I dally with you. Some already are jealous that my hands tasted your loveliness when we struggled last night in Tuono Basin.”
“That will be enough of that!” Jessica snapped.
“No offense,” Stilgar said, and his voice was mild. “Women among us are not taken against their will ... and with you....” He shrugged. “... even that convention isn’t required.”
“You will keep in mind that I was a duke’s lady,” she said, but her voice was calmer.
“As you wish,” he said. “It’s time to seal off this opening, to permit relaxation of stillsuit discipline. My people need to rest in comfort this day. Their families will give them little rest on the morrow.”
Silence fell between them.
Jessica stared out into the sunlight. She had heard what she had heard in Stilgar’s voice—the unspoken offer of more than his countenance. Did he need a wife? She realized she could step into that place with him. It would be one way to end conflict over tribal leadership—female properly aligned with male.
But what of Paul then? Who could tell yet what rules of parenthood prevailed here? And what of the unborn daughter she had carried these few weeks? What of a dead Duke’s daughter? And she permitted herself to face fully the significance of this other child growing within her, to see her own motives in permitting the conception. She knew what it was—she had succumbed to that profound drive shared by all creatures who are faced with death—the drive to seek immortality through progeny. The fertility drive of the species had overpowered them.
Jessica glanced at Stilgar, saw that he was studying her, waiting. A daughter born here to a woman wed to such a one as this man—what would be the fate of such a daughter? she asked herself. Would he try to limit the necessities that a Bene Gesserit must follow?
Stilgar cleared his throat and revealed then that he understood some of the questions in her mind. “What is important for a leader is that which makes him a leader. It is the needs of his people. If you teach me your powers, there may come a day when one of us must challenge the other. I would prefer some alternative.”
“There are several alternatives?” she asked.
“The Sayyadina,” he said. “Our Reverend Mother is old.”
Their Reverend Mother!
Before she could probe this, he said: “I do not necessarily offer myself as mate. This is nothing personal, for you are beautiful and desirable. But should you become one of my women, that might lead some of my young men to believe that I’m too much concerned with pleasures of the flesh and not enough concerned with the tribe’s needs. Even now they listen to us and watch us.”
A man who weighs his decisions, who thinks of consequences, she thought.
“There are those among my young men who have reached the age of wild spirits,” he said. “They must be eased through this period. I must leave no great reasons around for them to challenge me. Because I would have to maim and kill among them. This is not the proper course for a leader if it can be avoided with honor. A leader, you see, is one of the things that distinguishes a mob from a people. He maintains the level of individuals. Too few individuals, and a people reverts to a mob.”
His words, the depth of their awareness, the fact that he spoke as much to her as to those who secretly listened, forced her to reevaluate him.
He has stature, she thought. Where did he learn such inner balance?
“The law that demands our form of choosing a leader is a just law,” Stilgar said. “But it does not follow that justice is always the thing a people needs. What we truly need now is time to grow and prosper, to spread our force over more land.”
What is his ancestry? she wondered. Whence comes such breeding? She said: “Stilgar, I underestimated you.”
“Such was my suspicion,” he said.
“Each of us apparently underestimated the other,” she said.
“I should like an end to this,” he said. “I should like friendship with you ... and trust. I should like that respect for each other which grows in the breast without demand for the huddlings of sex.”
“I understand,” she said.
“Do you trust me?”
“I hear your sincerity.”
“Among us,” he said, “the Sayyadina, when they are not the formal leaders, hold a special place of honor. They teach. They maintain the strength of God here.” He touched his breast.
Now I must probe this Reverend Mother