Страница 8 из 152
The Reverend Mother looked at Jessica. "You've been training him in the Way—I've seen the signs of it. I'd have done the same in your shoes and devil take the Rules."
Jessica nodded.
"Now, I caution you," said the old woman, "to ignore the regular order of training. His own safety requires the Voice. He already has a good start in it, but we both know how much more he needs... and that desperately." She stepped close to Paul, stared down at him. "Goodbye, young human. I hope you make it. But if you don't—well, we shall yet succeed."
Once more she looked at Jessica. A flicker sign of understanding passed between them. Then the old woman swept from the room, her robes hissing, with not another backward glance. The room and its occupants already were shut from her thoughts.
But Jessica had caught one glimpse of the Reverend Mother's face as she turned away. There had been tears on the seamed cheeks. The tears were more u
***
You have read that Muad'Dib had no playmates his own age on Caladan. The dangers were too great. But Muad'Dib did have wonderful companion-teachers. There was Gurney Halleck, the troubadour-warrior. You will sing some of Gurney's songs, as you read along in this book. There was Thufir Hawat, the old Mentat Master of Assassins, who struck fear even into the heart of the Padishah Emperor. There were Duncan Idaho, the Swordmaster of the Ginaz; Dr. Wellington Yueh, a name black in treachery but bright in knowledge; the Lady Jessica, who guided her son in the Bene Gesserit Way, and — of course — the Duke Leto, whose qualities as a father have long been overlooked.
Thufir Hawat slipped into the training room of Castle Caladan, closed the door softly. He stood there a moment, feeling old and tired and storm-leathered. His left leg ached where it had been slashed once in the service of the Old Duke.
Three generations of them now , he thought.
He stared across the big room bright with the light of noon pouring through the skylights, saw the boy seated with back to the door, intent on papers and charts spread across an ell table.
How many times must I tell that lad never to settle himself with his back to a door? Hawat cleared his throat.
Paul remained bent over his studies.
A cloud shadow passed over the skylights. Again, Hawat cleared his throat.
Paul straightened, spoke without turning: "I know. I'm sitting with my back to a door."
Hawat suppressed a smile, strode across the room.
Paul looked up at the grizzled old man who stopped at a corner of the table. Hawat's eyes were two pools of alertness in a dark and deeply seamed face.
"I heard you coming down the hall," Paul said. "And I heard you open the door."
"The sounds I make could be imitated."
"I'd know the difference."
He might at that , Hawat thought. That witch-mother of his is giving him the deep training, certainly. I wonder what her precious school thinks of that? Maybe that's why they sent the old Proctor here—to whip our dear Lady Jessica into line .
Hawat pulled up a chair across from Paul, sat down facing the door. He did it pointedly, leaned back and studied the room. It struck him as an odd place suddenly, a stranger-place with most of its hardware already gone off to Arrakis. A training table remained, and a fencing mirror with its crystal prisms quiescent, the target dummy beside it patched and padded, looking like an ancient foot soldier maimed and battered in the wars.
There stand...awat thought.
"Thufir, what're you thinking?" Paul asked.
Hawat looked at the boy. "I was thinking we'll all be out of here soon and likely never see the place again."
"Does that make you sad?"
"Sad? Nonsense! Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place." He glanced at the charts on the table. " And Arrakis is just another place."
"Did my father send you up to test me?"
Hawat scowled—the boy had such observing ways about him. He nodded. "You're thinking it'd have been nicer if he'd come up himself, but you must know how busy he is. He'll be along later."
"I've been studying about the storms on Arrakis."
"The storms. I see."
"They sound pretty bad."
"That's too cautious a word: bad . Those storms build up across six or seven thousand kilometers of flatlands, feed on anything that can give them a push—coriolis force, other storms, anything that has an ounce of energy in it. They can blow up to seven hundred kilometers an hour, loaded with everything loose that's in their way—sand, dust, everything. They can eat flesh off bones and etch the bones to slivers."
"Why don't they have weather control?"
"Arrakis has special problems, costs are higher, and there'd be maintenance and the like. The Guild wants a dreadful high price for satellite control and your father's House isn't one of the big rich ones, lad. You know that."
"Have you ever seen the Fremen?"
The lad's mind is darting all over today , Hawat thought.
"Like as not I have seen them," he said. "There's little to tell them from the folk of the graben and sink. They all wear those great flowing robes. And they stink to heaven in any closed space. It's from those suits they wear—call them 'stillsuits'—that reclaim the body's own water."
Paul swallowed, suddenly aware of the moisture in his mouth, remembering a dream of thirst. That people could want so for water they had to recycle their body moisture struck him with a feeling of desolation. "Water's precious there," he said.
Hawat nodded, thinking: Perhaps I'm doing it, getting across to him the importance of this planet as an enemy. It's madness to go in there without that caution in our minds .
Paul looked up at the skylight, aware that it had begun to rain. He saw the spreading wetness on the gray meta-glass. "Water," he said.
"You'll learn a great concern for water," Hawat said. "As the Duke's son you'll never want for it, but you'll see the pressures of thirst all around you."
Paul wet his lips with his tongue, thinking back to the day a week ago and the ordeal with the Reverend Mother. She, too, had said something about water starvation.
"You'll learn about the funeral plains," she'd said, "about the wilderness that is empty, the wasteland where nothing lives except the spice and the sandworms. You'll stain your eyepits to reduce the sun glare. Shelter will mean a hollow out of the wind and hidden from view. You'll ride upon your own two feet without 'thopter or groundcar or mount."
And Paul had been caught more by her tone—singsong and wavering—than by her words.
"When you live upon Arrakis," she had said, "khala, the land is empty. The moons will be your friends, the sun your enemy."
Paul had sensed his mother come up beside him away from her post guarding the door. She had looked at the Reverend Mother and asked: "Do you see no hope. Your Reverence?"
"Not for the father." And the old woman had waved Jessica to silence, looked down at Paul. "Grave this on your memory, lad: A world is supported by four things..." She held up four big-knuckled fingers. "....he learning of the wise, the justice of the great, the prayers of the righteous and the valor of the brave. But all of these are as nothing..." She closed her fingers into a fist. "....ithout a ruler who knows the art of ruling. Make that the science of your tradition!"
A week had passed since that day with the Reverend Mother. Her words were only now begi