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But he's only fifteen, she thought. And he has no shield. I must stop this. Somehow, there must be a way to.... She looked up, saw Stilgar watching her.
"You cannot stop it," he said. "You must not speak."
She put a hand over her mouth, thinking: I've planted fear in Jamis' mind. It'll slow him some ... perhaps. If I could only pray--trulypray.
Paul stood alone now just into the ring, clad in the fighting trunks he'd worn under his stillsuit. He held a crysknife in his right hand; his feet were bare against the sand-gritted rock. Idaho had warned him time and again: "When in doubt of your surface, bare feet are best. " And there were Chani's words of instruction still in the front of his consciousness: "Jamis turns to the right with his knife after a parry. It's a habit in him we've all seen. And he'll aim for the eyes to catch a blink in which to slash you. And he can fight either hand; look out for a knife shift."
But strongest in Paul so that he felt it with his entire body was training and the instinctual reaction mechanism that had been hammered into him day after day, hour after hour on the practice floor.
Gurney Halleck's words were there to remember: "The good knife fighter thinks on point and blade and shearing-guard simultaneously. The point can also cut; the blade can also stab; the shearing-guard can also trap your opponent's blade. "
Paul glanced at the crysknife. There was no shearing-guard; only the slim round ring of the handle with its raised lips to protect the hand. And even so, he realized that he did not know the breaking tension of this blade, did not even know if it could be broken.
Jamis began sidling to the right along the edge of the ring opposite Paul.
Paul crouched, realizing then that he had no shield, but was trained to fighting with its subtle field around him, trained to react on defense with utmost speed while his attack would be timed to the controlled slowness necessary for penetrating the enemy's shield. In spite of constant warning from his trainers not to depend on the shield's mindless blunting of attack speed, he knew that shield-awareness was part of him.
Jamis called out in ritual challenge: "May thy knife chip and shatter!"
This knife will break then, Paul thought.
He cautioned himself that Jamis also was without shield, but the man wasn't trained to its use, had no shield-fighter inhibitions.
Paul stared across the ring at Jamis. The man's body looked like knotted whipcord on a dried skeleton. His crysknife shone milky yellow in the light of the glowglobes.
Fear coursed through Paul. He felt suddenly alone and naked standing in dull yellow light within this ring of people. Prescience had fed his knowledge with countless experiences, hinted at the strongest currents of the future and the strings of decision that guided them, but this was the real-now. This was death hanging on an infinite number of miniscule mischances.
Anything could tip the future here, he realized. Someone coughing in the troop of watchers, a distraction. A variation in a glowglobe's brilliance, a deceptive shadow.
I'm afraid, Paul told himself.
And he circled warily opposite Jamis, repeating silently to himself the Bene Gesserit litany against fear. "Fear is the mind-killer...." It was a cool bath washing over him. He felt muscles untie themselves, become poised and ready.
"I'll sheath my knife in your blood," Jamis snarled. And in the middle of the last word he pounced.
Jessica saw the motion, stifled an outcry.
Where the man struck there was only empty air and Paul stood now behind Jamis with a clear shot at the exposed back.
Now, Paul! Now! Jessica screamed it in her mind.
Paul's motion was slowly timed, beautifully fluid, but so slow it gave Jamis the margin to twist away, backing and turning to the right.
Paul withdrew, crouching low. "First, you must find my blood," he said.
Jessica recognized the shield-fighter timing in her son, and it came over her what a two-edged thing that was. The boy's reactions were those of youth and trained to a peak these people had never seen. But the attack was trained, too, and conditioned by the necessities of penetrating a shield barrier. A shield would repel too fast a blow, admit only the slowly deceptive counter. It needed control and trickery to get through a shield.
Does Paul see it? she asked herself. He must!
Again Jamis attacked, ink-dark eyes glaring, his body a yellow blur under the glowglobes.
And again Paul slipped away to return too slowly on the attack.
And again.
And again.
Each time, Paul's counterblow came an instant late.
And Jessica saw a thing she hoped Jamis did not see. Paul's defensive reactions were blindingly fast, but they moved each time at the precisely correct angle they would take if a shield were helping deflect part of Jamis' blow.
"Is your son playing with that poor fool?" Stilgar asked. He waved her to silence before she could respond. "Sorry; you must remain silent."
Now the two figures on the rock floor circled each other: Jamis with knife hand held far forward and tipped up slightly; Paul crouched with knife held low.
Again, Jamis pounced, and this time he twisted to the right where Paul had been dodging.
Instead of faking back and out, Paul met the man's knife hand on the point of his own blade. Then the boy was gone, twisting away to the left and thankful for Chani's warning.
Jamis backed into the center of the circle, rubbing his knife hand. Blood dripped from the injury for a moment, stopped. His eyes were wide and staring--two blue-black holes--studying Paul with a new wariness in the dull light of the glowglobes.
"Ah, that one hurt," Stilgar murmured.
Paul crouched at the ready and, as he had been trained to do after first blood, called out: "Do you yield?"
"Hah!" Jamis cried.
An angry murmur arose from the troop.
"Hold!" Stilgar called out. "The lad doesn't know our rule." Then, to Paul: "There can be no yielding in the tahaddi-challenge. Death is the test of it."
Jessica saw Paul swallow hard. And she thought: He's never killed a man like this ... in the hot blood of a knife fight. Can he do it?
Paul circled slowly right, forced by Jamis' movement. The prescient knowledge of the time-boiling variables in this cave came back to plague him now. His new understanding told him there were too many swiftly compressed decisions in this fight for any clear channel ahead to show itself.
Variable piled on variable--that was why this cave lay as a blurred nexus in his path. It was like a gigantic rock in the flood, creating maelstroms in the current around it.
"Have an end to it, lad," Stilgar muttered. "Don't play with him."
Paul crept farther into the ring, relying on his own edge in speed.
Jamis backed now that the realization swept over him--that this was no soft offworlder in the tahaddi ring, easy prey for a Fremen crysknife.
Jessica saw the shadow of desperation in the man's face. Now is when he's most dangerous, she thought. Now he's desperate and can do anything. He sees that this is not like a child of his own people, but a fighting machine born and trained to it from infancy. Now the fear I planted in him has come to bloom.
And she found in herself a sense of pity for Jamis--an emotion tempered by awareness of the immediate peril to her son.
Jamis could do anything ... any unpredictable thing, she told herself. She wondered then if Paul had glimpsed this future, if he were reliving this experience. But she saw the way her son moved, the beads of perspiration on his face and shoulders, the careful wariness visible in the flow of muscles. And for the first time she sensed, without understanding it, the uncertainty factor in Paul's gift.
Paul pressed the fight now, circling but not attacking. He had seen the fear in his opponent. Memory of Duncan Idaho's voice flowed through Paul's awareness: "When your opponent fears you, then's the moment when you give the fear its own rein, give it the time to work on him. Let it become terror. The terrified man fights himself. Eventually, he attac
ks in desperation. That is the most dangerous moment, but the terrified man can be trusted usually to make a fatal mistake. You are being trained here to detect these mistakes and use them."
The crowd in the cavern began to mutter.
They think Paul's toying with Jamis, Jessica thought. They think Paul's being needlessly cruel.
But she sensed also the undercurrent of crowd excitement, their enjoyment of the spectacle. And she could see the pressure building up in Jamis. The moment when it became too much for him to contain was as apparent to her as it was to Jamis ... or to Paul.
Jamis leaped high, feinting and striking down with his right hand, but the hand was empty. The crysknife had been shifted to his left hand.
Jessica gasped.
But Paul had been warned by Chani: "Jamis fights with either hand. " And the depth of his training had taken in that trick en passant. "Keep the mind on the knife and not on the hand that holds it, " Gurney Halleck had told him time and again. "The knife is more dangerous than the hand and the knife can be in either hand. "
And Paul had seen Jamis' mistake: bad footwork so that it took the man a heartbeat longer to recover from his leap, which had been intended to confuse Paul and hide the knife shift.
Except for the low yellow light of the glowglobes and the inky eyes of the staring troop, it was similar to a session on the practice floor. Shields didn't count where the body's own movement could be used against it. Paul shifted his own knife in a blurred motion, slipped sideways and thrust upward where Jamis' chest was descending--then away to watch the man crumble.
Jamis fell like a limp rag, face down, gasped once and turned his face toward Paul, then lay still on the rock floor. His dead eyes stared out like beads of dark glass.
"Killing with the point lacks artistry, " Idaho had once told Paul, "but don't let that hold your hand when the opening presents itself. "
