When he was absolutely certain the traitor was dead, Gurney let him slide to the dusty floor. He peeled the krimskell fiber out of the deep indentation in the priest’s neck. Coiling the strand once more into a neat loop, he left silently through the back entrance. He had two more men to visit this night.
When she learned of the murders of her three supposedly loyal priests, Alia was outraged. Without being summoned, Jessica came into the Regent’s private office, ordered the amazon guards to wait outside, and sealed the door.
Seated at her writing table, Alia wanted to lash out at some target, any target. She had laid out a pattern of the new Dune Tarot cards, though the reading had not gone as well as she’d hoped. When her mother entered, Alia scattered the cards on the table, a panoply of ancient icons modified to have relevance to Dune—a Coriolis storm of sand, an Emperor resembling Paul, a goblet overflowing with spice, a sandworm instead of a dragon, and an eerie Blind Man, rather than Death.
Jessica withstood the brunt of her daughter’s buffeting rage, then spoke calmly. “Those priests are dead for good reason. Gurney Halleck killed them.”
That stopped Alia in midsentence. The willowy girl raised herself to her feet from behind the desk, the clutter of tarot cards before her. Her face turned pale, her eyes widening. “What did you just say to me, Mother?”
“Gurney only followed my orders. I saved your life.”
While her daughter listened, astonished and scowling, Jessica revealed the full details of the plot that would have assassinated both Alia and Duncan at their wedding ceremony. She extended the recordings, letting her daughter listen to the schemes of Isbar and the other two priests. There could be no denying their guilt. “It seems your priests would rather speak as surrogates for dead prophets than for live rulers.”
Alia sat down heavily, but after only a moment’s pause, her mood shifted once more. “So you’ve set spies on me, Mother? You don’t trust my security, so you have your own inside sources?” She jabbed a finger at the surreptitious recordings and her voice grew louder, more shrill. “How dare you secretly keep watch on me and my priests? Who among my—”
As Alia began to lose control of her temper, Jessica took a step closer and slapped her like a mother disciplining an unruly child. Calmly. Once, hard. “Stop this nonsense and think. I did it to protect you, not to weaken you. Not to spy on you. Sometimes it is beneficial to have an independent set of sources—as this proves.”
Alia rocked backward, shocked that her mother had struck her. Her lips tightened until they turned pale; the red mark stood out on her cheek. With great effort, she composed herself. “There are always plots, Mother. My own people would have uncovered this one in time—and I would much rather have publicly executed the traitors, rather than killing them in secret. The wedding ceremony would have been an obvious opportunity for someone to move against me, and I’ve already taken security measures—measures that even your ‘sources’ don’t know about.”
“I am not your enemy, nor am I your rival,” Jessica insisted. “Can you fault a mother for wanting to prevent harm to her daughter?”
Alia sighed and tossed her hair back behind her shoulders. “No, Mother, I cannot. By the same token, don’t fault me for saying that I will feel less . . . unsettled, when you return to Caladan.”
Even when I feel love, it is so complex that others may not recognize it as such. While I admit this freely, I do so only on these pages that are for me alone.
—LADY ALIA, private journals, intentionally written in a style to imitate Princess Irulan
When yet another of Bronso’s manifestos appeared only days before the wedding, Alia reacted swiftly and angrily, ordering the destruction of all copies. She demanded that anyone who was found distributing, or even carrying, the document be executed without further ado.
Deeply concerned and hoping to mitigate any damage, Jessica rushed to meet with her daughter in private. “Such bloodshed will backfire on you. In two days you and Duncan will be married—do you want the people to hate and fear you?”
After expressing her disgust at the situation, Alia relented. “All right, Mother—if only to appease you. Amputating the perpetrators’ hands should be harsh enough to get the message across, I suppose.” Her mother departed, not entirely satisfied.
Alia spent the rest of the day in the throne room, then left through a guarded doorway and pushed aside a Fremen wall hanging, just as she had seen her brother do many times. It was difficult to believe he was gone. She churned with a feeling of helplessness that only made her angry. Why had he left her with such a messy state of affairs? Did Paul expect her to act as the mother of his twin babies? Or perhaps Harah could do it? Or Princess Irulan? Or Jessica? How could the most important man in the known universe simply turn his back and . . . leave?
She wished her brother could be here now.
A terrible sensation of sadness and longing threatened to make her cry, but Alia had not shed tears for him, and doubted she ever would, especially on Dune. Yet she had loved Paul in life . . . and might love him even more now in death.
His presence was like a supergiant star whose gravitational pull affected everything that came within his sphere of influence. Paul shone so brightly that he blinded all other individual stars and constellations. The Emperor Muad’Dib, the Fremen messiah Lisan al-Gaib. He had overthrown an Emperor, conquered a galaxy, and used a Jihad to sweep aside the clutter of ten thousand years of history.
But without his charismatic personality dominating the daily workings of government and the Atreides family, Alia was beginning to see her brother from a different perspective, actually getting a chance to know and respect him in new ways.
After Chani’s water was mysteriously stolen—and no blackmail threats had ever emerged, thankfully—she had sealed off Paul’s private quarters in the Citadel, and allowed no one into these rooms. Alia liked to come here alone, just to think, imagining that he might still be there.
Paul-Muad’Dib had left a remarkable legacy, and she was its custodian as Regent and as his sister. That was not a duty she took lightly. Given time and the proper circumstances, Alia might stand one day as the equal to Muad’Dib in the histories. She already had chroniclers compiling records of her achievements, just in case.
Standing on stone floor tiles just inside the room’s entrance, she smelled the lingering odors of the former inhabitants, a bit of staleness in the air. Not so long ago, Paul and Chani had filled these rooms with their personalities, their dreams, their hopes, and secret words for each other. They had made love here and conceived the twins, Leto and Ghanima.
Oil murals painted on the walls depicted common Fremen scenes: a woman counting water rings for her hair, children out in the sand catching sandtrout, a robed Naib standing high on a promontory. Everything was exactly as the occupants had left it, Chani’s shoes and clothing were laid about casually as if she had expected to come back, just like any other day . . . but Paul’s clothes were neatly put away. Seeing this, Alia felt a chill, wondering if her brother had known he would not return.
Ultimately, Alia contemplated what to do with these private quarters. The hallowed place reached beyond her own feelings of devotion for her brother. She felt the sacredness in the still shadows of the sietch-like suite with its austere wall tapestries, the bed Paul and Chani had shared, the jasmium spice-coffee service that had once belonged to Jamis.
After long deliberation, Alia decided that she needed to share this place with others. But with whom? A place limited to herself and a few invited guests, only those who had been close to Paul, and to Chani? What about a museum that only Fremen could visit . . . or should it be something more accessible that drew pilgrims from all over the Imperium?
Valefor’s voice called to her from the other side of the closed door. “Regent Alia, your mother requests entrance.”
Alia pushed past the wall hanging, opened the door and saw her chief amazon guard standing next to Jessica. “Of course.”
Her mother entered, the first time she’d ever been inside these rooms. She said nothing about the crackdown, or Bronso’s writings, or any of their previous discussions as she walked around the chamber, sadly inspecting the extra stillsuits, the filmbooks that Paul or Chani had been reading, the holophotos. She wiped a finger across a tabletop, came away with a thin layer of dust; she took several deep, agitated breaths.
“This is not easy for you, is it, Mother?”
“No.”
In the sleeping quarters, Jessica paused to look at a detached wooden headboard that featured carvings of a leaping fish and thick brown waves . . . a piece that had been salvaged from the original Arrakeen Residence. That headboard had once concealed a hunter-seeker used in a Harkonnen attempt to kill Paul. Later, after becoming Emperor, Paul had kept it as a reminder never to let down his guard.
Moving on, Jessica paused to examine the contents of a table by a filterglass window, a pottery jar set all by itself as if in a place of special reverence. Her gaze flickered over to her daughter, asking an unspoken question.
“It’s the jar Chani sent me to fetch after Count Fenring stabbed Paul. It held the Water of Life that stopped his heartbeat long enough for us to control the bleeding.”
Jessica stared at the pottery. “After what we observed in the bazaar the other day, it heartens me to see authentic objects here. I think I should collect a few keepsakes of my own.”
Alia felt a rush of enthusiasm. “Yes, Mother. After our conversation, I instituted a close watch on the black marketeers with their phony relics. The memory of Muad’Dib should not be cheapened by counterfeits.” She smiled, hoping her mother would approve. “I have decided that the only way to prevent the fraud is to create a seal of approval, an official mark that reassures buyers—the faithful—that a particular object has been authenticated as the original. All additional profits shall go into the government treasury.”
Jessica’s brow furrowed. “But the demand will be far higher than the amount of items available.”
“Yes, and since copies will be made anyway, we will manufacture our own replicas and sell them as such, blessed by the Qizarate. Official facsimiles, rather than fakes. I’ll be on a consulting board, and I’d like you to act in that capacity as well.”
“Remember, I’m going back to Caladan soon. I’ve seen enough . . . scraps of Paul’s life.” She took another long look around and then slowly left. “Yes, I’ve seen enough.”
Afterward, Alia lifted a seashell fragment from the table and held the broken piece up against the light from the window. It was an object from Mother Earth, if Whitmore Bludd’s story about it was true. He’d given it to Paul as a token of allegiance from Archduke Armand Ecaz. But the seashell, like Bludd’s promise, was broken.
She put the artifact back down in exactly the same position. Then on impulse, she spun the piece around so that it faced the other way. Making her own mark. These objects were not really sacred, though she would continue to act as if they were. They were just . . . things.
Is a ghola capable of love? This was one of my questions at first, but not any longer. Duncan Idaho and I have an understanding.
—ALIA ATREIDES, private notes
Only hours before Alia and Duncan’s wedding would begin, three stern amazon guards escorted Lady Jessica out to a place of honor at the edge of the desert beyond the Citadel walls.
Stilgar was her companion as they moved through the festive crowds, both dressed in formal robes for the joyous occasion. She had intentionally kept her distance from the Fremen leader since returning from the secret ceremony to honor Chani. Keeping their silence, Jessica and the Naib took seats in the viewing stands overlooking the perfect expanse of desert. Hundreds of diligent workers had combed the dunes with fine rakes and used gentle blowers to erase footprints and remove any appearance of clutter—an extravagant and unnecessary waste of effort, Jessica thought, for the swift winds would erase any mark soon enough.
As the crowds gathered, Stilgar mused, “I was the one who first told Usul that your daughter should be wedded. It was a thing any man could see, at the time.” He narrowed his eyes and gazed out at the dunes where the ceremony would take place.
Jessica was glad to share her thoughts. “In some cultures, my daughter would be considered too young for marriage, but Alia is unlike any other girl. In her memories, she can recall all the pleasures of the flesh, all the joys and obligations of marriage. Even so, it’s always challenging for a mother to think of her daughter being married. It is a fundamental change in relationships, the crossing of a Rubicon.”
Stilgar raised his eyebrows. “Rubicon? The term is unfamiliar to me.”
“A river on ancient Terra. A famous military leader crossed it and forever changed the course of history.”
The Fremen Naib turned away, muttering, “I know nothing of rivers.”
Princess Irulan arrived with Harah and the two children, attended by another cluster of guards. Gurney moved along the stands, ever suspicious and alert. Jessica understood his reasons for concern. By removing Isbar and the traitorous priests, they had eliminated one plot against Alia . . . but that did not mean there weren’t others waiting to be sprung. Alia had mentioned her implementation of other unusual “security measures,” but Jessica did not know what her daughter had meant by that.
Grand spectacles seemed to invite tragedy: Rhombur’s death during the Jongleur performance in the Theater of Shards, the slaughter during Duke Leto’s wedding, the swarms of unleashed hunter-seekers during Muad’Dib’s Great Surrender ceremony, even Bronso’s recent disruption during Paul’s funeral. From the stands, she glanced at the twins, aware that Leto and Ghanima would spend their entire lives fearing an assassin’s blade, a conspirator’s explosion, a poisoner’s special ingredient, or some weapon no one had yet contemplated.
But a state wedding could not be held behind closed doors and drawn shutters. Duke Leto Atreides, and the Old Duke before him, had understood the power and necessity of diversions, of bravura. “Bread and circuses,” the ancient Romans had called it.
Her heart went out to Alia, wishing the young woman well on her wedding day. “She is my daughter,” she whispered fiercely to herself. Jessica prayed that this ceremony, unlike those others, would take place without disruption or disaster, and that Alia and Duncan could actually be happy together.
It was time for that in the Atreides family.
Out of view, Alia stood naked on the balcony of a palace annex at the far edge of the city. The sun was setting on the horizon, throwing long shadows across the rock escarpments. On the sands below, young Fremen women whirled and chanted, their hair flying loose and free. The traditional marriage dances were under way.
Behind her, Duncan Idaho lay on the bed they had recently begun to share. She and Duncan had just made love, a passionate release of their anxious energies as they waited, and waited, for the time of the ceremony. He was her first physical lover, though she remembered plenty of others in her deep layers of memories.
All day long, crowds of onlookers had gathered at the edge of the city and spilled out onto the sands. Weaving their way through the throngs, vendors hawked memorabilia bearing the faces of the bride and groom, and Alia’s government would receive its percentage of it all.
A number of viewing stands had been erected for the visiting dignitaries of various Houses, CHOAM, the Landsraad, the Spacing Guild, the Bene Gesserit, and the Qizarate. Each important personage would receive his own memorabilia, inscribed and authenticated.
As both the sister of Muad’Dib and Regent of the Imperium, Alia had designed her wedding to combine Fremen and Imperial elements in a hybrid ceremony. She and Duncan had gone over the details that would combine vows from both traditions. Far out on the dunes, the two of them would be wed under the double moonlight—at least, that was what the people would see, and hear. Their preparations would make the illusion perfect.
To the left of the bed stood a blackplaz cubicle with a seale
d door—one of the new technologies that the Ixian Confederation had recently given her, hoping to buy their way back into her good graces. Because of the usual death threats that hovered around her, Alia was increasingly resorting to technological security measures.
Her mother and Gurney had thwarted Isbar’s plot to kill them during the wedding. Alia knew of the deadly conspiracies that had sprung up around Paul. And Irulan had once told her stories about the countless plots, conspiracies, and assassination attempts Shaddam IV had faced on Kaitain. What is it about human beings that they invariably develop hatred toward their leaders?
Just yesterday, Qizara security had seized a lunatic in the streets shouting that the wedding was “an unholy alliance of Bene Gesserit Abomination and Tleilaxu ghola.” Under interrogation, the man had implicated others, and provided credible evidence that there were deeper plots afoot against Alia and Duncan. But the man himself had been an inept fool, and had never posed much of a threat.
She worried more about the quiet, well-concealed plots, conspirators who were not so foolish as to shout out their anger in the streets of Arrakeen. She would have liked to blame all the threats on Bronso of Ix, but she had never been his target, though many others had resentments against her. For her purposes, however, Bronso provided a convenient focal point, and she could use his reputation to turn the tables and incite a backlash against critics of the regime. She had already taken steps to exploit the situation, secretly writing her own counterfeit “manifesto” that would be released immediately after the wedding, under Bronso’s name.
Adaptation was a Bene Gesserit strength, one to which she had been born. Her brother had changed the human race forever, but Alia would take her place in history as well, since Paul had left her to pick up the pieces and arrange them as she saw fit.
The Winds of Dune Page 22
