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perhaps, a place for her to give birth. He had summoned odd companions for
this journey, she thought -- Bijaz, the
Tleilaxu dwarf; the ghola, Hayt, who might be Duncan Idaho's revenant; Edric,
the Guild Steersman-
Ambassador; Gaius Helen Mohiam, the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother he so
obviously hated; Lichna, Otheym's strange daughter, who seemed unable to move
beyond the watchful eyes of guards; Stilgar, her uncle of the Naibs, and his
favorite wife, Harah . . . and Irulan . . . Alia . . .
The sound of wind through the rocks accompanied her thoughts. The desert day
had become yellow on yellow, tan on tan, gray on gray.
Why such a strange mixture of companions?
"We have forgotten," Paul had said in response to her question, "that the word
'company'
originally meant traveling companions. We are a company."
"But what value are they?"
"There!" he'd said, turning his frightful sockets toward her. "We've lost that
clear, single-
note of living. If it cannot be bottled, beaten, pointed or hoarded, we give
it no value."
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Hurt, she'd said: "That's not what I meant."
"Ahhh, dearest one," he'd said, soothing, "we are so money-rich and so
life-poor. I am evil, obstinate, stupid . . . "
"You are not!"
"That, too, is true. But my hands are blue with time. I think . . . I think I
tried to invent life, not realizing it'd already been invented."
And he'd touched her abdomen to feel the new life there.
Remembering, she placed both hands over her abdomen and trembled, sorry that
she'd asked Paul to bring her here.
The desert wind had stirred up evil odors from the fringe plantings which
anchored the dunes at the cliff base. Fremen superstition gripped her: evil
odors, evil times. She faced into the wind, saw a worm appear outside the
plantings. It arose like the prow of a demon ship out of the dunes, threshed
sand, smelled the water deadly to its kind, and fled beneath a long, burrowing
mound.
She hated the water then, inspired by the worm's fear. Water, once the
spirit-soul of Arrakis, had become a poison. Water brought pestilence. Only
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the desert was clean.
Below her, a Fremen work gang appeared. They climbed to the sietch's middle
entrance, and she saw that they had muddy feet.
Fremen with muddy feet!
The children of the sietch began singing to the morning above her, their
voices piping from the upper entrance. The voices made her feel time fleeing
from her like hawks before the wind. She shuddered.
What storms did Paul see with his eyeless vision?
She sensed a vicious madman in him, someone weary of songs and polemics.
The sky, she noted, had become crystal gray filled with alabaster rays,
bizarre designs etched across the heavens by windborne sand. A line of
gleaming white in the south caught her attention.
Eves suddenly alerted, she interpreted the sign: White sky in the south:
Shai-hulud's mouth. A
storm came, big wind. She felt the warning breeze, a crystal blowing of sand
against her cheeks.
The incense of death came on the wind: odors of water flowing in qanats,
sweating sand, flint. The water -- that was why Shai-hulud sent his coriolis
wind.
Hawks appeared in the cleft where she stood, seeking safety from the wind.
They were brown as the rocks and with scarlet in their wings. She felt her
spirit go out to them: they had a place to hide; she had none.
"M'Lady, the wind comes!"
She turned, saw the ghola calling to her outside the upper entrance to the
sietch. Fremen fears gripped her. Clean death and the body's water claimed for
the tribe, these she understood.
But . . . something brought back from death . . .
Windblown sand whipped at her, reddened her cheeks. She glanced over her
shoulder at the frightful band of dust across the sky. The desert beneath the
storm had taken on a tawny, restless appearance as though dune waves beat on a
tempest shore the way Paul had once described a sea. She hesitated, caught by
a feeling of the desert's transience. Measured against eternity, this was no
more than a caldron. Dune surf thundered against cliffs.
The storm out there had become a universal thing for her -- all the animals
hiding from it . .
. nothing left of the desert but its own private sounds: blown sand scraping
along rock, a wind-
surge whistling, the gallop of a boulder tumbled suddenly from its hill --
then! somewhere out of sight, a capsized worm thumping its idiot way aright
and slithering off to its dry depths.
It was only a moment as her life measured time, but in that moment she felt
this planet being swept away -- cosmic dust, part of other waves.
"We must hurry," the ghola said from right beside her.
She sensed fear in him then, concern for her safety.
"It'll shred the flesh from your bones," he said, as though he needed to
explain such a storm to her.
Her fear of him dispelled by his obvious concern, Chani allowed the ghola to
help her up the rock stairway to the sietch. They entered the twisting baffle
which protected the entrance.
Attendants opened the moisture seals, closed them behind.
Sietch odors assaulted her nostrils. The place was a ferment of nasal memories
-- the warren closeness of bodies, rank esters of the reclamation stills,
familiar food aromas, the flinty burning of machines at work . . . and through
it all, the omnipresent spice: melange everywhere.
She took a deep breath. "Home."
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