn’t move. The paralysis drug held him like a vise, so he simply put as much hatred into his eyes as he could manage.
“Prisoner,” Rabban said, his thick lips wearing an obscene smile. “Gurney Halleck of the village Dmitri. After you attacked me, we took the trouble to find your family. We’ve heard from Captain Kryubi about the obnoxious little songs you were singing in the tavern. Even though no one had seen you in the village for years, they never thought to report your disappearance. A few of them, before they died under torture, said that they assumed we’d taken you away in the night. The fools.”
Gurney felt panicked now, with fluttering dark wings in his mind. He wanted to demand answers about his tired and unambitious parents . . . but he feared Rabban would tell him anyway. He could barely breathe. His chest muscles spasmed, fighting the paralysis. As his blood boiled and his rage grew, he was unable to draw in more breath. His head began to buzz from lack of oxygen.
“Then all the pieces fell into place. We learned about how your sister had been assigned to the pleasure houses . . . and you just couldn’t accept the natural order of things.” Rabban shrugged his broad shoulders; his fingers strayed meaningfully to his inkvine whip, but did not pull it free. “Everyone else knows his place on Giedi Prime, but you don’t seem to know yours. So we’ve decided to provide a reminder, just for you.”
He gave a theatrically heavy sigh that emphasized his disappointment. “Unfortunately, my troops were a bit too . . . enthusiastic . . . when they asked your parents to join us here. I’m afraid your mother and father did not survive the encounter. However . . .”
Rabban raised one hand, and the guards hurried to the supply shack. Out of his field of view, Gurney heard a scuffle and then a woman’s wordless cry, but he could not turn to see. He knew it was Bheth.
For a moment his heart skipped a beat just to know she was still alive. He’d thought the Harkonnens might have killed her after his capture in the pleasure house. But now he knew in his soul that they’d only been saving her for something much worse.
They dragged her, thrashing and struggling, onto the wooden platform. She wore only a baggy, torn shirt. Her flaxen hair was long and wild, her eyes wide with fear, and even more so once she caught sight of her brother. Again, he saw the white scar on her throat. They had stolen Bheth’s ability to sing or to talk . . . and had destroyed her ability to smile.
Their gazes locked. Bheth couldn’t speak. Paralyzed, Gurney could not say anything to her, or even flinch.
“Your sister knows her place,” Rabban said. “In fact, she served us rather well. I checked through the records to come up with an exact number. This little girl has provided pleasure to 4,620 of our troops.” Rabban patted Bheth on the shoulder. She tried to bite him. He clenched his fingers and tore off the shift she wore.
The guards forced her naked onto the platform— and Gurney couldn’t move. He wanted to shut his eyes, but the paralysis prevented him. Though he understood what she had been forced to do for the past six years, seeing her nakedness again offended and appalled him. Her body was bruised, her skin a patchwork of dark colors and thin scars.
“Not many women at our pleasure houses last as long as she has,” Rabban said. “This one has a strong will to live, but her time is at an end. If she could speak, she’d tell us how very happy she is to give this one last service to House Harkonnen— providing a lesson to you.”
Gurney strained with all of his might, trying to force his muscles to move. His heart pounded, and heat pulsed through his body. But he could not so much as wiggle a finger.
The work supervisor went first. He opened his robes, and Gurney had no recourse but to watch as the potbellied man raped Bheth on the stage. Then came five of the other guards, performing at Rabban’s command. The broad-shouldered brute observed Gurney as much as he observed the spectacle on the stage. Inside his mind, Gurney flew into a rage, then wished fervently to be allowed to retreat, to call down black sleep upon himself. But he didn’t have that option.
Rabban himself went last, taking the greatest pleasure. He was forceful and brutal, though by then Bheth had been abused nearly into unconsciousness. As he finished, Rabban locked his hands around Bheth’s neck, around the white scar. She struggled again, but Rabban twisted her head, forcing her to look over at her brother as he squeezed his hands around her throat. He thrust once more inside her, viciously, and then the muscles in his arms went tense. He squeezed harder, and Bheth’s eyes bulged.
Gurney had no choice but to watch as she died in front of him. . . .
Doubly satisfied, Rabban stood, stepped back, and redressed himself in his uniform. He smiled at both of his victims. “Leave her body here,” he said. “How long will her brother’s paralysis last?”
The doctor approached quickly, unmoved by what he had just seen. “Another hour or two at that small dosage. Any more of the kirar would have put him into a hibernation trance, and you didn’t want that.”
Rabban shook his head. “Let’s leave him here to stare at her until he can move again. I want him to consider the error of his ways.”
Laughing, Rabban departed and the guards followed. Gurney remained alone in the chair, completely unshackled. He could not cease staring at the motionless form of Bheth sprawled on the platform. Blood trickled from her mouth.
But even the paralysis that gripped Gurney’s body could not prevent the tears that spilled from his eyes.
The mystery of life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.
— Meditations from Bifrost Eyrie, Buddislamic Text
For a year and a half, Abulurd Harkonnen remained a broken man. He hid his face in shame from the horror of what his son had done. He accepted the blame and the guilt, but he could not bear to meet the haunted eyes of the good people of Lankiveil.
As he had feared, after Rabban’s slaughter of Bjondax whales in Tula Fjord, the fishing had gone bad; villages were abandoned as the fishermen and fur whale hunters moved on. Left exposed to the elements, the wooden settlements remained empty, a string of ghost towns in rocky coves.
Abulurd had dismissed his servants, and he and Emmi shut down the main lodge, leaving it like a tombstone to memorialize their once-idyllic way of life. They departed from the grand old building in hopes that one day the good times would return. For now, he and his wife lived in their small dacha out on an isolated spit of land that extended into the blood-tainted waters of the fjord.
Emmi, who had been so hale and hearty with laughing eyes and a commonsense smile, now seemed old and tired, as if the knowledge of their corrupted son sapped her remaining strength. She had always been firmly anchored in the world, like a bed’rock, but her foundation had been badly eroded.
Glossu Rabban was forty-one years old, an adult responsible for his own horrific actions. Yet Abulurd and Emmi feared they had done something wrong, that they had not instilled in him the proper sense of honor and love for a ruled people. . . .
Rabban had personally led the attack that obliterated Bifrost Eyrie. Abulurd had watched the man stand by as guards hurled his own grandfather off the cliffs. By slaughtering the whales in Tula Fjord, he had single-handedly destroyed the economy of the entire coast. From a CHOAM representative, they’d learned how Rabban delighted in torturing and killing innocent victims in the grim slave pits of Giedi Prime.
How can this man be any offspring of mine?
During the time spent in their lonely dacha, Emmi and Abulurd tried to conceive another son. It had been a difficult decision, but he and his wife finally realized that Glossu Rabban was no longer their child. He had cut himself off forever from their love. Emmi h
ad made up her mind, and Abulurd could not refuse her.
While they could not undo the damage Rabban had caused, they could perhaps have another son, one to be raised right. Though she was strong and healthy, Emmi was past her prime years, and the Harkonnen bloodline had never spawned a large number of children.
Victoria— the first wife of Dmitri Harkonnen— had given him only one son, Vladimir. After a bitter divorce, Dmitri had married the young and beautiful Daphne, but their first child, Marotin, had been severely retarded, a terrible embarrassment who died at the age of twenty-eight. Daphne’s second son, Abulurd, was a bright boy who became his father’s favorite. They had laughed and read and played together. Dmitri had taught Abulurd about statecraft, reading to him from the historical treatises of Crown Prince Raphael Corrino.
Dmitri never spent much time with his eldest child, but his bitter ex-wife Victoria taught her son much. Though they had the same father, Vladimir and Abulurd could not have been more different. Unfortunately, Rabban took after the Baron more than his own parents. . . .
Following months of self-imposed isolation, Abulurd and Emmi took their boat down the gnarled coast to the nearest village, where they intended to buy fresh fish, vegetables, and supplies that the dacha’s stores didn’t offer. They wore homespun shawls and thickly padded tunics without the ceremonial jewelry or fine trimmings of their station.
When Abulurd and his wife first walked through the market, he hoped they would be treated as mere villagers, unrecognized. But the people of Lankiveil knew their leader too well. They welcomed him with painfully wholehearted greetings.
Seeing how the villagers looked at him with understanding, Abulurd realized he’d been wrong to isolate himself. The natives needed to see him as much as he needed the company of his citizens. What had happened at Bifrost Eyrie was one of the great tragedies of Lankiveil’s history, but Abulurd Harkonnen could not give up hope entirely. In the hearts of these people, a bright flame continued to burn. Their welcome did much to fill the emptiness within him. . . .
Over the next few months, Emmi spoke to women in the villages; they knew of their governor’s desire to have another son, someone who would be raised here and not as a . . . Harkonnen. Emmi refused to give up hope.
A strange chance occurred one week while they shopped, filling their baskets with fresh greens and smoked fish wrapped in salted sheets of kelp. As they moved along the stalls, chatting with fish vendors and shell carvers, Abulurd noticed an old woman standing at the end of the market. She wore the pale-blue robes of a Buddislamic monk; gold embroidery on the trim and copper bells at her neck signified that this woman had reached her religion’s higher orders of enlightenment, one of the few females to do so. She stood rigid as a statue, no taller than the other villagers . . . yet somehow the woman’s presence made her stand out like a monolith.
Emmi stared with her dark eyes, transfixed, and finally stepped forward with hope and wonder on her face. “We’ve heard of you.” Abulurd looked at his wife, wondering what she meant.
The old monk threw back her hood to reveal a freshly shaved scalp, which was pink and mottled, as if unaccustomed to exposure to the cold; when she furrowed her brow, the parchmentlike skin on her long face wrinkled up like crumpling paper. But she spoke in a voice that had resonant, hypnotic qualities. “I know what you desire— and I know that Buddallah sometimes grants wishes to those He deems worthy.”
The old woman leaned closer as if her words were a secret to be shared only with them. The copper bells at her neck jingled faintly. “Your minds are pure, your consciences clear, and your hearts worthy of such a reward. You have already suffered much pain.” Her eyes became hard like a bird’s. “But you must want a child badly enough.”
“We do,” Abulurd and Emmi said in such perfect unison that it startled them. They looked at each other and chuckled nervously. Emmi grasped her husband’s hand.
“Yes, I see your sincerity. An important beginning.” The woman murmured a quick blessing over the two. Then, as if it were a supernatural nod from Buddallah Himself, the soup of gray clouds thinned, allowing a streak of sunlight to shine down on the village. The others in the market stared at Abulurd and Emmi with curious, hopeful expressions.
The monk reached into her sky-blue robes and withdrew several packets. She held them up, clutching the edges with the barest tips of her fingers.
“Extracts of shellfish,” she said. “Mother-of-pearl ground together with diamond dust, dried herbs that grow only during the summer solstice up in the snowfields. These are extremely potent. Use them well.” She extended three packets to Abulurd and the same to Emmi. “Brew them into tea and drink deeply before your lovemaking. But have a care that you do not waste yourselves. Watch the moons, or look at your charts if the clouds are too thick.”
The old monk carefully explained the most fortuitous phases of the moon, the times in the monthly cycle best suited for conceiving a child. Emmi nodded, clutching the packets in her fingers as if they were great treasure.
Abulurd felt a wave of skepticism. He’d heard of folk remedies and superstitious treatments, but the look of delight and hope on his wife’s face was so great that he dared not voice any doubts. He promised himself that for her he would do everything this strange old woman suggested.
In an even quieter voice, but without the slightest embarrassment, the withered woman told them in explicit detail of certain enhancement rituals they must perform to heighten their sexual pleasure and to increase the possibility of sperm uniting with a fertile egg. Emmi and Abulurd listened, and each agreed to do as they had been instructed.
Before returning to their boat and leaving the village market behind, Abulurd made certain to pick up a current lunar chart from a vendor.
• • •
In the black of night at their isolated dacha, they lit the rooms with candles and built a roaring fire in the fireplace so that their home was filled with warm, orange light. Outside, the wind had died away into deep silence like a held breath. The water in the fjord was a dark mirror reflecting the clouds above. The brooding mountains rose sheer from the waterline, their peaks lost in the overcast sky.
In the distance, around the curve of the cove, they could make out the silhouette of the main lodge, its windows shuttered, its doors barred. The rooms would be cold and frosty, the furniture covered, the cupboards empty. The abandoned villages were quiet, silent memories of bustling times before all the fur whales had gone away.
Abulurd and Emmi lay on their honeymoon bed made of amber-gold elacca wood carved with beautiful fern designs. They wrapped themselves in plush furs and slowly made love with more passionate attention than they had experienced in years. The bitter taste of the old monk’s strange tea lingered in their throats and filled them each with a heathen arousal that made them feel young again.
Afterward, as they lay contented in each other’s arms, Abulurd listened to the night. In the distance, quiet but echoing over the still waters and sheer rock walls, he thought he heard the calls of lonely Bjondax whales hovering at the entrance to the cove.
Abulurd and Emmi took that as a good omen.
• • •
Her mission accomplished, Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam discarded her Buddislamic robes, wrapped up the tiny ornamental bells she had worn at her throat, and packed them all away. Her scalp itched, but her hair would soon grow back.
She removed the contact lenses that disguised the color of her eyes, and the makeup that made her look older, then added lotions to the rough skin on her face to help her recover from the harsh winds and cold of Lankiveil.
She had been here for more than a month, collecting data, studying Abulurd Harkonnen and his wife. One time, when they were in the village following their too-predictable weekly routine, she had slipped north and broken into their dacha, collecting hairs, skin scrapings, discarded nail clippings, anything to help her determine the precise biochemistry of these two. Such things provided her with all the information sh
e needed.
Sisterhood experts had analyzed all the probabilities and determined how to improve the odds of Abulurd Harkonnen having another child, a boy child. The Kwisatz Haderach breeding program needed these genetics, and the actions of Glossu Rabban proved him too unruly— not to mention too old— to be a fitting mate for the daughter Jessica had been commanded to bear by Leto Atreides. The Bene Gesserit needed another male Harkonnen alternative.
She went to the Lankiveil spaceport and waited for the next scheduled shuttle. For once, unlike her experience with the vile Baron, she was not coercing others to conceive a child they did not wish to have. Abulurd and his wife desired another son more than anything else, and Mohiam was happy to use the Sisterhood’s expertise to manipulate their chances.
This new child, Glossu Rabban’s younger brother, would have an important destiny ahead of him.
The work to which we have set ourselves is the liberating of the imagination, and the harnessing of the imagination to man’s physical creativity.
— FRIEDRE GINAZ,
Philosophy of the Swordmaster
Late afternoon on yet another Ginaz island, with stretches of sloping green land, fences of black-lava boulders, and grazing cattle. Thatch-and-frond huts stood in clearings studded with mounds of pampas grass that waved in the wind; canoes lay on smooth beaches. Out on the water, the white flecks of sails dotted the lagoons.
The fishing boats made Duncan Idaho think fondly of Caladan . . . his home.
The remaining students had spent a grueling day of martial-arts instruction, practicing the art of balance. Trainees fought with short knives while standing amidst sharpened bamboo stakes in the ground. Two of his classmates had been seriously injured when they’d fallen onto the stakes. Duncan had sliced open his hand, but he ignored the stinging red gash. It would heal.
“Wounds make better lessons than lectures,” the Swordmaster had remarked, without sympathy.
Dune: House Harkonnen Page 39