Tamalane put down the report and smiled. "So she ordered the prisoners brought back to her. I find her choice of words fascinating."
"Bring them back?" Kipuna asked. "That seems a simple enough order. How is it fascinating?"
Tamalane admired the directness of the acolyte's interest. Kipuna was not about to pass up a chance at learning how a real Reverend Mother's mind worked.
"It was not that part of her performance that interested me," Tamalane said. She bent to the report, reading aloud: " 'You are servants unto Shaitan, not servants unto servants.' " Tamalane looked up at Kipuna. "You saw and heard all of this yourself?"
"Yes, Reverend Mother. It was judged important that I report to you personally should you have other questions."
"She still calls him Shaitan," Tamalane said. "How that must gall them! Of course, the Tyrant himself said it: 'They will call me Shaitan.' "
"I have seen the reports out of the hoard found at Dar-es-Balat," Kipuna said.
"There was no delay in bringing back the two prisoners?" Tamalane asked.
"As quickly as a message could be transmitted to the 'thopter, Reverend Mother. They were returned within minutes."
"So they are watching her and listening all the time. Good. Did Sheeana give any sign that she knew the two prisoners? Did any message pass between them?"
"I am sure they were strangers to her, Reverend Mother. Two ordinary people of the lower orders, rather dirty and poorly clothed. They smelled of the unwashed from the perimeter hovels."
"Sheeana ordered the manacles removed and then she spoke to this unwashed pair. Her exact words now: What did she say?"
" 'You are my people.' "
"Lovely, lovely," Tamalane said. "Sheeana then ordered that these two be taken away, bathed and given new clothes before being released. Tell me in your own words what happened next."
"She summoned Tuek who came with three of his councillor-attendants. It was... almost an argument."
"Memory-trance, please," Tamalane said. "Replay the exchange for me."
Kipuna closed her eyes, breathed deeply and fell into memory-trance. Then: "Sheeana says, 'I do not like it when you feed my people to Shaitan.' Councillor Stiros says, 'They are sacrificed to Shai-hulud!' Sheeana says, 'To Shaitan!' Sheeana stamps her foot in anger. Tuek says, 'Enough, Stiros. I will not hear more of this dissension.' Sheeana says, 'When will you learn?' Stiros starts to speak but Tuek silences him with a glare and says, 'We have learned, Holy Child.' Sheeana says, 'I want -' "
"Enough," Tamalane said.
The acolyte opened her eyes and waited silently.
Presently, Tamalane said, "Return to your post, Kipuna. You have done very well, indeed."
"Thank you, Reverend Mother."
"There will be consternation among the priests," Tamalane said.
"Sheeana's wish is their command because Tuek believes in her. They will stop using the worms as instruments of punishment."
"The two prisoners," Kipuna said.
"Yes, very observant of you. The two prisoners will tell what happened to them. The story will be distorted. People will say that Sheeana protects them from the priests."
"Isn't that exactly what she's doing, Reverend Mother?"
"Ahhhh, but consider the options open to the priests. They will increase their alternative forms of punishment - whippings and certain deprivations. While fear of Shaitan eases because of Sheeana, fear of the priests will increase."
Within two months, Tamalane's reports to Chapter House contained confirmation of her own words.
"Short rations, especially short water rations, have become the dominant form of punishment," Tamalane reported. "Wild rumors have penetrated the farthest reaches of Rakis and soon will find lodging on many other planets as well."
Tamalane considered the implications of her report with care. Many eyes would see it, including some not in sympathy with Taraza. Any Reverend Mother would be able to call up an image of what must be happening on Rakis. Many on Rakis had seen Sheeana's arrival atop a wild worm from the desert. The priestly response of secrecy had been flawed from the beginning. Curiosity unsatisfied tended to create its own answers. Guesses were often more dangerous than facts.
Previous reports had told of the children brought to play with Sheeana. The much-garbled stories of such children were repeated with increasing distortions and those distortions had been dutifully sent on to Chapter House. The two prisoners, returned to the streets in their new finery, only compounded the growing mythology. The Sisterhood, artists in mythology, possessed on Rakis a ready-made energy to be subtly amplified and directed.
"We have fed a wish-fulfillment belief into the populace," Tamalane reported. She thought of the Bene Gesserit-originated phrases as she reread her latest report.
"Sheeana is the one we have long awaited."
It was a simple enough statement that its meaning could be spread without unacceptable distortion.
"The Child of Shai-hulud comes to chastise the priests!"
That one had been a bit more complicated. A few priests died in dark alleys as a result of popular fervency. This had fed a new alertness into the corps of priestly enforcers with predictable injustices inflicted upon the populace.
Tamalane thought of the priestly delegation that had waited upon Sheeana as a result of turmoil among Tuek's councillors. Seven of them led by Stiros had intruded upon Sheeana's luncheon with a child from the streets. Knowing that this would happen Tamalane had been prepared and a secret recording of the incident had been brought to her, the words audible, every expression visible, the thoughts quite apparent to a Reverend Mother's trained eye.
"We were sacrificing to Shai-hulud!" Stiros protested.
"Tuek told you not to argue with me about that," Sheeana said.
How the priestesses smiled at the discomfiture of Stiros and the other priests!
"But Shai-hulud -" Stiros began.
"Shaitan!" Sheeana corrected him and her expression was easily read: Did these stupid priests know nothing?
"But we have always thought -"
"You were wrong!" Sheeana stamped a foot.
Stiros feigned the need for instruction. "Are we to believe that Shai-hulud, the Divided God, is also Shaitan?"
What a complete fool he was, Tamalane thought. Even a pubescent girl could confound him, as Sheeana proceeded to do.
"Any child of the streets knows this almost as soon as she can walk!" Sheeana ranted.
Stiros spoke slyly: "How do you know what is in the minds of street children?"
"You are evil to doubt me!" Sheeana accused. It was an answer she had learned to use often, knowing it would get back to Tuek and cause trouble.
Stiros knew this only too well. He waited with downcast eyes while Sheeana, speaking with heavy patience as one telling an old fable to a child, explained to him that either god or devil or both could inhabit the worm of the desert. Humans had only to accept this. It was not left to humans to decide such things.
Stiros had sent people into the desert for speaking such heresy. His expression (so carefully recorded for Bene Gesserit analysis) said such wild concepts were always springing up from the muck at the bottom of the Rakian heap. But now! He had to contend with Tuek's insistence that Sheeana spoke gospel truth!
As she looked at the recording, Tamalane thought the pot was boiling nicely. This she reported to Chapter House. Doubts flogged Stiros; doubts everywhere except among the populace in their devotion to Sheeana. Spies close to Tuek said he was even beginning to doubt the wisdom of his decision to translate the historian-locutor, Dromind.
"Was Dromind right to doubt her?" Tuek demanded of those around him.
"Impossible!" the sycophants said.
What else could they say? The High Priest could make no mistake in such decisions. God would not allow it. Sheeana clearly confounded him, though. She put the decisions of many previous High Priests into a terrible limbo. Reinterpretation was being demanded on all sides.
&n
bsp; Stiros kept pounding at Tuek: "What do we really know about her?"
Tamalane had a full account of the most recent such confrontation. Stiros and Tuek alone, debating far into the night, just the two of them (they thought) in Tuek's quarters, comfortably ensconced in rare blue chairdogs, melange-laced confits close at hand. Tamalane's holophoto record of the meeting showed a single yellow glowglobe drifting on its suspensors close above the pair, the light dimmed to ease the strain on tired eyes.
"Perhaps that first time, leaving her in the desert with a thumper, was not a good test," Stiros said.
It was a sly statement. Tuek was noted for not having an excessively complicated mind. "Not a good test? Whatever do you mean?"
"God might wish us to perform other tests."
"You have seen her yourself! Many times in the desert talking to God!"
"Yes!" Stiros almost pounced. Clearly, it was the response he wanted. "If she can stand unharmed in the presence of God, perhaps she can teach others how this is accomplished."
"You know this angers her when we suggest it."
"Perhaps we have not approached the problem in quite the right way."
"Stiros! What if the child is right? We serve the Divided God. I have been thinking long and earnestly upon this. Why would God divide? Is this not God's ultimate test?"
The expression on Stiros' face said this was exactly the kind of mental gymnastics his faction feared. He tried to divert the High Priest but Tuek was not to be shifted from a single-track plunge into metaphysics.
"The ultimate test," Tuek insisted. "To see the good in evil and the evil in good."
Stiros' expression could only be described as consternation. Tuek was God's Supreme Anointed. No priest was allowed to doubt that! The thing that might now arise if Tuek went public with such a concept would shake the foundations of priestly authority! Clearly, Stiros was asking himself if the time had not come to translate his High Priest.
"I would never suggest that I might debate such profound ideas with my High Priest," Stiros said. "But perhaps I can offer a proposal that might resolve many doubts."
"Propose then," Tuek said.
"Subtle instruments could be introduced in her clothing. We might listen when she talks to -"
"Do you think God would not know what we did?"
"Such a thought never crossed my mind!"
"I will not order her taken into the desert," Tuek said.
"But if it is her own idea to go?" Stiros assumed his most ingratiating expression. "She has done this many times."
"But not recently. She appears to have lost her need to consult with God."
"Could we not offer suggestions to her?" Stiros asked.
"Such as?"
"Sheeana, when will you speak again with your Father? Do you not long to stand once more in His presence?"
"That has more the sound of prodding than suggestion."
"I am only proposing that -"
"This Holy Child is no simpleton! She talks to God, Stiros. God might punish us sorely for such presumption."
"Did God not put her here for us to study?" Stiros asked.
This was too close to the Dromind heresy for Tuek's liking. He sent a baleful stare at Stiros.
"What I mean," Stiros said, "is that surely God means us to learn from her."
Tuek himself had said this many times, never hearing in his own words a curious echo of Dromind's words.
"She is not to be prodded and tested," Tuek said.
"Heaven forbid!" Stiros said. "I will be the soul of holy caution. And everything I learn from the Holy Child will be reported to you immediately."
Tuek merely nodded. He had his own ways to be sure Stiros spoke the truth.
The subsequent sly proddings and testings were reported immediately to Chapter House by Tamalane and her subordinates.
"Sheeana has a thoughtful look," Tamalane reported.
Among the Reverend Mothers on Rakis and those to whom they reported, this thoughtful look had an obvious interpretation. Sheeana's antecedents had been deduced long ago. Stiros' intrusions were making the child homesick. Sheeana kept a wise silence but she clearly thought much about her life in a pioneer village. Despite all of the fears and perils, those obviously had been happy times for her. She would remember the laughter, poling the sand for its weather, hunting scorpions in the crannies of the village hovels, smelling out spice fragments in the dunes. From Sheeana's repeated trips to the area, the Sisterhood had made a reasonably accurate guess as to the location of the lost village and what had happened to it. Sheeana often stared at one of Tuek's old maps on the wall of her quarters.
As Tamalane expected, one morning Sheeana stabbed a finger at the place on the wall map where she had gone many times. "Take me there," Sheeana commanded her attendants.
A 'thopter was summoned.
While priests listened avidly in a 'thopter hovering far overhead, Sheeana once more confronted her nemesis in the sand. Tamalane and her advisors, tuned into the priestly circuits, observed just as avidly.
Nothing even remotely suggesting a village remained on the duneswept waste where Sheeana ordered herself deposited. She used a thumper this time however. Another of Stiros' sly suggestions accompanied by careful instructions on use of the ancient means to summon the Divided God.
A worm came.
Tamalane watched on her own relay projector, thinking the worm only a middling monster. Its length she estimated at about fifty meters. Sheeana stood only about three meters in front of the gaping mouth. The huffing of the worm's interior fires was clearly audible to the observers.
"Will you tell me why you did it?" Sheeana demanded.
She did not flinch from the worm's hot breath. Sand crackled beneath the monster but she gave no sign that she heard.
"Answer me!" Sheeana commanded.
No voice came from the worm but Sheeana appeared to be listening, her head cocked to one side.
"Then go back where you came from," Sheeana said. She waved the worm away.
Obediently, the worm backed off and returned beneath the sands.
For days, while the Sisterhood spied upon them with glee, the priests debated that sparse encounter. Sheeana could not be questioned lest she learn that she had been overheard. As before, she refused to discuss anything about her visits to the desert.
Stiros continued his sly prodding. The result was precisely what the Sisterhood expected. Without any warning, Sheeana would awaken some days and say: "Today, I will go into the desert."
Sometimes she used a thumper, sometimes she danced her summons. Far out on the sands beyond the sight of Keen or any other inhabited place, the worms came to her. Sheeana alone in front of a worm talked to it while others listened. Tamalane found the accumulated recordings fascinating as they passed through her hands on their way to Chapter House.
"I should hate you!"
What a turmoil that caused among the priests! Tuek wanted an open debate: "Should all of us hate the Divided God at the same time we love Him?"
Stiros barely shut off this suggestion with the argument that God's wishes had not been made clear.
Sheeana asked one of her gigantic visitors: "Will you let me ride you again?"
When she approached, the worm retreated and would not let her mount.
On another occasion, she asked: "Must I stay with the priests?"
This particular worm proved to be the target of many questions, and among them:
"Where do people go when you eat them?"
"Why are people false to me?"
"Should I punish the bad priests?"
Tamalane laughed at that final question, thinking of the turmoil it would cause among Tuek's people. Her spies duly reported the dismay of the priests.
"How does He answer her?" Tuek asked. "Has anyone heard God respond?"
"Perhaps He speaks directly into her soul," a councillor ventured.
"That's it!" Tuek leaped at this offering. "We must ask her what God tells her to do
."
Sheeana refused to be drawn into such discussions.
"She has a pretty fair assessment of her powers," Tamalane reported. "She's not going into the desert very much now despite Stiros' proddings. As we might expect, the attraction has waned. Fear and elation will carry her just so far before paling. She has, however, learned an effective command:
"Go away!"
The Sisterhood marked this as an important development. When even the Divided God obeyed, no priest or priestess was about to question her authority to issue such a command.
"The priests are building towers in the desert," Tamalane reported. "They want more secure places from which to observe Sheeana when she does go out there."
The Sisterhood had anticipated this development and had even done some of its own prodding to speed up the projects.
Each tower had its own windtrap, its own maintenance staff, its own water barrier, gardens and other elements of civilization. Each was a small community spreading the established areas of Rakis farther and farther into the domain of the worms.
Pioneer villages no longer were necessary and Sheeana got the credit for this development.
"She is our priestess," the populace said.
Tuek and his councillors spun on the point of a pin: Shaitan and Shai-hulud in one body? Stiros lived in daily fear that Tuek would announce the fact. Stiros' advisors finally rejected the suggestion that Tuek be translated. Another suggestion that Priestess Sheeana have a fatal accident was greeted with horror by all, even Stiros finding it too great a venture.
"Even if we remove this thorn, God may visit us with an even more terrible intrusion," he said. And he warned: "The oldest books say that a little child shall lead us."
Stiros was only the most recent among those who looked upon Sheeana as something not quite mortal. It was observable that those around her, Cania included, had come to love Sheeana. She was so ingenuous, so bright and responsive.
Many observed that this growing affection for Sheeana extended even to Tuek.
For the people touched by this power, the Sisterhood had an immediate recognition. The Bene Gesserit knew a label for this ancient effect: expanding worship. Tamalane reported profound changes moving through Rakis as people everywhere on the planet began praying to Sheeana instead of to Shaitan or even to Shai-hulud.
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