That responsibility came on them abruptly in 10180 when Falra was injured in a rockfall and died before help could reach her. Because Liet-Kynes was in-sietch so seldom, and because it was essential to the Fremen's plan that his connection with them not attract unwanted attention, the girl Chani was made a part of Stilgar's household at once. Misra and Tharthar, their own children nearly grown, took the child immediately to their hearts — as did Stilgar's third wife, Kalifi, whom he married in 10185 (after defending his burda against her former mate, Jesal, in 10184).
Like the rest of his people, Stilgar greeted the transfer of the Arrakis fief to House Atreides (10190) with cautious optimism. True, the new rulers were off-worlders, like the Harkonnen beasts; but heartening stories of the House's character had preceded their arrival. The Fremen decided to wait to see if the tales had any truth to them before they judged the newcomers.
As far as Stilgar was concerned, the first proof came in the person of Duncan Idaho, Swordmaster for Duke Leto Atreides. Idaho had been sent to Sietch Tabr as Leto's representative, to make contact with the Fremen and to assure them that the abuses suffered during the Harkonnen reign would now be ended. During his stay in-sietch, Idaho had adopted Fremen customs without question and had conducted himself honorably. After he had left to return to his Duke, the Fremen heard about a plot to send Harkonnen mercenaries disguised as desert people against the Atreides; because of the favorable impression Idaho had made, Stilgar dispatched a courier with a warning, following shortly after with a small band of men intent on seeing how the new soldiers would measure up as warriors.
The courier was waylaid en route by the pseudo-Fremen and badly wounded. The Harkonnens attacked Idaho and his men but were rebuffed, with many being killed and the survivors taken prisoner. Idaho found the courier and was taking him to the House medics when the man died. He took the body back to Atreides headquarters, intending to bury him, surprised that Stilgar and his men — who had joined him for the last part of the battle — had not asked that the corpse (containing water of their tribe) be given them.
Stilgar's reasons for accompanying Idaho were threefold: he wished to learn the manner of man whom Idaho served so loyally; he was curious about how the Atreides would treat the body of the dead courier, Turok (the Harkonnens, it was known, showed no respect to Fremen dead, not even to taking their water); and, most important, he was compelled to see what Idaho intended to do with Turok's crysknife, having surprised the dying Fremen in the act of throwing it away.
On all counts, the naib was satisfied. After he had forbidden Idaho to unsheath the crysknife before the other Atreides men (thereby "defiling," in Stilgar's eyes, an "honorable blade"), he found that Duke Leto not only refused to be provoked by the encroachment on his authority, but enforced the command. When the Duke added that it was an Atreides custom always to pay their debts and inquired whether there were any other way to honor the man who had died in his service, Stilgar was enough impressed by the new ruler's behavior to favor him with a small fai, or water tribute: he spat on the tabletop before Leto. The angry reaction of the Atreides servitors — who did not realize how Stilgar had honored Leto — was checked when Idaho reminded them of how precious water was to a Fremen, thanked Stilgar for his gift, and repeated the gesture himself.
Stilgar then requested that Idaho seek release from his service to the Duke and join his tribe. Leto, desperately needing an emissary to the desert folk, offered a dual allegiance, which Stilgar accepted. Turok's water would be Atreides water in fair exchange for the water of Duncan Idaho, and Stilgar left the corpse with the Atreides, satisfied that it would be treated with respect and its spirit released, and took Idaho back to the desert with him.
In 10191, following the Harkonnen/Sardaukar attack on the Atreides, Stilgar received an urgent command from Liet-Kynes. The Duke was dead and his concubine, Lady Jessica, had escaped with their son Paul into the desert; Duncan Idaho — who had returned to his Duke at the first sign of trouble — had given his life as part of the price for that escape. (Liet-Kynes's life would be another part, although Stilgar could not have known it at the time). Stilgar was to take a band out from Sietch Tabr and find them.
True Fremen that he was, Liet-Kynes did not demand that Stilgar save both mother and son. Should one or both of the pair not seem fit to survive among the Fremen, it was left to Stilgar to order action appropriate to the good of the tribe. However the decision went, the demands of honor had been met by the attempt.
From his first encounter with Jessica and Paul, Stilgar felt himself being pulled into a world larger than the one he knew, an environment where legend and reality were inseparably mixed. And as events proceeded — the acceptance of the strangers at Sietch Tabr, Paul's relentless progress toward deification, the formation of the Fedaykin, the death commandos who called themselves "the fighters of Muad’Dib" — Stilgar felt the old Fremen ways spilling like sand faster and faster from beneath his feet.
A drastic change was inevitable. It came in 10193, when the young men who had been raiding the Harkonnen sinks with Muad'Dib would no longer be put off and insisted on his challenging Stilgar for his burda. It was a measure of their confidence in their mahdi ("The One Who Will Lead Us to Paradise") that the young bloods were so eager to pit him against their ruling naib. Stilgar would not be an easy man for any challenger to take, as a description of him from this period indicates:
Stilgar was a tall man — well over two meters — and appeared to tower over his brethren. A history of success in combat, some of it costly, was evidenced by scars old and new which covered much of his body. He possessed in large measure the mercurial temperament characteristic of Fremen: he could turn from consoling an injured child as tenderly as any woman in his sietch, to ruthlessly hunting an enemy's blood with his crysknife without a visible wrench. And he was equally skilled at both.3
The young Atreides, Lady Jessica and Stilgar had planned against the moment such an encounter would be forced. Instead of challenging Stilgar, Paul declared himself ruling Duke of Arrakis and swore the Naib — with the crowd of young men suddenly converted from agitators to witnesses — into his service as liege man and ruler of Sietch Tabr in his Duke's name.
The trio's plan was a success: the new Duke had a unified troop and the service of a wily and experienced commander, while Stilgar retained his burda and his loyalty to Muad'Dib. It was a combination that proved devastating shortly thereafter, when the Fremen met and defeated Harkonnen and Sardaukar troops in the final battle for Arrakis, culminating in Shaddam IV's abdication.
One of the new emperor's first acts was Stilgar's appointment as Planetary Governor of Arrakis. The title altered the Naib's duties very little, at least in kind; Stilgar left the government of the individual sietches to their own naibs and continued to work with Muad'Dib as Warmaster and advisor. Except for those times when his services were needed in Arrakeen, Stilgar preferred to remain at Sietch Tabr with his wives (now numbered four, since Harah, Muad'Dib's servant for his first year with the Fremen, had joined the Naib's household).
There were, of course, some things demanded of an Imperial servant which Stilgar would never have had to face in the desert. Court intrigues, interplanetary diplomacy, and the like occupied much of his time — more than he cared for — and his favorite tasks were usually of a military nature. (The emperor dispatched him at times to the more troublesome or sensitive spots on the jihad.) Despite his occasional longings for simpler times, however, Stilgar managed to adapt to his new role and to carry out his duties with a minimum of personal trauma for the first twelve years of Atreides's reign.
In 10209, the background against which Stilgar had fixed himself was shattered past repair. Following the births of Leto II and Ghanima, and Chani's death, Paul Muad'Dib Atreides — twice blinded, first by a stoneburner and then by a shift in his prescient vision — walked into the desert, leaving Stilgar as guardian of the children and Alia as their Regent. Under Alia's orders, the Naib's first duty was to exec
ute the group of traitors who had helped to bring about Muad'Dib's downfall, the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam, once the Corrino Emperor's Truthsayer, among them.
The decade Stilgar spent as guardian aged him severely. Misra died of a sudden fever in 10211, ending a companionship that had lasted more than half a century. (At the ceremony to release her spirit, Stilgar was said to have "given water to the dead"; it was the one time in his entire life the old naib was seen to weep.) The Regency was turbulent, marked by rebellions major and minor. Worst of all was the Regent's steady progression into Abomination, as Alia succumbed to the control of an ancestral personality stronger than herself.
All the threads in the skein were drawn together in 10219. Young Leto was assumed dead, Ghanima and Irulan were endangered by Alia's possession, and the unknown element of a Bene Gesserit-trained Corrino prince was entering the scene. Amid all this, Stilgar found himself confronted by Alia's consort, the original ghola of Duncan Idaho. Idaho urged him to take Irulan and Ghanima and flee to the desert with them, arguing that Alia's condition negated Stilgar's oath of fealty to her. The Naib listened, but declined to rebel against the woman he acknowledged as his rightful liege.
Seeing that argument would never succeed against the stubborn Fremen, Idaho resorted to desperate measures: he provoked Stilgar to a murderous rage and let the other man kill him without raising a hand in his own defense. Stilgar, after his passion dissipated, realized the enormity of what he had done; he gathered his household, as many of his fellows as were willing to travel with him, and the Atreides women Idaho had urged him to protect, and decamped to the safety of the desert.
Alia seat Buer Agarves to negotiate with Stilgar for his pardon, demanding the return of Ghanima as its price. Stilgar refused, as Alia had anticipated he would, but it made no difference; the Regent had also sent a troop of soldiers to attack Stilgar's camp, capture him along with Irulan and Ghanima and scatter the remainder of his people.
Her trap worked perfectly. The one satisfaction Stilgar took with him to the dungeons beneath Alia's Temple was that he had managed to kill the treacherous Agarves. Even this vengeance was scant consolation, however, as the Naib rightly assumed that Alia had chosen her emissary with just such a fate in mind.
Chained and isolated, Stilgar did not witness the final confrontation between Leto II and his aunt. Nor was he forced to watch as Muad'Dib, now known as The Preacher, died. He first glimpsed the new order when Leto freed him and Irulan by tearing the door to their dungeon off its hinges and ripping their chains out of the walls. It was an impressive first look.
In the days that followed, Stilgar watched with the other naibs as the new emperor demonstrated his powers. The rest were awed and terrified, and quick to pay homage to their new ruler; Stilgar, on the other hand, mourned for Muad'Dib's son even as he honored him. What horrors could the child have seen in his oracular visions that made such a terrible transformation seem his duty?
He mourned for his people as well. Though he would not live to see it, Stilgar had heard Leto's description of the changes in store for Arrakis, and he wanted no part of that new world. No worms? No spice? No endless desert against which to pit body and mind, knowing that the outcome of such a battle could only be determined by Shai-Hulud in the end? The old life, the Fremen life, would come to an end.
It was a subdued and tired naib who returned to Sietch Tabr. In less frightful times, one of the younger men of the sietch would undoubtedly have challenged Stilgar and won; but much of the heart had gone out of the desert folk, and the challenge never came.
Following Stilgar's death in 10228, Leto forbade the men of the sietch to slay one another for his burda. Instead, he appointed one of their number, a pliable young man named Mirat, as leader. That the Fremen acquiesced would have proven to the old naib that his worst fears were justified.
C.W.
NOTES
1The case for such a challenge could be made only if Liet-Kynes was willing to claim that Stilgar had caused intentional harm to his tribe by killing Forad.
2Stilgar ben Fifrawi, The Stilgar Chronicle, trans. Mityau Gwulador, Arrakis Studies 5 (Grumman: United Worlds), p. 104.
3Princess Irulan Atreides-Corrino, Conversations with Muad'Dib, Lib. Conf. Temp. Series 346, p. 149.
Further references: ATREIDES, LETO I AND II; ATREIDES, PAUL; FREMEN.
STILLSUIT
The Fremen garment which allowed desert survival by cooling the wearer and by preventing water loss. These slick, gray bodysuits were the second skins of Fremen — and of all those with good sense who had occasion to venture into the Arrakeen desert. An unprotected human, without access to a staggeringly large water supply, could last no more than a day on the sands; one wearing a stillsuit of Fremen manufacture, however, could keep water loss under fifteen milliliters per day. The less efficient versions of the suits produced in village factories by the Arrakeen peons were greatly inferior and offered no such level of protection.
Stillsuits were an invention-of-necessity developed after the Zensunni nomads were transported to Arrakis. Not even on Ishia, an earlier stop in the Zensunni's migrations, had water conservation been so essential that permitting any bodily moisture to escape could be fatal. Practices which had made life possible on that arid planet (though far less arid than Arrakis) were simply too inefficient for the new environment, and the stillsuit was one of the first adaptations made.
The fabric itself made the suits effective. Its invention was a tribute to the Fremen's ability to "cross-use" technology. The Zensunni had been used as laborers of many different types during their generations of wandering and had retained the knowledge of the various kinds of devices and machinery they had operated. One such machine, a cryogenic separator, had been used on a number of worlds for drawing oxygen and other gases from a planet's atmosphere. The Fremen remembered the technique and applied it to the manufacture of stillcloth.
The fabric, a microsandwich in its completed form, was produced in layers. The innermost layer consisted of a porous membrane allowing the free passage of perspiration, exhaled moisture, and other bodily secretions; it was also an efficient insulation, protecting the suit's wearer from evaporative chill.
The next two layers accomplished the separation of reusable water. A complex system of fine tubes permeated the fabric. They were equipped with checkvalves at various points to keep the system's contents from reversing directions. The tubes contained air at the beginning of the suit's cycle; the air pressure built up by the pumping action of the wearer's breathing and by heel pumps located on the soles of the suit. At a pre-set pressure (which varied with the atmospheric conditions under which the suit was worn), the air was released into a holding chamber in the suit's hood.
This sudden release cooled the air by the Joule-Thompson effect, and the cooled air was drawn back into the system and again run through the suit, dropping the temperature of the separating layers. The build-up, release, return cycle would continue until the temperature dropped sufficiently to liquify ammonia produced when the suit's thigh-pads filtered the wearer's urine. Once the ammonia had been liquified, the air was automatically retained in the hood chamber and the ammonia was pumped into the tubing system, keeping the temperature down until it was converted back to a gas by acquired heat, at which point the air cycle was triggered again.
Passing through this chilled area returned the trapped water vapor, protected from ammonia contamination by the airtight nature of the tubing system, to liquid form. This water was forced through the separating layers by both pumping pressure and osmosis and was subsequently trapped in the fourth layer. Here another tubing system routed the reclaimed water (from which salt precipitators, also located in the second and third layers, had removed most of the salinity) to the suit's catchpocket. Any radiated body heat which survived the passage through the separating layers then passed through the fifth, outermost layer along with unreclaimed gases.
The stillsuit was considered an unattractive but essential g
arment by most non-Fremen; its manufacture brought a steady income to a number of sietch factories. On Arrakis any man who valued his life would not venture into the desert without a stillsuit of Fremen manufacture, well maintained; its importance can be seen not only in the survival of the Fremen themselves, but in the death rate among Harkonnen servitors, to whom the tribes adamantly refused to sell their wares.
After Paul Muad'Dib Atreides became emperor, an interesting phenomenon took place. Recognizing that the true source of the emperor's power lay in his Fremen, and wishing to advance themselves at Court, some sycophants adopted a custom of wearing stillsuits beneath their courtier's clothing. That these individuals had taken to wearing the garments where they were not needed amused the emperor and his Fedaykin tremendously. When it was discovered that all of the fashionable stillsuits were non-functional replicas, their wearers were made the objects of such derision that they abandoned the practice.
The fashion was revived, however, during the rule of Leto II: the stillsuits worn by his museum Fremen were also useless. The irony did not escape the God Emperor, and a number of his Journal entries refer to the Museum Fremen as "sand dandies, at whose dress a true Fremen would laugh until no laughter remained." Leto kept a small number of stillsuits, manufactured in the old style, at his Citadel, for use by persons he wished to accompany him into the Sareer.
C.W.
Further references: FREMEN; STILLTENT; Jarret Oslo, Fremen: Lives and Legends (Salusa Secundus: Morgan and Sharak).
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