“You thought you had escaped, eh, witch?” Gurney snarled.
Before she could turn the question over in her mind or try to answer, the curtains parted and Paul entered.
“Here he is, Moth—” Paul broke off, taking in the tensions of the scene.
“You will stand where you are, m’Lord,” Gurney said.
“What ....” Paul shook his head.
Jessica started to speak, felt the arm tighten against her throat.
“You will speak only when I permit it, witch,” Gurney said. “I want only one thing from you for your son to hear it, and I am prepared to send this knife into your heart by reflex at the first sign of a counter against me. Your voice will remain in a monotone. Certain muscles you will not tense or move. You will act with the most extreme caution to gain yourself a few more seconds of life. And I assure you, these are all you have.”
Paul took a step forward. “Gurney, man, what is—”
“Stop right where you are!” Gurney snapped. “One more step and she’s dead.”
Paul’s hand slipped to his knife hilt. He spoke in a deadly quiet: “You had best explain yourself, Gurney.”
“I swore an oath to slay the betrayer of your father,” Gurney said. “Do you think I can forget the man who rescued me from a Harkonnen slave pit, gave me freedom, life, and honor ... gave me friendship, a thing I prized above all else? I have his betrayer under my knife. No one can stop me from—”
“You couldn’t be more wrong, Gurney,” Paul said.
And Jessica thought: So that’s it! What irony!
“Wrong, am I?” Gurney demanded. “Let us hear it from the woman herself. And let her remember that I have bribed and spied and cheated to confirm this charge. I’ve even pushed semuta on a Harkonnen guard captain to get part of the story.”
Jessica felt the arm at her throat ease slightly, but before she could speak, Paul said: “The betrayer was Yueh. I tell you this once, Gurney. The evidence is complete, cannot be controverted. It was Yueh. I do not care how you came by your suspicion—for it can be nothing else—but if you harm my mother ....” Paul lifted his crysknife from its scabbard, held the blade in front of him. “... I’ll have your blood.”
“Yueh was a conditioned medic, fit for a royal house,” Gurney snarled. “He could not turn traitor!”
“I know a way to remove that conditioning,” Paul said.
“Evidence,” Gurney insisted.
“The evidence is not here,” Paul said. “It’s in Tabr sietch, far to the south, but if—”
“This is a trick,” Gurney snarled, and his arm tightened on Jessica’s throat.
“No trick, Gurney,” Paul said, and his voice carried such a note of terrible sadness that the sound tore at Jessica’s heart.
“I saw the message captured from the Harkonnen agent,” Gurney said. “The note pointed directly at—”
“I saw it, too,” Paul said. “My father showed it to me the night he explained why it had to be a Harkonnen trick aimed at making him suspect the woman he loved.”
“Ayah!” Gurney said. “You’ve not—”
“Be quiet,” Paul said, and the monotone stillness of his words carried more command than Jessica had ever heard in another voice.
He has the Great Control, she thought.
Gurney’s arm trembled against her neck. The point of the knife at her back moved with uncertainty.
“What you have not done,” Paul said, “is heard my mother sobbing in the night over her lost Duke. You have not seen her eyes stab flame when she speaks of killing Harkonnens.”
So he has listened, she thought. Tears blinded her eyes.
“What you have not done,” Paul went on, “is remembered the lessons you learned in a Harkonnen slave pit. You speak of pride in my father’s friendship! Didn’t you learn the difference between Harkonnen and Atreides so that you could smell a Harkonnen trick by the stink they left on it? Didn’t you learn that Atreides loyalty is bought with love while the Harkonnen coin is hate? Couldn’t you see through to the very nature of this betrayal?”
“But Yueh?” Gurney muttered.
“The evidence we have is Yueh’s own message to us admitting his treachery,” Paul said. “I swear this to you by the love I hold for you, a love I will still hold even after I leave you dead on this floor.”
Hearing her son, Jessica marveled at the awareness in him, the penetrating insight of his intelligence.
“My father had an instinct for his friends,” Paul said. “He gave his love sparingly, but with never an error. His weakness lay in misunderstanding hatred. He thought anyone who hated Harkonnens could not betray him.” He glanced at his mother. “She knows this. I’ve given her my father’s message that he never distrusted her.”
Jessica felt herself losing control, bit at her lower lip. Seeing the stiff formality in Paul, she realized what these words were costing him. She wanted to run to him, cradle his head against her breast as she never had done. But the arm against her throat had ceased its trembling; the knife point at her back pressed still and sharp.
“One of the most terrible moments in a boy’s life,” Paul said, “is when he discovers his father and mother are human beings who share a love that he can never quite taste. It’s a loss, an awakening to the fact that the world is there and here and we are in it alone. The moment carries its own truth; you can’t evade it. I heard my father when he spoke of my mother. She’s not the betrayer, Gurney.”
Jessica found her voice, said: “Gurney, release me.” There was no special command in the words, no trick to play on his weaknesses, but Gurney’s hand fell away. She crossed to Paul, stood in front of him, not touching him.
“Paul,” she said, “there are other awakenings in this universe. I suddenly see how I’ve used you and twisted you and manipulated you to set you on a course of my choosing ... a course I had to choose—if that’s any excuse—because of my own training.” She swallowed past a lump in her throat, looked up into her son’s eyes. “Paul ... I want you to do something for me: choose the course of happiness. Your desert woman, marry her if that’s your wish. Defy everyone and everything to do this. But choose your own course. I ....”
She broke off, stopped by the low sound of muttering behind her.
Gurney!
She saw Paul’s eyes directed beyond her, turned.
Gurney stood in the same spot, but had sheathed his knife, pulled the robe away from his breast to expose the slick grayness of an issue stillsuit, the type the smugglers traded for among the sietch warrens.
“Put your knife right here in my breast,” Gurney muttered. “I say kill me and have done with it. I’ve besmirched my name. I’ve betrayed my own Duke! The finest—”
“Be still!” Paul said.
Gurney stared at him.
“Close that robe and stop acting like a fool,” Paul said. “I’ve had enough foolishness for one day.”
“Kill me, I say!” Gurney raged.
“You know me better than that,” Paul said. “How many kinds of an idiot do you think I am? Must I go through this with every man I need?”
Gurney looked at Jessica, spoke in a forlorn, pleading note so unlike him: “Then you, my Lady, please ... you kill me.”
Jessica crossed to him, put her hands on his shoulders. “Gurney, why do you insist the Atreides must kill those they love?” Gently, she pulled the spread robe out of his fingers, closed and fastened the fabric over his chest.
Gurney spoke brokenly: “But ... I ....”
“You thought you were doing a thing for Leto,” she said, “and for this I honor you.”
“My Lady,” Gurney said. He dropped his chin to his chest, squeezed his eyelids closed against the tears.
“Let us think of this as a misunderstanding among old friends,” she said, and Paul heard the soothers, the adjusting tones in her voice. “It’s over and we can be thankful we’ll never again have that sort of misunderstanding between us.”
Gurney opened
eyes bright with moisture, looked down at her.
“The Gurney Halleck I knew was a man adept with both blade and baliset,” Jessica said. “It was the man of the baliset I most admired. Doesn’t that Gurney Halleck remember how I used to enjoy listening by the hour while he played for me? Do you still have a baliset, Gurney?”
“I’ve a new one,” Gurney said. “Brought from Chusuk, a sweet instrument. Plays like a genuine Varota, though there’s no signature on it. I think myself it was made by a student of Varota’s who ....” He broke off. “What can I say to you, my Lady? Here we prattle about—”
“Not prattle, Gurney,” Paul said. He crossed to stand beside his mother, eye to eye with Gurney. “Not prattle, but a thing that brings happiness between friends. I’d take it a kindness if you’d play for her now. Battle planning can wait a little while. We’ll not be going into the fight till tomorrow at any rate.”
“I ... I’ll get my baliset,” Gurney said. “It’s in the passage.” He stepped around them and through the hangings.
Paul put a hand on his mother’s arm, found that she was trembling.
“It’s over, Mother,” he said.
Without turning her head, she looked up at him from the corners of her eyes. “Over?”
“Of course. Gurney’s ....”
“Gurney? Oh ... yes.” She lowered her gaze.
The hangings rustled as Gurney returned with his baliset. He began tuning it, avoiding their eyes. The hangings on the walls dulled the echoes, making the instrument sound small and intimate.
Paul led his mother to a cushion, seated her there with her back to the thick draperies of the wall. He was suddenly struck by how old she seemed to him with the beginnings of desert-dried lines in her face, the stretching at the corners of her blue-veiled eyes.
She’s tired, he thought. We must find some way to ease her burdens.
Gurney strummed a chord.
Paul glanced at him, said: “I’ve ... things that need my attention. Wait here for me.”
Gurney nodded. His mind seemed far away, as though he dwelled for this moment beneath the open skies of Caladan with cloud fleece on the horizon promising rain.
Paul forced himself to turn away, let himself out through the heavy hangings over the side passage. He heard Gurney take up a tune behind him, and paused a moment outside the room to listen to the muted music.
“Orchards and vineyards,
And full-breasted houris,
And a cup overflowing before me.
Why do I babble of battles,
And mountains reduced to dust?
Why do I feel these tears?
Heavens stand open
And scatter their riches;
My hands need but gather their wealth.
Why do I think of an ambush,
And poison in molten cup?
Why do I feel my years?
Love’s arms beckon
With their naked delights,
And Eden’s promise of ecstasies.
Why do I remember the scars,
Dream of old transgressions ...
And why do I sleep with fears?”
A robed Fedaykin courier appeared from a corner of the passage ahead of Paul. The man had hood thrown back and fastenings of his stillsuit hanging loose about his neck, proof that he had come just now from the open desert.
Paul motioned for him to stop, left the hangings of the door and moved down the passage to the courier.
The man bowed, hands clasped in front of him the way he might greet a Reverend Mother or Sayyadina of the rites. He said: “Muad’Dib, leaders are beginning to arrive for the Council.”
“So soon?”
“These are the ones Stilgar sent for earlier when it was thought ....” He shrugged.
“I see.” Paul glanced back toward the faint sound of the baliset, thinking of the old song that his mother favored—an odd stretching of happy tune and sad words. “Stilgar will come here soon with others. Show them where my mother waits.”
“I will wait here, Muad’Dib,” the courier said.
“Yes ... yes, do that.”
Paul pressed past the man toward the depths of the cavern, headed for the place that each such cavern had—a place near its water-holding basin. There would be a small shai-hulud in this place, a creature no more than nine meters long, kept stunted and trapped by surrounding water ditches. The maker, after emerging from its little maker vector, avoided water for the poison it was. And the drowning of a maker was the greatest Fremen secret because it produced the substance of their union—the Water of Life, the poison that could only be changed by a Reverend Mother.
The decision had come to Paul while he faced the tension of danger to his mother. No line of the future he had ever seen carried that moment of peril from Gurney Halleck. The future—the gray-cloud-future-with its feeling that the entire universe rolled toward a boiling nexus hung around him like a phantom world.
I must see it, he thought.
His body had slowly acquired a certain spice tolerance that made prescient visions fewer and fewer ... dimmer and dimmer. The solution appeared obvious to him.
I will drown the maker. We will see now whether I’m the Kwisatz Haderach who can survive the test that the Reverend Mothers have survived.
And it came to pass in the third year of the Desert War that Paul-Muad’Dib lay alone in the Cave of Birds beneath the kiswa hangings of an inner cell. And he lay as one dead, caught up in the revelation of the Water of Life, his being translated beyond the boundaries of time by the poison that gives life. Thus was the prophecy made true that the Lisan al Gaib might be both dead and alive.
—“CollectedLegends of Arrakis” by the Princess Irulan
CHANI CAME up out of the Habbanya basin in the predawn darkness, hearing the ‘thopter that had brought her from the south go whir-whirring off to a hiding place in the vastness. Around her, the escort kept its distance, fanning out into the rocks of the ridge to probe for dangers—and giving the mate of Muad’Dib, the mother of his firstborn, the thing she had requested: a moment to walk alone.
Why did he summon me? she asked herself. He told me before that I must remain in the south with little Leto and Alia.
She gathered her robe and leaped lightly up across a barrier rock and onto the climbing path that only the desert-trained could recognize in the darkness. Pebbles slithered underfoot and she danced across them without considering the nimbleness required.
The climb was exhilarating, easing the fears that had fermented in her because of her escort’s silent withdrawal and the fact that a precious ‘thopter had been sent for her. She felt the inner leaping at the nearness of reunion with Paul-Muad’Dib, her Usul. His name might be a battle cry over all the land: “Muad‘Dib! Muad’Dib! Muad’Dib!” But she knew a different man by a different name—the father of her son, the tender lover.
A great figure loomed out of the rocks above her, beckoning for speed. She quickened her pace. Dawn birds already were calling and lifting into the sky. A dim spread of light grew across the eastern horizon.
The figure above was not one of her own escort. Otheym? she wondered, marking a familiarity of movement and manner. She came up to him, recognized in the growing light the broad, flat features of the Fedaykin lieutenant, his hood open and mouth filter loosely fastened the way one did sometimes when venturing out on the desert for only a moment.
“Hurry,” he hissed, and led her down the secret crevasse into the hidden cave. “It will be light soon,” he whispered as he held a doorseal open for her. “The Harkonnens have been making desperation patrols over some of this region. We dare not chance discovery now.”
They emerged into the narrow side-passage entrance to the Cave of Birds. Glowglobes came alight. Otheym pressed past her, said: “Follow me. Quickly, now.”
They sped down the passage, through another valve door, another passage and through hangings into what had been the Sayyadina’s alcove in the days when this was an overday rest cav
e. Rugs and cushions now covered the floor. Woven hangings with the red figure of a hawk hid the rock walls. A low field desk at one side was strewn with papers from which lifted the aroma of their spice origin.
The Reverend Mother sat alone directly opposite the entrance. She looked up with the inward stare that made the uninitiated tremble.
Otheym pressed palms together, said: “I have brought Chani.” He bowed, retreated through the hangings.
And Jessica thought: How do I tell Chani?
“How is my grandson?” Jessica asked.
So it’s to be the ritual greeting, Chani thought, and her fears returned. Where is Muad’Dib? Why isn’t he here to greet me?
“He is healthy and happy, my mother,” Chani said. “I left him with Alia in the care of Harah.”
My mother, Jessica thought. Yes, she has the right to call me that in theformal greeting. She has given me a grandson.
“I hear a gift of cloth has been sent from Coanua sietch,” Jessica said.
“It is lovely cloth,” Chani said.
“Does Alia send a message?”
“No message. But the sietch moves more smoothly now that the people are beginning to accept the miracle of her status.”
Why does she drag this out so? Chani wondered. Something was so urgent that they sent a ’thopter for me. Now, we drag through the formalities!
“We must have some of the new cloth cut into garments for little Leto,” Jessica said.
“Whatever you wish, my mother,” Chani said. She lowered her gaze. “Is there news of battles?” She held her face expressionless that Jessica might not see the betrayal—that this was a question about Paul Muad’Dib.
“New victories,” Jessica said. “Rabban has sent cautious overtures about a truce. His messengers have been returned without their water. Rabban has even lightened the burdens of the people in some of the sink villages. But he is too late. The people know he does it out of fear of us.”
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