Dune (53 page)

“Enough of that!”

“Then I'll share one of mine,” she said. “I can make do with one until—”

“You will not,” Stilgar said.“I know there are spares among us. Where are the spares? Are we a troop together or a band of savages?”

Hands reached out from the troop offering hard, fibrous objects. Stilgar selected four, handed them to Chani. “Fit these to Usul and the Sayyadina.”

A voice lifted from the back of the troop: “What of the water, Stil? What of the literjons in their pack?”

“I know your need, Farok,” Stilgar said. He glanced at Jessica. She nodded.

“Broach one for those that need it,” Stilgar said. “Watermaster . . . where is a watermaster? Ah, Shimoom, care for the measuring of what is needed. The necessity and no more. This water is the dower property of the Sayyadina and will be repaid in the sietch at field rates less pack fees.”

“What is the repayment at field rates?” Jessica asked.

“Ten for one,” Stilgar said.

“But—”

“It's a wise rule as you'll come to see,” Stilgar said.

A rustling of robes marked movement at the back of the troop as men turned to get the water.

Stilgar held up a hand, and there was silence. “As to Jamis,” he said, “I order the full ceremony. Jamis was our companion and brother of the Ichwan Bedwine. There shall be no turning away without the respect due one who proved our fortune by his tahaddi-challenge. I invoke the rite . . . at sunset when the dark shall cover him.”

Paul, hearing these words, realized that he had plunged once more into the abyss . . . blind time. There was no past occupying the future in his mind . . . except . . . except . . . he could still sense the green and black Atreides banner waving . . . somewhere ahead . . . still see the jihad's bloody swords and fanatic legions.

It will not be,
he told himself.
Icannot let it be.

 

IN THE stillness of the cavern, Jessica heard the scrape of sand on rock as people moved, the distant bird calls that Stilgar had said were the signals of his watchmen.

The great plastic hood-seals had been removed from the cave's opening. She could see the march of evening shadows across the lip of rock in front of her and the open basin beyond. She sensed the daylight leaving them, sensed it in the dry heat as well as the shadows. She knew her trained awareness soon would give her what these Fremen obviously had—the ability to sense even the slightest change in the air's moisture.

How they had scurried to tighten their stillsuits when the cave was opened! Deep within the cave, someone began chanting:

Jessica translated silently:
These are ashes! And these are roots!”

The funeral ceremony for Jamis was beginning.

She looked out at the Arrakeen sunset, at the banked decks of color in the sky. Night was beginning to utter its shadows along the distant rocks and the dunes.

Yet the heat persisted.

Heat forced her thoughts onto water and the observed fact that this whole people could be trained to be thirsty only at given times.

Thirst.

She could remember moonlit waves on Caladan throwing white robes over rocks . . . and the wind heavy with dampness. Now the breeze that fingered her robes seared the patches of exposed skin at cheeks and forehead. The new nose plugs irritated her, and she found herself overly conscious of the tube that trailed down across her face into the suit, recovering her breath's moisture.

The suit itself was a sweatbox.

“Your suit will be more comfortable when you've adjusted to a lower water content in your body,
” Stillgar had said.

She knew he was right, but the knowledge made this moment no more comfortable. The unconscious preoccupation with water here weighed on her mind. No, she corrected herself:
it was preoccupation with
moisture.

And that was a more subtle and profound matter.

She heard approaching footsteps, turned to see Paul come out of the cave's depths trailed by the elfin-faced Chani.

There's another thing,
Jessica thought.
Paul must be cautioned about their women. One of these desert women would not do as wife to a Duke. As concubine, yes, but not as wife.

Then she wondered at herself, thinking:
Have I been infected with his schemes?
And she saw how well she had been conditioned.
I can think of the marital needs of royalty without once weighing my own concubinage. Yet
. . .
I was more than concubine.

“Mother.”

Paul stopped in front of her. Chani stood at his elbow.

“Mother, do you know what they're doing back there?”

Jessica looked at the dark patch of his eyes staring out from the hood. “I think so.”

“Chani showed me . . . because I'm supposed to see it and give my . . . permission for the weighing of the water.”

Jessica looked at Chani.

“They're recovering Jamis' water,” Chani said, and her thin voice came out nasal past the nose plugs. “It's the rule. The flesh belongs to the person, but his water belongs to the tribe . . . except in the combat.”

“They say the water's mine,” Paul said.

Jessica wondered why this should make her suddenly alert and cautious.

“Combat water belongs to the winner,” Chani said. “It's because you have to fight in the open without stillsuits. The winner has to get his water back that he loses while fighting.”

“I don't want his water,” Paul muttered. He felt that he was a part of many images moving simultaneously in a fragmenting way that was disconcerting to the inner eye. He could not be certain what he would do, but of one thing he was positive: he did not want the water distilled out of Jamis' flesh.

“It's . . . water,” Chani said.

Jessica marveled at the way she said it.
“Water.”
So much meaning in a simple sound. A Bene Gesserit axiom came to Jessica's mind:
“Survival is the ability to swim in strange water.”
And Jessica thought: Paul
and I
,
we must find the currents and patterns in these strange waters
. . .
if we're to survive.

“You will accept the water,” Jessica said.

She recognized the tone in her voice. She had used that same tone once with Leto, telling her lost Duke that he would accept a large sum offered for his support in a questionable venture—because money maintained power for the Atreides.

On Arrakis, water was money. She saw that clearly.

Paul remained silent, knowing then that he would do as she ordered—not because she ordered it, but because her tone of voice had forced him to re-evaluate. To refuse the water would be to break with accepted Fremen practice.

Presently Paul recalled the words of 467 Kalima in Yueh's O.C. Bible. He said: “From water does all life begin.”

Jessica stared at him.
Where did he learn that quotation?
she asked herself.
He hasn't sutdied the mysteries.

“Thus it is spoken,” Chani said. “Giudichar mantene: It is written in the Shah-Nama that water was the first of all things created.”

For no reason she could explain (and
this
bothered her more than the sensation), Jessica suddenly shuddered. She turned away to hide her confusion and was just in time to see the sunset. A violent calamity of color spilled over the sky as the sun dipped beneath the horizon.

“It is time!”

The voice was Stilgar's ringing in the cavern. “Jamis' weapon has been killed. Jamis has been called by Him, by Shai-hulud, who has ordained the phases for the moons that daily wane and—in the end—appear as bent and withered twigs.” Stilgar's voice lowered. “Thus it is with Jamis.”

Silence fell like a blanket on the cavern.

Jessica saw the gray-shadow movement of Stilgar like a ghost figure within the dark inner reaches. She glanced back at the basin, sensing the coolness.

“The friends of Jamis will approach,” Stilgar said.

Men moved behind Jessica, dropping a curtain across the opening. A single glowglobe was lighted overhead far back in the cave. Its yellow glow picked out an inflowing of human figures. Jessica heard the rustling of the robes.

Chani took a step away as though pulled by the light.

Jessica bent close to Paul's ear, speaking in the family code: “Follow their lead; do as they do. It will be a simple ceremony to placate the shade of Jamis.”

It will be more than that,
Paul thought. And he felt a wrenching sensation within his awareness as though he were trying to grasp some thing in motion and render it motionless.

Chani glided back to Jessica's side, took her hand. “Come, Sayyadina. We must sit apart.”

Paul watched them move off into the shadows, leaving him alone. He felt abandoned.

The men who had fixed the curtain came up beside him.

“Come, Usul.”

He allowed himself to be guided forward, to be pushed into a circle of people being formed around Stilgar, who stood beneath the glowglobe and beside a bundled, curving, and angular shape gathered beneath a robe on the rock floor.

The troop crouched down at a gesture from Stilgar, their robes hissing with the movement. Paul settled with them, watching Stilgar, noting the way the overhead globe made pits of his eyes and brightened the touch of green fabric at his neck. Paul shifted his attention to the robe-covered mound at Stilgar's feet, recognized the handle of a baliset protruding from the fabric.

“The spirit leaves the body's water when the first moon rises,” Stilgar intoned. “Thus it is spoken. When we see the first moon rise this night, whom will it summon?”

“Jamis,” the troop responded.

Stilgar turned full circle on one heel, passing his gaze across the ring of faces. “I was a friend of Jamis,” he said. “When the hawk plane stooped upon us at Hole-in-the-Rock, it was Jamis pulled me to safety.”

He bent over the pile beside him, lifted away the robe. “I take this robe as a friend of Jamis—leader's right.” He draped the robe over a shoulder, straightening.

Now, Paul saw the contents of the mound exposed: the pale glistening gray of a stillsuit, a battered literjon, a kerchief with a small book in its center, the bladeless handle of a crysknife, an empty sheath, a folded pack, a paracompass, a distrans, a thumper, a pile of fist-sized metallic hooks, an assortment of what looked like small rocks within a fold of cloth, a clump of bundled feathers . . . and the baliset exposed beside the folded pack.

So Jamis played the baliset,
Paul thought. The instrument reminded him of Gurney Halleck and all that was lost. Paul knew with his memory of the future in the past that some chance-lines could produce a meeting with Halleck, but the reunions were few and shadowed. They puzzled him. The uncertainty factor touched him with wonder.
Does it mean that something I will do . . . that I may do, could destroy Gurney . . . or bring him back to life . . . or. . ..

Paul swallowed, shook his head.

Again, Stilgar bent over the mound.

“For Jamis' woman and for the guards,” he said. The small rocks and the book were taken into the folds of his robe.

“Leader's right,” the troop intoned.

“The marker for Jamis' coffee service,” Stilgar said, and he lifted a flat disc of green metal. “That it shall be given to Usul in suitable ceremony when we return to the sietch.”

“Leader's right,” the troop intoned.

Lastly, he took the crysknife handle and stood with it. “For the funeral plain,” he said.

“For the funeral plain,” the troop responded.

At her place in the circle across from Paul, Jessica nodded, recognizing the ancient source of the rite, and she thought:
The meeting between ignorance and knowledge, between brutality and culture—it begins in the dignity with which we treat our dead.
She looked across at
Paul, wondering: Will he see it? Will he know what to do?'

“We are friends of Jamis,” Stilgar said. “We are not wailing for our dead like a pack of garvarg.”

A gray-bearded man to Paul's left stood up. “I was a friend of Jamis,” he said. He crossed to the mound, lifted the distrans. “When our water went below minim at the siege at Two Brids, Jamis shared.” The man returned to his place in the circle.

Am I supposed to say I was a friend of Jamis?
Paul wondered.
Do they expect me to take something from that pile?
He saw faces turn toward him, turn away.
They do expect it!

Another man across from Paul arose, went to the pack and removed the paracompass. “I was a friend of Jamis,” he said. “When the patrol caught us at Bight-of-the-Cliff and I was wounded, Jamis drew them off so the wounded could be saved.” He returned to his place in the circle.

Again, the faces turned toward Paul, and he saw the expectancy in them, lowered his eyes. An elbow nudged him and a voice hissed: “Would you bring the destruction on us?”

How can I say I was his friend?
Paul wondered.

Another figure arose from the circle opposite Paul and, as the hooded face came into the light, he recognized his mother. She removed a kerchief from the mount. “I was a friend of Jamis,” she said. “When the spirit of spirits within him saw the needs of truth, that spirit withdrew and spared my son.” She returned to her place.

And Paul recalled the scorn in his mother's voice as she had confronted him after the fight.
“How does it feel to be a killer?”