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Chani, nearing the ledge, was followed at a distance by four women carrying another woman in a litter.
Jessica ignored Chani's approach, focusing all her attention on the woman in the litter--a crone, a wrinkled and shriveled ancient thing in a black gown with hood thrown back to reveal the tight knot of gray hair and the stringy neck.
The litter-carriers deposited their burden gently on the ledge from below, and Chani helped the old woman to her feet.
So this is their Reverend Mother, Jessica thought.
The old woman leaned heavily on Chani as she hobbled toward Jessica, looking like a collection of sticks draped in the black robe. She stopped in front of Jessica, peered upward for a long moment before speaking in a husky whisper.
"So you're the one." The old head nodded once precariously on the thin neck. "The Shadout Mapes was right to pity you."
Jessica spoke quickly, scornfully: "I need no one's pity."
"That remains to be seen," husked the old woman. She turned with surprising quickness and faced the throng. "Tell them, Stilgar."
"Must I?" he asked.
"We are the people of Misr," the old woman rasped. "Since our Sunni ancestors fled from Nilotic al-Ourouba, we have known flight and death. The young go on that our people shall not die."
Stilgar took a deep breath, stepped forward two paces.
Jessica felt the hush come over the crowded cavern--some twenty thousand people now, standing silently, almost without movement. It made her feel suddenly small and filled with caution.
"Tonight we must leave this sietch that has sheltered us for so long and go south into the desert," Stilgar said. His voice boomed out across the uplifted faces, reverberating with the force given it by the acoustical horn behind the ledge.
Still the throng remained silent.
"The Reverend Mother tells me she cannot survive another hajra," Stilgar said. "We have lived before without a Reverend Mother, but it is not good for people to seek a new home in such straits."
Now, the throng stirred, rippling with whispers and currents of disquiet.
"That this may not come to pass," Stilgar said, "our new Sayyadina Jessica of the Weirding, has consented to enter the rite at this time. She will attempt to pass within that we not lose the strength of our Reverend Mother."
Jessica of the Weirding, Jessica thought. She saw Paul staring at her, his eyes filled with questions, but his mouth held silent by all the strangeness around them.
If I die in the attempt, what will become of him? Jessica asked herself. Again she felt the misgivings fill her mind.
Chani led the old Reverend Mother to a rock bench deep in the acoustical horn, returned to stand beside Stilgar.
"That we may not lose all if Jessica of the Weirding should fail," Stilgar said, "Chani, daughter of Liet, will be consecrated in the Sayyadina at this time." He stepped one pace to the side.
From deep in the acoustical horn, the old woman's voice came out to them, an amplified whisper, harsh and penetrating: "Chani has returned from her hajra--Chani has seen the waters."
A sussurant response arose from the crowd: "She has seen the waters."
"I consecrate the daughter of Liet in the Sayyadina," husked the old woman.
"She is accepted," the crowd responded.
Paul barely heard the ceremony, his attention still centered on what had been said of his mother.
If she should fail?
He turned and looked back at the one they called Reverend Mother, studying the dried crone features, the fathomless blue fixation of her eyes. She looked as though a breeze would blow her away, yet there was that about her which suggested she might stand untouched in the path of a coriolis storm. She carried the same aura of power that he remembered from the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam who had tested him with agony in the way of the gom jabbar.
"I, the Reverend Mother Ramallo, whose voice speaks as a multitude, say this to you," the old woman said. "It is fitting that Chani enter the Sayyadina."
"It is fitting," the crowd responded.
The old woman nodded, whispered: "I give her the silver skies, the golden desert and its shining rocks, the green fields that will be. I give these to Sayyadina Chani. And lest she forget that she's servant of us all, to her fall the menial tasks in this Ceremony of the Seed. Let it be as Shai-hulud will have it." She lifted a brown-stick arm, dropped it.
Jessica, feeling the ceremony close around her with a current that swept her beyond all turning back, glanced once at Paul's question-filled face, then prepared herself for the ordeal.
"Let the watermasters come forward," Chani said with only the slightest quaver of uncertainty in her girl-child voice.
Now, Jessica felt herself at the focus of danger, knowing its presence in the watchfulness of the throng, in the silence.
A band of men made its way through a serpentine path opened in the crowd, moving up from the back in pairs. Each pair carried a small skin sack, perhaps twice the size of a human head. The sacks sloshed heavily.
The two leaders deposited their load at Chani's feet on the ledge and stepped back.
Jessica looked at the sack, then at the men. They had their hoods thrown back, exposing long hair tied in a roll at the base of the neck. The black pits of their eyes stared back at her without wavering.
A furry redolence of cinnamon arose from the sack, wafted across Jessica. The spice? she wondered.
"Is there water?" Chani asked.
The watermaster on the left, a man with a purple scar line across the bridge of his nose, nodded once. "There is water, Sayyadina," he said, "but we cannot drink of it."
"Is there seed?" Chani asked.
"There is seed," the man said.
Chani knelt and put her hands to the sloshing sack. "Blessed is the water and its seed."
There was familiarity to the rite, and Jessica looked back at the Reverend Mother Ramallo. The old woman's eyes were closed and she sat hunched over as though asleep.
"Sayyadina Jessica," Chani said.
Jessica turned to see the girl staring up at her.
"Have you tasted the blessed water?" Chani asked.
Before Jessica could answer, Chani said: "It is not possible that you have tasted the blessed water. You are outworlder and unprivileged."
A sigh passed through the crowd, a sussuration of robes that made the nape hairs creep on Jessica's neck.
"The crop was large and the maker has been destroyed," Chani said. She began unfastening a coiled spout fixed to the top of the sloshing sack.
Now, Jessica felt the sense of danger boiling around her. She glanced at Paul, saw that he was caught up in the mystery of the ritual and had eyes only for Chani.
Has he seen this moment in time? Jessica wondered. She rested a hand on her abdomen, thinking of the unborn daughter there, asking herself: Do I have the right to risk us both?
Chani lifted the spout toward Jessica, said: "Here is the Water of Life, the water that is greater than water--Kan, the water that frees the soul. If you be a Reverend Mother, it opens the universe to you. Let Shai-hulud judge now."
Jessica felt herself torn between duty to her unborn child and duty to Paul. For Paul, she knew, she should take that spout and drink of the sack's contents, but as she bent to the proffered spout, her senses told her its peril.
The stuff in the sack had a bitter smell subtly akin to many poisons that she knew, but unlike them, too.
"You must drink it now," Chani said.
There's no turning back, Jessica reminded herself. But nothing in all her Bene Gesserit training came into her mind to help her through this instant.
What is it? Jessica asked herself. Liquor? A drug?
She bent over the spout, smelled the esthers of cinnamon, remembering then the drunkenness of Duncan Idaho. Spice liquor? she asked herself. She took the siphon tube in her mouth, pulled up only the most minuscule sip. It tasted of the spice, a faint bite acrid on the tongue.
Chani pressed down on th
e skin bag. A great gulp of the stuff surged into Jessica's mouth and before she could help herself, she swallowed it, fighting to retain her calmness and dignity.
"To accept a little death is worse than death itself," Chani said. She stared at Jessica, waiting.
And Jessica stared back, still holding the spout in her mouth. She tasted the sack's contents in her nostrils, in the roof of her mouth, in her cheeks, in her eyes--a biting sweetness, now.
Cool.
Again, Chani sent the liquid gushing into Jessica's mouth.
Delicate.
Jessica studied Chani's face--elfin features--seeing the traces of Liet-Kynes there as yet unfixed by time.
This is a drug they feed me, Jessica told herself.
But it was unlike any other drug of her experience, and Bene Gesserit training included the taste of many drugs.
Chani's features were so clear, as though outlined in light.
A drug.
Whirling silence settled around Jessica. Every fiber of her body accepted the fact that something profound had happened to it. She felt that she was a conscious mote, smaller than any subatomic particle, yet capable of motion and of sensing her surroundings. Like an abrupt revelation--the curtains whipped away--she realized she had become aware of a psychokinesthetic extension of herself. She was the mote, yet not the mote.
The cavern remained around her--the people. She sensed them: Paul, Chani, Stilgar, the Reverend Mother Ramallo.
Reverend Mother!
