“It is the time of the scalding day,” Stilgar said, and now his voice was entirely ritual. “Go, Usul, and ride the maker, travel the sand as a leader of men.”
Paul saluted his banner, noting how the green and black flag hung limply now that the dawn wind had died. He turned toward the dune Stilgar had indicated—a dirty tan slope with an S -track crest. Already, most of the troop was moving out in the opposite direction, climbing the other dune that had sheltered their camp.
One robed figure remained in Paul’s path: Shishakli, a squad leader of the Fedaykin, only his slope-lidded eyes visible between stillsuit cap and mask.
Shishakli presented two thin, whiplike shafts as Paul approached. The shafts were about a meter and a half long with glistening plasteel hoods at one end, roughened at the other end for a firm grip.
Paul accepted them both in his left hand as required by the ritual.
“They are my own hooks,” Shishakli said in a husky voice. “They never have failed.”
Paul nodded, maintaining the necessary silence, moved past the man and up the dune slope. At the crest, he glanced back, saw the troop scattering like a flight of insects, their robes fluttering. He stood alone now on the sandy ridge with only the horizon in front of him, the flat and unmoving horizon. This was a good dune Stilgar had chosen, higher than its companions for the viewpoint vantage.
Stooping, Paul planted the thumper deep into the windward face where the sand was compacted and would give maximum transmission to the drumming. Then he hesitated, reviewing the lessons, reviewing the life-and-death necessities that faced him.
When he threw the latch, the thumper would begin its summons. Across the sand, a giant worm—a maker—would hear and come to the drumming. With the whiplike hook-staffs, Paul knew, he could mount the maker’s high curving back. For as long as a forward edge of a worm’s ring segment was held open by a hook, open to admit abrasive sand into the more sensitive interior, the creature would not retreat beneath the desert. It would, in fact, roll its gigantic body to bring the opened segment as far away from the desert surface as possible.
I am a sandrider, Paul told himself.
He glanced down at the hooks in his left hand, thinking that he had only to shift those hooks down the curve of a maker’s immense side to make the creature roll and turn, guiding it where he willed. He had seen it done. He had been helped up the side of a worm for a short ride in training. The captive worm could be ridden until it lay exhausted and quiescent upon the desert surface and a new maker must be summoned.
Once he was past this test, Paul knew, he was qualified to make the twenty-thumper journey into the southland—to rest and restore himself—into the south where the women and the families had been hidden from the pogrom among the new palmaries and sietch warrens.
He lifted his head and looked to the south, reminding himself that the maker summoned wild from the erg was an unknown quantity, and the one who summoned it was equally unknown to this test.
“You must gauge the approaching maker carefully,” Stilgar had explained. “You must stand close enough that you can mount it as it passes, yet not so close that it engulfs you.”
With abrupt decision, Paul released the thumper’s latch. The clapper began revolving and the summons drummed through the sand, a measured “lump… lump… lump ….”
He straightened, scanning the horizon, remembering Stilgar’s words: “Judge the line of approach carefully. Remember, a worm seldom makes an unseen approach to a thumper. Listen all the same. You may often hear it before you see it.”
And Chani’s words of caution, whispered at night when her fear for him overcame her, filled his mind: “When you take your stand along the maker’s path, you must remain utterly still. You must think like a patch of sand. Hide beneath your cloak and become a little dune in your very essence.”
Slowly, he scanned the horizon, listening, watching for the signs he had been taught.
It came from the southeast, a distant hissing, a sand-whisper. Presently he saw the faraway outline of the creature’s track against the dawnlight and realized he had never before seen a maker this large, never heard of one this size. It appeared to be more than half a league long, and the rise