Dune

I must remember to fasten the boots slip-fashion to help my stillsuit’s pumping action, she thought. There are so many things to remember.

She could still taste their morning meal—the morsel of bird flesh and grain bound within a leaf with spice honey—and it came to her that the use of time was turned around here: night was the day of activity and day was the time of rest.

Night conceals; night is safest.

She unhooked her robe from its hammock pegs in a rock alcove, fumbled with the fabric in the dark until she found the top, slipped into it.

How to get a message out to the Bene Gesserit? she wondered. They would have to be told of the two strays in Arrakeen sanctuary.

Glowglobes came alight farther into the cave. She saw people moving there, Paul among them already dressed and with his hood thrown back to reveal the aquiline Atreides profile.

He had acted so strangely before they retired, she thought. Withdrawn. He was like one come back from the dead, not yet fully aware of his return, his eyes half shut and glassy with the inward stare. It made her think of his warning about the spice-impregnated diet: addictive.

Are there side effects? she wondered. He said it had something to do with his prescient faculty, but he has been strangely silent about what he sees.

Stilgar came from shadows to her right, crossed to the group beneath the glowglobes. She marked how he fingered his beard and the watchful, cat-stalking look of him.

Abrupt fear shot through Jessica as her senses awakened to the tensions visible in the people gathered around Paul—the stiff movements, the ritual positions.

“They have my countenance!” Stilgar rumbled.

Jessica recognized the man Stilgar confronted—Jamis! She saw then the rage in Jamis—the tight set of his shoulders.

Jamis, the man Paul bested! she thought.

“You know the rule, Stilgar,” Jamis said.

“Who knows it better?” Stilgar asked, and she heard the tone of placation in his voice, the attempt to smooth something over.

“I choose the combat,” Jamis growled.

Jessica sped across the cave, grasped Stilgar’s arm. “What is this?” she asked.

“It is the amtal rule,” Stilgar said. “Jamis is demanding the right to test your part in the legend.”

“She must be championed,” Jamis said. “If her champion wins, that’s the truth in it. But it’s said….” He glanced across the press of people. “…that she’d need no champion from the Fremen—which can mean only that she brings her own champion.”

He’s talking of single combat with Paul! Jessica thought.

She released Stilgar’s arm, took a half-step forward. “I’m always my own champion,” she said. “The meaning’s simple enough for….”

“You’ll not tell us our ways!” Jamis snapped. “Not without more proof than I’ve seen. Stilgar could’ve told you what to say last morning. He could’ve filled your mind full of the coddle and you could’ve bird-talked it to us, hoping to make a false way among us.”

I can take him, Jessica thought, but that might conflict with the way they interpret the legend. And again she wondered at the way the Missionaria Protectiva’s work had been twisted on this planet.

Stilgar looked at Jessica, spoke in a low voice but one designed to carry to the crowd’s fringe. “Jamis is one to hold a grudge, Sayyadina. Your son bested him and—”

“It was an accident!” Jamis roared. “There was witch-force at Tuono Basin and I’ll prove it now!”

“…and I’ve bested him myself,” Stilgar continued. “He seeks by this tahaddi challenge to get back at me as well. There’s too much of violence in Jamis for him ever to make a good leader—too much ghafla, the distraction. He gives his mouth to the rules and his heart to the sarfa, the turning away. No, he could never make a good leader. I’ve preserved him this long because he’s useful in a fight as such, but when he gets this carving anger on him he’s dangerous to his own society.”

“Stilgar-r-r-r!” Jamis rumbled.

And Jessica saw what Stilgar was doing, trying to enrage Jamis, to take the challenge away from Paul.

Stilgar faced Jamis, and again Jessica heard the soothing in the rumbling voice. “Jamis, he’s but a boy. He’s—”

“You named him a man,” Jamis said. “His mother says he’s been through the gom jabbar. He’s full-fleshed and with a surfeit of water. The ones who carried their pack say there’s literjons of water in it. Literjons! And us sipping our catchpockets the instant they show dewsparkle.”

Stilgar glanced at Jessica. “Is this true? Is there water in your pack?”

“Yes.”

“Literjons of it?”

“Two literjons.”

“What was intended with this wealth?”