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There were no funerals on the Funeral Plain.
There was death, of course, in great numbers. Ichwan Bedwine who lost their way would perish alone, their life’s water wasted in the sand rather than reclaimed by the sietch. Cielagos whose echolocation had been distorted by distrans messages drifted by night and succumbed in the day. Even the great Makers met their end, battling their peers or immersed in one of the very far-flung natural reservoirs. No part of Arrakis was lush, but even the polar villages were an oasis beside the relentless heat of the Funeral Plain.
And yet, the hajr moved south. They made camp in one hiereg after the next, varying their pacing so that Shai-Hulud would not find them unprepared, and erasing their tracks behind them so that the Harkonnens would not follow. One danger was a god to be held in reverent fear; the other was human and devoid of reason. Neither could be destroyed or subjugated. Both could be made use of, if treated carefully.
The warriors split apart into different scouting bands. Three spread ahead, looking for the next day’s shelter, while the rear guard defended the slower-moving children and elders. With the tribe temporarily divided, there was less risk that a Maker would be drawn to their movements, and a better chance that a brave sandrider might be able to ride such a Maker further ahead.
Once, Chani would have been with the scouts. But instead, she walked beside the palanquin, kicking up sand. The Reverend Mother, Ramallo, did not expect to live to reach the deep south. If they were fortunate, she would have time to pass on enough of what she knew that Chani would be a full Reverend Mother in her own right, able to sustain the tribe through the memories of those who had come before. If not, they would be left with no one to change the Water of Life and connect the sietch through the tau.
Chani did not expect, or want, the duties of a Sayyadina to be easy. But neither had she expected them to be so boring. Instead of transcending time, Ramallo wanted her to memorize blessings and curses, prayers of thanksgiving and petition, until she could say them backwards and forwards. And fill in the lines of every other participant in the ceremony, for good measure, so that she could teach her own acolytes and watermen. Blessed be the water. Blessed be its seed. Blessed be the coming and going of the Maker.
The prayers had been the same for generations. Some of the rituals—ones that every Fremen knew, not only the Reverend Mothers—dated from a time before they had even come to Arrakis or tasted the Water of Life. Becoming the vessel that held all those sacred words should have been an honor, not a chore. But all the wisdom of the past could not do a thing about Beast Rabban’s cruelty.
Still, she listened, because Ramallo expected no less of her. And as slowly as the palanquin moved, they would not waste any time in setting it down once the Reverend Mother no longer drew breath. After all, there was no time for funerals on the Funeral Plain.
“Take a scoop of sand,” Ramallo said, “in each hand.”
Chani crouched and obeyed, quickly striding to keep up with the palanquin. This wasn’t necessary, as the women who carried it moved at a dignified pace. The second moon had not yet risen, and the first moon was only a thin crescent in the sky. The Harkonnens would not dare surprise them in so lonely a place. Still, Chani felt vulnerable. With both hands full, she could not draw a weapon.
“How many grains,” Ramallo asked, “do you carry in your left hand?”
She must have been in a good mood if she was posing riddles rather than demanding recitations. No estimate would suffice; Chani would need to find some way of penetrating a deeper meaning to satisfy her. “As many as there are stars in the sky.”
“And in your right?”
“As many as the years the Guild has claimed the skies.” This was the sort of thing that Imperial Houses boasted of knowing with precision, and was also utterly useless.
“And which is the greater?”
Chani clenched her fists tightly, willing none of the grains to spill through. “The Guild has only one beginning,” she ventured. “But from another planet, we might see many more stars which are invisible here. So the stars are the greater.”
Ramallo clacked her tongue against the roof of her mouth, wasting no saliva on the dismissal.
Chani waited a few moments, hoping to see the second moon rise and blot out some of the dim stars on the horizon. Then a better idea occurred to her. “When we rest, only the one sun will burn, while the generations before us are endless and unchanging. So the years are the greater.”
“Less babbling,” said Ramallo, “and more wisdom.”
What would a Reverend Mother do? A true leader who carried nested memories within her? Someone clever enough to pose riddles of her own?
Chani stepped to the edge of the group, making sure no one was beside her. Then, in one motion, she flung open her right hand and drew her Maula pistol. “My left, now.”
“You still think like a warrior,” Ramallo scoffed. “When you are my age, what good will your weapons do you? If you cannot reckon wisely, you will have to count the grains that remain to you.”
If those who could fight didn’t make good use of the weapons they had, Chani thought, she would not live to see Ramallo’s age. But she took the admonition as it was meant, stowing the pistol and moving her fingertip over to the grains still clutched in her left hand. Slowly, she flicked the sand away. One speck, two, a third. It was woefully imprecise, but Ramallo could come no closer to guessing than she could.
“Reverend Mother,” said the woman who held the back-right pole, “she is still young. Do not withhold your wisdom out of spite.”
Chani winced as she flicked her finger again. Jessica of the Weirding was a formidable woman, but witch or no, she was still a water-fat offworlder. “Do you presume to tell me who is young, girl-child?” Ramallo snapped. “If she proves strong enough, time will be no barrier to receiving wisdom.”
Jessica, to her credit, shrank back and bore her pole in silence. She had the strength of a tireless scout, at least.
One of the bands returned, noting that there were no obstacles in the direction they had explored. They relayed the course to the other bands, and the slower group proceeded on the indicated course. Chani let the sand trickle through her fingers, trying to attune herself to each grain. A Reverend Mother had to be shrewd enough to sense every mote on her skin, yet callous enough to offer up even her own wrinkles.
The second moon rose high, and she tried not to urge it to move faster and hasten the dawn. Instead she let her mind wander to the familiar silhouette of the big-eared mouse. Muad’Dib. It was the name that Usul had chosen for himself. A clever name, for one so new. He had not tried to boast of his power; he had not wanted to kill Jamis, even in the tahaddi challenge. Did that make him weak, another water-fat stranger who did not understand the exigencies Arrakis demanded of them? Or did that make him something grand, a messiah who could show them a better future?
As the pink flickers of sunrise decked the horizon, they reached the place where the other scouting bands had set up the hiereg. The litter-bearers slowly lowered Ramallo to the sand. She hardly needed a tent, having been carried all night on her own perch. Chani opened her palm, and let the remaining grains flutter free. Then she bowed. “I grabbed the weapon,” she said, “with my right hand. That’s my stronger one, the one I fight with. They’re both the same size, but my grip is probably stronger with that one, and less sand slips through. So that one held more grains.”
Ramallo gave a nod, her gray hair lit with pink in the morning. “Hone your body until you know every muscle that well,” she said, “and no poison shall harm you.”
When they rested by day, Chani slept near Ramallo and two of the litter-bearers. Fazil had never married, and Nodiri’s husband had two other women—“if he’s worth a literjon as a scout he’ll be too tired for me,” she quipped. Davas joined her Ibduma, and Jessica joined the odd family unit comprised of Paul Muad’Dib, Harah, Kaleff, and Orlop.
Paul scouted with the warriors and must have been as tired as anyone by sunrise. Yet clearly the boys had picked his brains, because when they tagged along with their mother, they boasted about his exploits.
“Usul says on his homeworld, there’s a whole—” Kaleff gestured, searching for a word. “—a sea of water, so much in one place you can’t see across it!”
“This is his homeworld now,” said Harah, without breaking stride.
“And they fight with...weirding weapons,” said Orlop. “That turn darts away before they land!”
“Clever lad. Maybe next he can teach you how to make yourself scarce before your foe draws his pistol in the first place.”
Chani harbored a patch of jealousy for Paul, as she did for all the warriors who had the first glimpse of unknown sands. But beyond that, she admired how easily he had taken to their ways, without protesting or demanding honor as his birthright. It made her want to speak with him, come to know him better.
Except for the way that Stilgar’s glances lingered on Jessica—or, as he called her, Takhmur. The others seemed happy to use her birth name, with its sibilant consonants and soft vowels, but Stilgar made a point of using her sietch name, even with no sietch to shelter them.
“Are you going to carry her watercounters, too?” Chani teased one night.
“I have two wives and thousands of ichwan to lead,” said Stilgar.
“That wasn’t a ‘no.’”
“Maybe I just want to learn how to be a witch,” he said with a straight face.
It might have been a reminder that she had her own duties to concentrate on. Or a sign of his own embarrassment: even someone as zealous as their naib still had mundane, human cravings. Either way, Chani knew better than to meddle in his trysts.
But as they continued further south, Jessica’s muscles grew lean in her stillsuit as she and the others shouldered Ramallo’s litter among them. And something else grew, too—she was fat, not with water, but with flesh that twisted and kicked to its own rhythms.
She could not have fled Arrakeen so recently as to carry Stilgar’s child. Could she? It was the sort of thing other women of Chani’s age might have known easily, from a glance at Jessica’s silhouette. But Chani had never been one to do as others did—with a naib for an uncle and Liet for a mother, no one would stand in her way.
“You’re young,” Ramallo had snorted. “And the only thing worse than a girl who’s seen nothing of the world is one who thinks she’s seen it all. But you’ll do.”
You’ll have to, was the unspoken warning, because there’s no other choice.
“When,” Ramallo said, “can a woman lead men in prayer?”
When we’re out on the sands and Shai-Hulud is about to devour us all, Chani thought, but she was pretty sure that wasn’t the answer Ramallo had in mind. “If they’re boys too young to ride the Maker?”
“Men, not children.”
A depressing amount of her training had consisted of learning when she could not overrule men. A woman, even one who spoke with the voice of generations within her, was only a field. “It is not fit for the rude ground to rise up and overcome those who walk upon it,” the Reverend Mother had said, paraphrasing the Kitab al-Ibar. “Neither ought we to subdue our menfolk.”
“Whoever said that had never seen a field,” Chani had pointed out. Even her mother, for all that she had brought a quiet revolution to Arrakis, had understood that the Fremen would remain nomads for decades, centuries even. “Had he ever touched a woman?”
“There were women who compiled the Kitab, too,” said Ramallo. “They understood that there is nothing finer to be desired, to be tended and, in time, to bear fruit.”
Had Ramallo once had children, or had she always been set apart to perform the rituals? She dismissed questions like these when they were put to her. “Pah! You see me, I am nothing but a bag of bones. Cling to my teachings with half the mind you put to this, and you need not fear.”
But despite claiming that she was halfway to the alam al-mithal, she had not faded as the hajr processed. She mocked Nodiri and Davas if they missed a step—“move any slower and I might as well get down and walk”—and did not deign to address Jessica. Maybe they would reach safety while she yet lived, and she could change the water herself. Had not stranger miracles ensured the survival of the Fremen in their ancestral past?
Now, facing another of Ramallo’s puzzles, Chani glanced over at Jessica. As always, the woman’s ears were wide-open like a cielago’s, taking in everything that the Reverend Mother said even if it was not meant for her. She had been teaching Stilgar more of her weirding way, and else besides; Chani could occasionally catch her making hand-signs that had no clear meaning, but made Stilgar blush.
“If they speak in a language without sound,” Chani said. “For man and woman alike may wear gloves with their stillsuits, so there is no lack of modesty. And if my voice has no sound to distract, what man may go astray?”
The fact that Ramallo did not immediately shoot down the idea was encouraging. After a moment, she said, “And where might such a prayer be offered?”
In the sietch? No, the tribe was at peace in the caverns, and there would be nothing stopping men from gathering on their own to pray if they wished. On scouting expeditions? Chani had travelled and fought alongside her brothers-in-arms before, but she had been only a young warrior then, not a Sayyadina.
“Under the sun,” she said, “if the need is so great that we must move in the heat of day. Only then might signed words not only rise up to the Great Mother, but be seen among the people as well. And even were I to speak with my tongue, the men who have stayed awake and alert so long would not fall to distraction, but know that the hour is dire and echo my supplication.”
Ramallo smiled. “You speak well. Pray that such an hour never dawns, but if it does, make faith your liberation rather than tradition your shackle.”
Chani had no desire to talk back and mar her triumph, but in this case, she doubted that prayer would be much use. Again, her mind drifted back to Paul Muad’Dib. Change followed in Usul’s wake, and it was not a question of if their enemies would be brutal enough to fight by day, but when.
“But how will I know?” Chani repeated. She could echo prayers until sunup, but that brought her no closer to understanding what it would be like for the poison to infuse her.
“If your ancestors were this useless we’d have never gotten off Bela Tegeuse, child,” Ramallo snapped. “How does a babe learn to drink? Milk is precious enough in the desert, and yet it needs no words to suckle. You take it within, and it is not lost.”
“We could ask Takhmur,” Chani ventured. Though she had grown noticeably larger by now, Jessica had not lost a step in bearing the litter, no doubt trying to impress the others. Chani wanted to shake her by the shoulders and tell her it was no use. No labor could erase the accent from Jessica’s voice.
Yet Chani saw, too, how Stilgar’s eyes danced when he greeted Jessica at the hiereg. She needed no inherited memories to teach her that they were a people on the run, a step ahead of the Empire’s wrath and half a step again beyond where Shai-Hulud scourged the land. If they could find such joy, who was she to chide them?
“It was a rhetorical question,” said Ramallo. “It will be easier if you have me to guide you. You must—”
“—catch your last breath with my lips,” Chani finished. The Reverend Mother’s nonchalance about death, she understood—no one took life for granted in the wild south—but did she have to be so blasé about intimacy? It was easy for her to make the suggestion, Chani thought. She wasn’t going to be around to see Chani fondling her corpse.
“Too squeamish,” said Ramallo. “When I was your age I’d kissed a dozen lads, good ichwan all. Don’t tell me you’re unfamiliar with the concept.”
“I think I know what to do,” said Chani, once more trying to put Usul out of her mind.
But she stayed close to Ramallo, as much to try to absorb the finer points of ilm and fiqh as to bear witness to the woman’s death. If it had not been for her training, she was not sure she would have noticed that the Reverend Mother’s withered frame was slowing even further, but Ramallo slept more and ate little as the weeks wore on, as scouts dug out long-abandoned botanical stations and found them too picked-over to permanently inhabit. Her tongue, at least, had not slowed; she smirked when she noticed Chani regarding her with unease. “Everyone’s water must be reclaimed by the tribe,” she said. “Mine just has more memories with it.”
“What happens if I get your—spirit, your memories, and I still can’t change the water?”
“What happens if you get caught in a sandstorm or a Harkonnen raid?” Ramallo said bluntly.
“To the sietch, I mean. Not me.”
“Same answer,” said Ramallo, and Chani took the hint. Tau was the best way to bind a sietch together, but it was not the only way. Suffering, millennia-old or near at hand, could do almost as well.
They were near a ridge one night when the easternmost scout team returned, earlier than expected. “Bad storms that way,” reported Shishakli. “Make hiereg here.”
The civilians needed no encouragement to get an early rest. Most of them set up on the flat bled. A few families, including Jessica, Harah, and her boys, made for the top of the ridge to have a bit more privacy. Chani, of course, remained in Ramallo’s tent.
It did not take long for the Reverend Mother to drift into a light sleep, but she shifted like the grains in her fitful rest. “Shidra,” she murmured.
An old friend? A lover? A memory from someone else’s past? “It’s just me,” she said. “Chani.”
Ramallo moaned again, then lay still. Chani told herself that she’d be lucky if she lived that long, able to pass on her memories to a successor in relative peace, but it was hard to see beyond the dim present.
And then Kaleff rushed in, the child babbling too quickly for Chani to make out. “Be quiet,” she snapped. “The Reverend Mother needs to rest.”
“Please,” he said, panting. “You need to come quick. Takhmur—she might be—losing the baby.”
Chani froze. “What am I supposed to do?”
“You’re a Sayyadina,” said Kaleff. “Pray, or something.”
She wanted to protest that her training would be of no help, and that she could not leave Ramallo at any rate, but the child’s stare galvanized her. “I’ll be back soon,” she promised, and followed Kaleff out from the tent and up the ridge.
Jessica was thrashing while Harah pressed fresh rags to her. Chani was no stranger to blood, in great quantities, but that was where lasguns and crysknifes had been drawn. If all of life was this fragile, this agonizing to create, why would the creator bother with a place like Arrakis?
“Leto!” Jessica wailed, and Harah did not bother to hush her. Even her weirding ways could not restore her dead offworlder man. She needed…
Stilgar. But, Chani saw with silent clarity, Stilgar was leading the central scouts. And even if she could find him and bring him back, he would lose face among the sietch. Stolen glances and signs at sunrise were one thing; turning back in the face of the storm to help deliver an off-worlder’s child was too far. There would be a challenge, and he would either die or become as corrupt a tyrant as the Empire’s men. Either way, there would be no refuge for Jessica and the baby, even if it lived.
But Paul, so young in some ways and already a man in others, who gave water to the dead and caused even hardened warriors to speak of the Mahdi—if anyone could guide Takhmur through this, he could.
“You’re doing well,” Chani said to Harah. “Keep her still.” She had no reason to believe this, but it sounded like the sort of thing a Reverend Mother ought to say. Then she turned to Kaleff. “Where’s your brother?”
“Down with Himud and Kammo, in the camps.”
“Good, you go stay with him.” At his questioning glance, she said, “I’m going to get Usul.”
She hurried back down the ridge, and accosted the first sandrider she came across. “I need a thumper and maker hooks,” she demanded, and Nahali was too startled to protest. He immediately produced them, and no one protested as she sped to the edge of the camp, then the sands beyond. Had Ramallo once commanded this respect—the sort that did not cause people to carry her gently, but trust that she knew her way, no matter how absurd?
Once she was far enough from the hiereg that the others were in no danger, she began to set the thumper. It occurred to her that she had a crysknife on her person. She could have eased Ramallo’s passage, ended her suffering, ensured that her dying breath would not be lost. But the concept had simply not occurred to her, as quaffing poison would never occur to her. Was this what it meant to be a Reverend Mother, to have confidence that all of her decisions were wise? Or was she simply a prisoner without freedom?
The thumper beat with a precision no human could imitate, until its noise dimmed in the presence of the Maker. Then Chani hurled the hooks, catching the Maker on its outer scales and swinging aboard. The Guild may have needed spice to sail through space, but these flights were more than enough to thrill her.
She readjusted the hooks, one at a time, urging the sandworm south and west. Unbidden, the ancient prayer leapt to mind: May his passage cleanse the world. May he keep the world for his people. She had called him, not for wealth or even for the Water of Life, but to speed Usul to Takhmur and the baby. What finer reason could there be?
“I used to get frustrated, when I first came to the sietches,” her mother had once said. “The prayers didn’t make sense in the way that I usually thought about things. But I found myself reciting them almost without deciding upon it.” At the time, Chani had rolled her eyes—couldn’t she discuss normal Fremen things, instead of constantly reminding Chani that she was technically an off-worlder? Now, it rang true.
She slowed, but did not stop, when she drew close to the western scout band. They had taken up a defensive formation, wary that the oncoming sandworm might be transporting an enemy sietch. Even this far south, caution was still necessary.
But they laughed when they saw it was only Chani. “Kull wahad! Are we so slow that Stilgar sends you to goad us?”
“Usul is needed,” she said. “Help him up.”
It was not a question. Her word carried because it needed to carry. A few of the young men flung their hooks into the Maker, alongside hers. The two in the back climbed on, then tossed some lengths of rope back to Paul. He clutched them, then rocked back and forth as Shai-Hulud pitched beneath Chani’s grip. She felt, rather than saw, his weight settle in behind hers, and his arms clutch her stillsuit for dear life.
The men from behind helped her turn the Maker so it faced northwards again. “Do you need us?”
“I’m all right,” said Paul, then repeated it more loudly, as if convincing himself. “You go ahead and scout.”
“Shishakli’s band says there are storms to the east,” said Chani. “Don’t rove too far, we already made camp.”
They agreed in silence, removing their hooks and rejoining their companions.
“Haiii-yoh!” Chani called, and the Maker thundered forward.
Usul clung to her as she guided the Maker back north. This time, it was the teaching of the sirat that occurred to her: Paradise on my right, hell on my left, and the Angel of Death behind. Old Father Eternity was great indeed, but he was only a slim bridge over the unforgiving planet. Ahead lay both life and death; one misstep, and the burning sands awaited them both; yet Usul’s trusting embrace around her was heavenly. “Sihaya,” he whispered. When had he learned her sietch name?
The first moon had already set, and only the kangaroo mouse of the second moon remained in the sky. By the distance it had moved, she reckoned they had travelled about as long on the return trip as her southbound one.
“You’re going to need to jump loose,” she said. Perhaps they should have brought the others, but she felt that the intimacy they shared had not been for the galaxy to know. Like the crysknife, the decision could cause no anxiety once it had passed. “Go diagonally, away from me, but not straight out. Once you land, make yourself small. The Maker will be irritated, but I am still in control. Remember to not move too rhythmically.”
“Bi-lal kaifa,” he replied. Perhaps a half-joke—the explanation was pathetically brief, but there was no time to explain anything more. Then he lifted his arms from where they had been pressed to her, and jumped free.
She glanced to the side, briefly, to confirm he had landed in one piece, then released the Maker and soared after him. Shai-Hulud lumbered away, rolling its scales in irritation.
Usul tilted his head up at her as she walked beside him, purposeful if not overly hasty. “The baby is coming,” she said. “Your mother may have need of your weirding ways. My knowledge can only do so much.” The rest he would learn soon enough, for good or ill.
He regarded this. “Thank you.”
“You can thank me later,” said Chani. Or he could curse her.
No one interrupted them as they passed through the hiereg. There was no sign of movement in Ramallo’s tent. Did that mean anything?
When they reached Jessica’s tent, it was much the same as Chani had left it. Jessica still bled, and Harah still tended to her. Given the alternatives, Chani supposed, it was good news. Paul waved his hand to dismiss Harah, and took her place, kneeling at his mother’s side. “I must not fear,” he recited. “Fear is the mind-killer.”
Jessica did not speak, but something in her untensed. Her breathing evened, and while she still screamed, she was screaming in rhythm with Paul’s voice. The blood did not faze him. He must have seen more when Arrakeen fell.
And then the screaming was joined by another wordless cry, high-pitched like the ridge itself. Paul reached for the baby, while Jessica still looked too frail to sit up. “Chani,” he hissed. “Sihaya, your knife.”
“What?”
“Under the circumstances, I’m going to say this counts as drawing blood. I could use the Voice and demand it of you, but I’d rather not do that. Please?”
The baby had been born to Sietch Tabr—it knew no other planet—and Paul knew the worth of liberty. She drew the Maker’s fang and handed it to Paul, who cut the baby free, and gathered it into Jessica’s frail arms.
At once, whatever bond of duty or desire had drawn her there was severed. Ignoring Paul, and the knife, she darted back down the ridge and into the hiereg, bursting into Ramallo’s tent. Let her not be too late, she willed. Let her search for the ayat, the signs of life in the midst of death, have not been in vain.
But there was no breath remaining in Ramallo, no challenge or wisdom from the elder. Only skin as parched as the sand beneath her.
The hajr did not stop for Ramallo’s death, of course, but Stilgar had them stay at the hiereg for another night and day before continuing south. There were storms where the warriors had scouted, he said, quite reasonably. If it also gave Takhmur time to heal, well, that was just an added bonus.
Without the litter, Fazil returned to the scout bands. Takhmur, with Alia slung within her stillsuit, wasn’t able to go any faster than she had before. Chani yearned to do something to fill the hours, now sprawling and empty without Ramallo’s lessons to occupy her.
But whatever had passed between her and Usul out on Shai-Hulud did not return. He continued scouting with the ichwan, and Chani embraced the exigencies of duty. When they reached an inhabitable warren, there would be a tau ritual, whether or not she was ready. And if she failed, there would need to be another Sayyadina ready to lead in her place.
She had thought someone like Miryan, who had outlived three husbands, or Higre, who was not much older than Chani herself, would be willing to serve as an acolyte. Instead Harah stepped up. “I will face the test of aql.”
“You?” Chani asked.
Harah’s smile was almost a sneer. “You are surprised that a woman like myself can reason? When I was young I spoke in Chakobsa and played the baliset. Before Geoff showed me my great purpose.”
“No, I mean—you’re wiser than me, nobody calls you a child. Ramallo should have chosen you.” Before she began this journey, she would not have imagined speaking so flippantly of the dead. But even as she’d grown impressed by the Reverend Mother’s teaching, she became painfully aware that the woman was only human.
Harah shook her head. “You are young—you think it no hardship to be set apart. Ramallo knew that I wanted nothing more to be a woman, Usul’s woman, and perhaps in the future another’s. But change pursues us whether we wish it or not.”
“Stilgar is not less of a man because he is the naib.”
“Stilgar!” Harah echoed, and the name was half-reverential, half a curse. “He is a good husband to Fusnila and Tharthar. If he contented himself with the old ways, there would be no shame in sharing their yali. But now I suppose he must fancy himself a fat off-worlder to keep up with Usul.”
“Take that back,” Chani snapped. Stilgar had led the sietch into exile, not because of what he felt for Jessica, but because no enemy of the Harkonnens could be safe for long on Arrakis.
“Peace!” Harah said. “If I hated Usul so much, would I ask him to teach my children?” And when Chani looked at her askance: “Teach me the rituals, Sayyadina. With luck you’ll survive and it won’t matter whether I can hold a drachm of knowledge in my brain.”
So Chani repeated her lessons, only in reverse. Now instead of Ramallo demanding perfect recitations and throwing her off-balance with puzzles, it was she who repeated the ritual to Harah, line by line. It was all she could do to repeat the prayers—she could not analyze their prosody or theology like Ramallo had, and Harah was liable to break off halfway through to chastise Orlop for fighting with the other children, or tell a bored Kaleff to supervise his brother.
Still, she learned, and that told Chani that her efforts as a student at least had not been in vain. Even if she was only a thin sirat, bridging the way from Ramallo to Harah, she had learned something of reason.
In the first month of the new year, they came to Jenos Palmary. There were a few civilians who lived there, mostly families of technicians at a nearby station. Keltira recognized Chani without her name being spoken, and for a wild moment Chani wondered if Stilgar had already introduced her as the new Reverend Mother. But instead she said, “You must be the daughter of Liet.”
“Yes,” said Chani.
Keltira grinned. “I am in charge of delivering the Palmaries’ tithes to the guild. May the debt of three centuries yield a flourishing world!”
If people did not want to talk about memories from millennia past, they would discuss her mother’s dreams of future centuries. Was there anyone left that saw Sihaya, in the moment?
There was space enough even for a large sietch, without having to shed blood for the warren and its reservoirs. Stilgar decreed that their hajr had come to an end, and that while they were still Sietch Tabr, they were now people of the Palmaries. Ichwan and children alike rejoiced that they would at last have yalis to sleep in at night. The familiar workstations were set up, whether ancient ones like stillsuit shops or new ones like Liet’s schools. Families began jockeying for precedence in yalis. Small families like Davas and Ibduma were likely to get cramped chambers down long corridors, while Nodiri’s family had a larger one to house all of her husband’s children.
Stilgar seemed unconcerned about the tau. “We have just endured a long hajr together, and now we have many spaces to share in common here. Our minds are many, but our water is one.”
But Chani felt a desperate urge to get it over with, success or failure. Death at least might be swift; the constant dread of not knowing whether she had learned enough to be worthy of the Water of Life ate away at her each day. It seemed everyone else had found their place in the Palmaries, even the off-worlders. Usul supplemented Kaleff’s classroom learning with his knowledge of planets throughout the Empire. Alia, though she was too young to learn the weirding way, was a quiet, observant baby. “Was I like that when I was young?” Paul asked.
Takhmur laughed. “Not at all! As soon as you learned that crying would wake me up to nurse you, you screamed like a little beast. Even then, you knew what to do with your voice.”
“Then Alia eats less?”
“She’s just a good Fremen child,” said Stilgar, taking a turn to burp her. “She knows her water discipline!”
It was a joke, of course. Chani knew that. And yet she could not shake her own feelings of worthlessness. Perhaps there was something to Harah’s reminders that reason was not everything.
So when she told Stilgar she was ready and he asked if she was sure, she bristled. When had the choice ever been entirely hers? “Yes,” she said.
The central cavern in Jenos was nearly as large as the one they’d left behind—not quite as tall, but with more off-branching passageways. The scene before her was almost familiar, but dissonant, the dimensions misaligned. At least the aroma was the same, the smell of a sietch filled with life and energy.
The watermasters’ sacks were small, leftovers from an earlier rite by the Jenos residents. Sietch Tabr had had a hard enough time hauling Ramallo through the plain that it made no sense for them to bring their own Kan, too. But Chani knew that the quantity did not matter. Even a small amount would be enough to unite the sietch through the tau. Even a minute amount would be enough to kill.
“Let Shai-Hulud judge now,” said Harah, and Chani drank.
The Water of Life was fresh, sharp. Chani needed no special training to instinctively understand that she could not gulp it down right away. Something this nourishing had to be savored, rationed drop for drop.
Not savored, the conscious part of her mind told her. Changed.
Carefully, without swallowing, she moved it around her mouth. In front of her, she could make out the outline of Harah, glaring at her with the same face she used when Orlop had picked a fight with the other kids—but the rest of the cavern was a blur of light. She needed to make the Kan neither poison nor mundane, but alive, transfused with the tau.
She gagged, almost by reflex, and saliva dribbled down her chin. She must have looked like Alia, burping. Harah was still holding the bag. Again.
Chani took another sip, and filled the Water with herself—her blood, her memories, everything she had learned from Ramallo. Beyond her, the cavern was empty. No, that was the Tabr cavern in the north, the familiar vaults and pillars. Where was she?
Words. Ramallo had given her sacred words that she had carried across the plain; she could not forget them now. “It has been blessed,” she said. “Mingle the waters, let the change come to all.”
She looked for Harah, for Stilgar, for any sign that her part in the ritual was complete. But it was a young woman who nodded at her and spoke in Ramallo’s voice. “There you are.”
Ramallo. She must have failed, and passed to the alam al-mithal. Chani bowed, unable to meet the woman’s eyes but finding nowhere else to hold her gaze in the hollow cavern. “Forgive me.”
“Girl-child,” said the young Ramallo, “you will transgress many times and fall short many more in your life, and you will beg forgiveness from your people among the living. But from me, no longer.”
Chani remained silent for a moment. This was not a puzzle like the ones she had posed in training, but she felt as if it was a test nonetheless. A foolish question would betray her ignorance. “When are we?”
“We are Within,” Ramallo said. “This is how my memory dwells as a guest, and this—” She gestured to the cavern beyond them—“is where your memory shows hospitality.”
“Then—your spirit has remained with me? Haunting me?” Perhaps the old Reverend Mother could not truly die and journey beyond unless Chani had been there to receive her breath. Why had she not made the stakes plain?
“The true Ramallo, the Ramallo-that-was, is whole within Father Eternity. She is not lessened because this memory lingers. We are part of you, now.”
And beyond Ramallo, Chani could see, the cavern was filled with Reverend Mothers—all of the sietch’s predecessors, going back to the ancient days of the Zensunni people. The shapes they wore may have been mirages, no nearer a resemblance to how they appeared in life than Ramallo did to the crone on the palanquin, but they were present, each a trove of memories that Chani could sift through.
“But I failed,” she said. “I wasn’t there for you. When you—died.” Did the memory-Ramallo even know of her own death?”
“You knew your duty,” said Ramallo. “To your people who yet live, to the ayat. As many words as we recite, there are lessons that no teacher can impart. Each of us must face her own burhan.”
And Chani saw, as if a dim memory, that the ritual was underway. Fazil, Nodiri, Davas, and all the others were drinking of the water that had been changed, and the sietch was as one. The boundaries that separated each mind and body from the next had not been annihilated, only eroded for a time, so that they might share in the oneness. For Chani, the oneness was not with her kindred in time and space, but with those who had come before. She would commune with them—and would need no Kan to do so again—but remain herself.
Ramallo gave a satisfied smile. “To give of yourself until you are empty, yet remain undiminished—that is what it is to be a woman.”
“Actually,” said a dry, familiar voice, “evolution has fostered a remarkable diversity of reproductive strategies for sexually dimorphic species, and it impedes our understanding to anthropomorphize them.”
Ramallo rolled her eyes as if this was a conversation they had had many times in the living world, but Chani whirled to take in the memory. “Mother!”
“Sihaya,” said Liet—and beyond her there was another crowd of women, Chani’s ancestors. Thinkers and tinkerers from untold planets. “We, too, endure in your blood.”
Chani thought she might cry, but it was impossible for tears to form, or for her sight to blur any further. She was the cavern, the sack, the reservoirs, and she contained a galaxy.
The awareness spectrum drug flowed through Takhmur’s cells. Even as she stepped aside and let the others come forward, part of her was already studying the Water of Life. Analyzing the subtle poisons that seeped throughout the galaxy had long since become second nature. For inhabiting a parched world, the Fremen certainly had a remarkable grasp of biochemistry.
She watched Stilgar drink. Only a few drops touched his lips, and yet she could see a slight change in the way he carried himself. Still on guard, as ready as ever to draw his crysknife in defense of the sietch. But he had shed a layer of the authority that held him apart. In the tau, there was no more naib nor fedaykin. They were all, simply, the people of Tabr.
And yet individuals retained their identity even in the oneness. It was not by coincidence that comrades long-separated by their scouting duties sought each other out in pairs—or sometimes threes and fours—savoring the scent of each others’ wet lips before peeling off into yalis. Takhmur maintained her composure, but her eyes sought out Stilgar. He met them, gently, and said: “No.”
Takhmur said nothing, but withdrew her consciousness to focus on the chemical patterns that her wordless mind had already identified. Molecular formations conspiring to penetrate the barriers that divided one mind from the next. Like anything else, terrible in the wrong dose. How could anyone, even a Bene Gesserit, survive if each of those shield walls were to be worn away?
“Whatever festivals the Empire may celebrate,” he went on, “the tau is not for sealing new oaths.”
After all this time—he had shared her tent, learned the fundamentals of the “Weirding Way,” even changed Alia’s diapers—did he still see her as only an off-worlder? She concealed her anger beneath contemplation of the narcotic, and looked around for a counterexample. “Obriha and Kulni’s oath is not new?”
“Those two have been pulled towards each other like two balls rolling down the same slack,” Stilgar said. “Remove the friction in the slope, and what was laborious accelerates.”
“And you?”
Stilgar said nothing for a moment. The cavern was clearing as the adults scattered, but a few children still came forward to sip obediently. Kaleff and Orlop took the watersack from their mother and returned it again. No hajr could sap their energy; they bounded across the cavern with wild limbs. “There is more than one sort of lust that is sated by the tau,” Stilgar noted. “If all our ichwan are as deadly by night as those two will be in their dreams this day, the planet will indeed be free soon.”
“Don’t tell me you go to play at war,” she said. “We both know it is no game.”
“Those two do not need me as a father, any more than they need Usul,” he went on. “But I can give respite to one who has grown weary.”
Takhmur looked down at Chani, who had seemed to fall asleep where she sat, and took care to give no reaction. Were the ways of the Major Houses any stranger?
But Stilgar looked past his niece, to where Harah still held the sack. “Sayyadina,” he said, and Takhmur knew that this was no ritual. “As the ground that has lain fallow puts forward sweet grain, I would glean from your richness.”
“Do you think me as lifeless as a watercounter?” Harah retorted. “You, who would not even raise a blade to change my path?”
“One as wise as you would have found honor along any journey. If the Maker wills, you may travel by paths yet unscouted.”
She drew herself up to her full height. “Tonight there is no need to journey. We have come to the place of unity.”
Wordlessly, they withdrew down the cavern passageways, and Takhmur could only marvel. Jessica had endured the scorn of the Reverend Mothers for not giving them a daughter, endured with Paul through the storm. Here, in this refuge, it was little cost to be alone.
And she was not entirely alone, for all that. Paul, who had been holding a sleeping Alia while he waited in the back of the cavern, came forward and regarded the watersack with curiosity. Then he gulped greedily from it, and Takhmur knew it was pointless to chide him. Like her, his body would be analyzing the Kan whether he willed it to or not.
Then he dipped a finger in the sack, and raised it to Alia’s mouth. She was as eerily silent as ever, but she blinked in contentment. Even her strange, aloof daughter belonged to the tau.
“She is beautiful,” Paul said, and Takhmur knew he did not speak of his sister.
“Remember spannungsbogen,” Takhmur counseled. “Between the desire of the eye and the movement of the hand, there are a thousand nerves.” Of course, it was not always advice that she had taken.
“And how many visions?” Paul sulked. “Hers, or mine?”
“This is not a multitudinous thing.” Takhmur nodded down at the now-empty sack. “This is a place of oneness.”
She half-expected Paul to protest, or quote some fatalistic saying. But instead he smiled, while inscribing in his mind the image of the new Reverend Mother, asleep in the Waters of Life.