"Stop changing the subject!"
"I do not change it. Rape was always the pay-off in male military conquest. Males did not have to abandon any of their adolescent fantasies while engaging in rape."
Idaho recalled the glowering anger which had come over him at this thrust.
"My houris tame the males," Leto said. "It is domestication, a thing that females know from eons of necessity."
Idaho stared wordlessly at Leto's cowled face.
"To tame," Leto said. "To fit into some orderly survival pattern. Women learned it at the hands of men; now men learn it at the hands of women."
"But you said..."
"My houris often submit to a form of rape at first only to convert this into a deep and binding mutual dependence."
"Dammit! You're..."
"Binding, Duncan! Binding."
"I don't feel bound to..."
"Education takes time. You are the ancient norm against which the new can be measured."
Leto's words momentarily flushed Idaho of all emotion except a deep sense of loss.
"My houris teach maturation," Leto said. "They know that they must supervise the maturation of males. Through this they find their own maturation. Eventually, houris merge into wives and mothers and we wean the violent drives away from their adolescent fixations."
"I'll have to see it to believe it!"
"You will see it at the Great Sharing."
As he stood beside Leto in the hall of Siaynoq, Idaho admitted to himself that he had seen something of enormous power, something which might create the kind of human universe Leto's words projected.
Leto was restoring the crysknife to its box, returning the box to its compartment in the bed of the Royal Cart. The women watched in silence, even the small children quiet everyone subdued by the force which could be felt in this great hall.
Idaho looked down at the children, knowing from Leto's explanation that these children would be rewarded with positions of power-male or female, each in a puissant niche. The male children would be female-dominated throughout their lives, making (in Leto's words) "an easy transition from adolescence into breeding males."
Fish Speakers and their progeny lived lives "possessed of a certain excitement not available to most others."
What will happen to Irti's children? Idaho wondered. Did my predecessor stand here and watch his white-clad wife share in Leto's ritual?
What does Leto offer me here?
With that female army, an ambitious commander could take over Leto's Empire. Or could he? No... not while Leto lived. Leto said the women were not militarily aggressive "by nature."
He said: "I do not foster that in them. They know a cyclical pattern with a Royal Festival every ten years, a changing of the Guard, a blessing for the new generation, a silent thought for fallen sisters and loved ones gone forever. Siaynoq after Siaynoq marches onward in predictable measure. The change itself becomes non-change."
Idaho lifted his gaze from the women in white and their children. He looked across the mass of silent faces, telling himself that this was only a small core of that enormous female force which spread its feminine web across the Empire. He could believe Leto's words:
"The power does not weaken. It grows stronger every decade."
To what end? Idaho asked himself.
He glanced at Leto who was lifting his hands in benediction over the hall of his houris.
"We will move among you now," Leto said.
The women below the ledge opened a path, pressing backward. The path opened deeper into the throng like a fissure spreading through the earth after some tremendous natural upheaval.
"Duncan, you will precede me," Leto said.
Idaho swallowed in a dry throat. He put a palm on the lip of the ledge and dropped down into the open space, moving out into the fissure because he knew only that could end this trial.
A quick glance backward showed him Leto's cart drifting majestically down on its suspensors.
Idaho turned and quickened his pace.
The women narrowed the path through their ranks. It was done in an odd stillness, with fixity of attention-first on Idaho and then on that gross pre-worm body riding behind Idaho on the Ixian cart.
As Idaho marched stoically ahead, women reached from all sides to touch him, to touch Leto, or merely to touch the Royal Cart. Idaho felt the restrained passion in their touch and knew the deepest fear in his experience. -= The problem of leadership is inevitably: Who will play God?
- Muad'Dib.
From the Oral History Hwi NOREE followed a young Fish Speaker guide down a wide ramp which spiraled into the depths of Onn. The summons from the Lord Leto had come in late evening of the Festival's third day, interrupting a development which had taxed her ability to maintain emotional balance.
Her first assistant, Othwi Yake, was not a pleasant mana sandy-haired creature with a long, narrow face and eyes which never looked long at anything and never ever looked directly into the eyes of someone he addressed. Yake had presented her with a single sheet of memerase paper containing what he described as "a summation of recently reported violence in the Festival City."
Standing close to the desk at which she was seated, he had stared down somewhere to her left and said: "Fish Speakers are slaughtering Face Dancers throughout the City." He did not appear particularly moved by this.
"Why?" she demanded.
"It is said that the Bene Tleilax made an attempt on the God Emperor's life."
A thrill of fear shot through her. She sat back and glanced around the ambassadorial office-around room with a single half-circle desk which concealed the controls for many Ixian devices beneath its highly polished surface. The room was a darkly important-appearing place with brown wood panels covering instruments which shielded it from spying. There were no windows.