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Halleck noted with a touch of pride that those of his men still able to stand were standing--no relaxation in weariness and defeat for them. Smuggler medics were moving among them tending the wounded. Litter cases were assembled in one area down to the left, each wounded man with an Atreides companion.
The Atreides training--"We care for our own!"--it held like a core of native rock in them, Halleck noted.
One of his lieutenants stepped forward carrying Halleck's nine-string baliset out of its case. The man snapped a salute, said: "Sir, the medics here say there's no hope for Mattai. They have no bone and organ banks here--only outpost medicine. Mattai can't last, they say, and he has a request of you."
"What is it?"
The lieutenant thrust the baliset forward. "Mattai wants a song to ease his going, sir. He says you'll know the one ... he's asked it of you often enough." The lieutenant swallowed. "It's the one called 'My Woman,' sir. If you--"
"I know." Halleck took the baliset, flicked the multipick out of its catch on the fingerboard. He drew a soft chord from the instrument, found that someone had already tuned it. There was a burning in his eyes, but he drove that out of his thoughts as he strolled forward, strumming the tune, forcing himself to smile casually.
Several of his men and a smuggler medic were bent over one of the litters. One of the men began singing softly as Halleck approached, catching the counter-beat with the ease of long familiarity: "My woman stands at her window,
Curved lines 'gainst square glass.
Uprais'd arms ... bent ... downfolded.
'Gainst sunset red and golded--
Come to me ...
Come to me, warm arms of my lass.
For me ...
For me, the warm arms of my lass."
The singer stopped, reached out a bandaged arm and closed the eyelids of the man on the litter.
Halleck drew a final soft chord from the baliset, thinking: Now we are seventy-three.
Family life of the Royal Creche is difficult for many people to understand, but I shall try to give you a capsule view of it. My father had only one real friend, I think. That was Count Hasimir Fenring, the genetic-eunuch and one of the deadliest fighters in the Imperium. The Count, a dapper and ugly little man, brought a new slave-concubine to my father one day and I was dispatched by my mother to spy on the proceedings. All of us spied on my father as a matter of self-protection. One of the slave-concubines permitted my father under the Bene Gesserit-Guild agreement could not, of course, bear a Royal Successor, but the intrigues were constant and oppressive in their similarity. We became adept, my mother and sisters and I, at avoiding subtle instruments of death. It may seem a dreadful thing to say, but I'm not at all sure my father was innocent in all these attempts. A Royal Family is not like other families. Here was a new slave concubine, then, red-haired like my father, willowy and graceful. She had a dancer's muscles, and her training obviously had included neuro-enticement. My father looked at her for a long time as she postured unclothed before him. Finally he said: "She is too beautiful. We will save her as a gift." You have no idea how much consternation this restraint created in the Royal Creche. Subtlety and self-control were, after all, the most deadly threats to us all.
-"In My Father's House" by the Princess Irulan
PAUL STOOD outside the stilltent in the late afternoon. The crevasse where he had pitched their camp lay in deep shadow. He stared out across the open sand at the distant cliff, wondering if he should waken his mother, who lay asleep in the tent.
Folds upon folds of dunes spread beyond their shelter. Away from the setting sun, the dunes exposed greased shadows so black they were like bits of night.
And the flatness.
His mind searched for something tall in that landscape. But there was no persuading tallness out of heat-addled air and that horizon--no bloom or gently shaken thing to mark the passage of a breeze ... only dunes and that distant cliff beneath a sky of burnished silver-blue.
What if there isn't one of the abandoned testing stations across there? he wondered. What if there are no Fremen, either, and the plants we see are only an accident?
Within the tent, Jessica awakened, turned onto her back and peered sidelong out the transparent end at Paul. He stood with his back to her and something about his stance reminded her of his father. She sensed the well of grief rising within her and turned away.
Presently she adjusted her stillsuit, refreshed herself with water from the tent's catchpocket, and slipped out to stand and stretch the sleep from her muscles.
Paul spoke without turning: "I find myself enjoying the quiet here."
How the mind gears itself for its environment, she thought. And she recalled a Bene Gesserit axiom: "The mind can go either direction under stress--towardpositive or toward negative: on or off. Think of it as a spectrum whose extremes are unconsciousness at the negative end and hyperconsciousness at the positive end. The way the mind will lean under stress is strongly influenced by training. "
"It could be a good life here," Paul said.
She tried to see the desert through his eyes, seeking to encompass all the rigors this planet accepted as commonplace, wondering at the possible futures Paul had glimpsed. One could be alone out here, she thought, without fear of someone behind you, without fear of the hunter.
She stepped past Paul, lifted her binoculars, adjusted the oil lenses and studied the escarpment across from them. Yes, saguaro in the arroyos and other spiny growth ... and a matting of low grasses, yellow-green in the shadows.
"I'll strike camp," Paul said.
Jessica nodded, walked to the fissure's mouth where she could get a sweep of the desert, and swung her binoculars to the left. A salt pan glared white there with a blending of dirty tan at its edges--a field of white out here where white was death. But the pan said another thing: water. At some time water had flowed across that glaring white. She lowered her binoculars, adjusted her burnoose, listened for a moment to the sound of Paul's movements.
The sun dipped lower. Shadows stretched across the salt pan. Lines of wild color spread over the sunset horizon. Color streamed into a toe of darkness testing the sand. Coal-colored shadows spread, and the thick collapse of night blotted the desert.
Stars!
She stared up at them, sensing Paul's movements as he came up beside her. The desert night focused upward with a feeling of lift toward the stars. The weight of the day receded. There came a brief flurry of breeze across her face.
"The first moon will be up soon," Paul said. "The pack's ready. I've planted the thumper."
We could be lost forever in this hellplace, she thought. And no one to know.
The night wind spread sand runnels that grated across her face, bringing the smell of cinnamon: a shower of odors in the dark.
"Smell that," Paul said.
"I can smell it even through the filter," she said. "Riches. But will it buy water?" She pointed across the basin. "There are no artificial lights across there."
"Fremen would be hidden in a sietch behind those rocks," he said.
A sill of silver pushed above the horizon to their right: the first moon. It lifted into view, the hand pattern plain on its face. Jessica studied the white-silver of sand exposed in the light.
"I planted the thumper in the deepest part of the crevasse," Paul said. "Whenever I light its candle it'll give us about thirty minutes."
"Thirty minutes?"
"Before it starts calling ... a ... worm."
"Oh. I'm ready to go."
He slipped away from her side and she heard his progress back up their fissure.
The night is a tunnel, she thought, a hole into tomorrow ... if we're to have a tomorrow. She shook her head. Why must I be so morbid? I was trained better than that!
Paul returned, took up the pack, led the way down to the first spreading dune where he stopped and listened as his mother came up behind him. He heard her soft progress and the cold single-grain dribbles of sound--the desert's own code
spelling out its measure of safety.
"We must walk without rhythm," Paul said and he called up memory of men walking the sand ... both prescient memory and real memory.
"Watch how I do it," he said. "This is how Fremen walk the sand."
He stepped out onto the windward face of the dune, following the curve of it, moved with a dragging pace.
Jessica studied his progress for ten steps, followed, imitating him. She saw the sense of it: they must sound like the natural shifting of sand ... like the wind. But muscles protested this unnatural, broken pattern: Step ... drag ... drag ... step ... step ... wait... drag ... step ...
Time stretched out around them. The rock face ahead seemed to grow no nearer. The one behind still towered high.
"Lump! Lump! Lump! Lump!"
It was a drumming from the cliff behind.
"The thumper," Paul hissed.
Its pounding continued and the found difficulty avoiding the rhythm of it in their stride.
"Lump ... lump ... lump ... lump...."
They moved in a moonlit bowl punctured by that hollowed thumping. Down and up through spilling dunes: step ... drag ... wait ... step.... Across pea sand that rolled under their feet: drag ... wait ... step....
And all the while their ears searched for a special hissing.
The sound, when it came, started so low that their own dragging passage masked it. But it grew ... louder and louder ... out of the west.
"Lump ... lump ... lump ... lump...." drummed the thumper.
The hissing approach spread across the night behind them. They turned their heads as they walked, saw the mound of the coursing worm.
"Keep moving," Paul whispered. "Don't look back."
A grating sound of fury exploded from the rock shadows they had left. It was a flailing avalanche of noise.
"Keep moving," Paul repeating.
He saw that they had reached an unmarked point where the two rock faces--the one ahead and the one behind--appeared equally remote.
And still behind them, that whipping, frenzied tearing of rocks dominated the night.
They moved on and on and on.... Muscles reached a stage of mechanical aching that seemed to stretch out indefinitely, but Paul saw that the beckoning escarpment ahead of them had climbed higher.
Jessica moved in a void of concentration, aware that the pressure of her will alone kept her walking. Dryness ached in her mouth, but the sounds behind drove away all hope of stopping for a sip from her stillsuit's catchpockets.
"Lump ... lump...."
Renewed frenzy erupted from the distant cliff, drowning out the thumper.
