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."
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 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.
Chapter Twenty-Two
"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."
The ghola took his hand from her arm, stood aside, a patient figure now, almost as though turned off when not in use. Yet... he watched.
Chani hesitated in the entrance chamber, puzzled by something she could not name. This was truly her home. As a child, she'd hunted scorpions here by glowglobe light. Something was changed, though...
"Shouldn't you be going to your quarters, m'Lady?" the ghola asked.
As though ignited by his words, a rippling birth constriction seized her abdomen. She fought against revealing it.
"M'Lady?" the ghola said.
"Why is Paul afraid for me to bear our children?" she asked.
"It is a natural thing to fear for your safety," the ghola said.
She put a hand to her cheek where the sand had reddened it. "And he doesn't fear for the children?"
"M'Lady, he cannot think of a child without remembering that your firstborn was slain by the Sardaukar."
She studied the ghola - flat face, unreadable mechanical eyes. Was he truly Duncan Idaho, this creature? Was he friend to anyone? Had he spoken truthfully now?