friends. I’d take it a kindness if you’d play for her now. Battle planning can wait a little while. We’ll not be going into the fight till tomorrow at any rate.”
“I … I’ll get my baliset,” Gurney said. “It’s in the passage.” He stepped around them and through the hangings.
Paul put a hand on his mother’s arm, found that she was trembling.
“It’s over, Mother,” he said.
Without turning her head, she looked up at him from the corners of her eyes. “Over?”
“Of course. Gurney’s ….”
“Gurney? Oh … yes.” She lowered her gaze.
The hangings rustled as Gurney returned with his baliset. He began tuning it, avoiding their eyes. The hangings on the walls dulled the echoes, making the instrument sound small and intimate.
Paul led his mother to a cushion, seated her there with her back to the thick draperies of the wall. He was suddenly struck by how old she seemed to him with the beginnings of desert-dried lines in her face, the stretching at the corners of her blue-veiled eyes.
She’s tired, he thought. We must find some way to ease her burdens.
Gurney strummed a chord.
Paul glanced at him, said: “I’ve … things that need my attention. Wait here for me.”
Gurney nodded. His mind seemed far away, as though he dwelled for this moment beneath the open skies of Caladan with cloud fleece on the horizon promising rain.
Paul forced himself to turn away, let himself out through the heavy hangings over the side passage. He heard Gurney take up a tune behind him, and paused a moment outside the room to listen to the muted music.
“Orchards and vineyards,
And full-breasted houris,
And a cup overflowing before me.
Why do I babble of battles,
And mountains reduced to dust?
Why do I feel these tears?
Heavens stand open
And scatter their riches;
My hands need but gather their wealth.
Why do I think of an ambush,
And poison in molten cup?
Why do I feel my years?
Love’s arms beckon
With their naked delights,
And Eden’s promise of ecstasies.
Why do I remember the scars,
Dream of old transgressions …
And why do I sleep with fears?”
A robed Fedaykin courier appeared from a corner of the passage ahead of Paul. The man had hood thrown back and fastenings of his stillsuit hanging loose about his neck, proof that he had come just now from the open desert.
Paul motioned for him to stop, left the hangings of the door and moved down the passage to the courier.
The man bowed, hands clasped in front of him the way he might greet a Reverend Mother or Sayyadina of the rites. He said: “Muad’Dib, leaders are beginning to arrive for the Council.”
“So soon?”
“These are the ones Stilgar sent for earlier when it was thought ….” He shrugged.
“I see.” Paul glanced back toward the faint sound of the baliset, thinking of the old song that his mother favored—an odd stretching of happy tune and sad words. “Stilgar will come here soon with others. Show them where my mother waits.”
“I will wait here, Muad’Dib,” the courier said.
“Yes … yes, do that.”
Paul pressed past the man toward the depths of the cavern, headed for the place that each such cavern had—a place near its water-holding basin. There would be a small shai-hulud in this place, a creature no more than nine meters long, kept stunted and trapped by surrounding water ditches. The maker, after emerging from its little maker vector, avoided water for the poison it was. And the drowning of a maker was the greatest Fremen secret because it produced the substance of their union—the Water of Life, the poison that could only be changed by a Reverend Mother.
The decision had come to Paul while he faced the tension of danger to his mother. No line of the future he had ever seen carried that moment of peril from Gurney Halleck. The future—the gray-cloud-future-with its feeling that the entire universe rolled toward a boiling nexus hung around him like a phantom world.
I must see it, he thought.
His body had slowly acquired a certain spice tolerance that made prescient visions fewer and fewer … dimmer and dimmer. The solution appeared obvious to him.
I will drown the maker. We will see now whether I’m the Kwisatz Haderach who can survive the test that the Reverend Mothers have survived.
***
And it came to pass in the third year of the Desert War that Paul-Muad’Dib lay alone in the Cave of Birds beneath the kiswa hangings of an inner cell. And he lay as one dead, caught up in the revelation of the Water of Life, his being translated beyond the