Dune

Leto’s mind floated in a stew of fierce odors. He recognized the heavy cinnamon of melange, the confined sweat of working bodies, the acridity of an uncapped deathstill, dust of many sorts with flint dominant. The odors formed a trail through dreamsand, created shapes of fog in a dead land. He knew these odors should tell him something, but part of him could not yet listen.

Thoughts like wraiths floated through his mind: In this time I have no finished features; I am all of my ancestors. The sun setting into the sand is the sun setting into my soul. Once this multitude within me was great, but that’s ended. I’m Fremen and I’ll have a Fremen ending. The Golden Path is ended before it began. It’s nothing but a windblown trail. We Fremen knew all the tricks to conceal ourselves: we left no feces, no water, no tracks. . . . Now, look at my trail vanish.

A masculine voice spoke close to his ear: “I could kill you, Atreides. I could kill you, Atreides.” It was repeated over and over until it lost meaning, became a wordless thing carried within Leto’s dreaming, a litany of sorts: “I could kill you, Atreides.”

Leto cleared his throat and felt the reality of this simple act shake his senses. His dry throat managed: “Who . . .”

The voice beside him said: “I’m an educated Fremen and I’ve killed my man. You took away our gods, Atreides. What do we care about your stinking Muad’Dib? Your god’s dead!”

Was that a real Ouraba voice or another part of his dream? Leto opened his eyes, found himself unfettered on a hard couch. He looked upward at rock, dim glowglobes, an unmasked face staring down at him so close he could smell the breath with its familiar odors of a sietch diet. The face was Fremen; no mistaking the dark skin, those sharp features and water-wasted flesh. This was no fat city dweller. Here was a desert Fremen.

“I am Namri, father of Javid,” the Fremen said. “Do you know me now, Atreides?”

“I know Javid,” Leto husked.

“Yes, your family knows my son well. I am proud of him. You Atreides may know him even better soon.”

“What . . .”

“I am one of your schoolmasters, Atreides. I have only one function: I am the one who could kill you. I’d do it gladly. In this school, to graduate is to live; to fail is to be given into my hands.”

Leto heard implacable sincerity in that voice. It chilled him. This was a human gom jabbar, a high-handed enemy to test his right of entrance into the human concourse. Leto sensed his grandmother’s hand in this and, behind her, the faceless masses of the Bene Gesserit. He writhed at this thought.

“Your education begins with me,” Namri said. “That is just. It is fitting. Because it could end with me. Listen to me carefully now. My every word carries your life in it. Everything about me holds your death within it.”

Leto shot his glance around the room: rock walls, barren—only this couch, the dim glowglobes, and a dark passage behind Namri.

“You will not get past me,” Namri said. And Leto believed him.

“Why’re you doing this?” Leto asked.

“That’s already been explained. Think what plans are in your head! You are here and you cannot put a future into your present condition. The two don’t go together: now and future. But if you really know your past, if you look backward and see where you’ve been, perhaps there’ll be reason once more. If not, there will be your death.”

Leto noted that Namri’s tone was not unkind, but it was firm and no denying the death in it.

Namri rocked back on his heels, stared at the rock ceiling. “In olden times Fremen faced east at dawn. Eos, you know? That’s dawn in one of the old tongues.”

Bitter pride in his voice, Leto said: “I speak that tongue.”

“You have not listened to me, then,” Namri said, and there was a knife edge in his voice. “Night was the time of chaos. Day was the time of order. That’s how it was in the time of that tongue you say you speak: darkness-disorder, light-order. We Fremen changed that. Eos was the light we distrusted. We preferred the light of a moon, or the stars. Light was too much order and that can be fatal. You see what you Eos-Atreides have done? Man is a creature of only that light which protects him. The sun was our enemy on Dune.” Namri brought his gaze down to Leto’s level. “What light do you prefer, Atreides?”

By Namri’s poised attitude, Leto sensed that this question carried deep weight. Would the man kill him if he failed to answer correctly? He might. Leto saw Namri’s hand resting quietly next to the polished hilt of a crysknife. A ring in the form of a magic tortoise glittered on the Fremen’s knife hand.