Dune_ House Atreides - Brian Herbert [153]
For hours back in the caves, other Fremen wives had braided Frieth’s hair with her metal water rings, together with those belonging to her future husband, to symbolize the commingling of their existence. Many months ago, the sietch had taken all of the supplies from Kynes’s groundcar and added his containers of water to the main stores. Once he had been accepted among them, he received payment in water rings for what he had contributed, and Kynes thus entered the community as a relatively wealthy man.
As Frieth looked at her betrothed, Kynes realized for the first time how beautiful and desirable she was—and then chastised himself for not having noticed before. Now the unmarried Fremen women rushed out onto the dunefield, their long, unbound hair flying in the night breeze. Kynes watched as they began the traditional wedding dance and chant.
Rarely did members of the sietch explain their customs to him, where the rituals had come from, or what they signified. To the Fremen, everything simply was. Long in the past, ways of life had been developed out of necessity during the Zensunni wanderings from planet to planet, and the ways had remained unchanged ever since. No one here bothered to question them, so why should Kynes? Besides, if he truly was the prophet they considered him to be, then he should understand such things intuitively.
He could easily decipher the custom of binding water rings into the braid of the woman to be married, while the unbetrothed daughters kept their hair loose and free. The troupe of unmarried women flitted across the sands in their bare feet, their footsteps floating. Some were mere girls, while others had ripened to full marriageable age. The dancers whipped and whirled, spinning about so that their hair streamed in all directions like halos around their heads.
Symbolic of a desert sandstorm, he thought. Coriolis whirlwinds. From his studies he knew that such winds could exceed eight hundred kilometers per hour, bearing dust and sand particles with enough force to scour the flesh off a man’s bones.
With sudden concern Kynes looked up. To his relief, the sky of the desert night was clear and scattered with stars; a precursor fog of dust would be carried up in advance of any storm. The Fremen spotters would see impending weather with sufficient warning to take immediate precautions.
The young girls’ dancing and chanting continued. Kynes stood beside his wife-to-be, but he looked up at the twin moons, thinking of their tidal effects, how the gentle flexings of gravity might have affected the geology and climate of this world. Perhaps deep core soundings would tell him more of what he needed to know. . . .
In future months, he wished to take extensive samples from the ice cap at the northern pole. By measuring the strata and analyzing isotopic content, Kynes would be able to draw a precise weather history of Arrakis. He could map the heating and melting cycles, as well as ancient precipitation patterns, using this information to determine where all the water must have gone.
So far this planet’s aridity made no sense. Could a world’s supply of water somehow be hydrated into rock layers beneath the sands, locking it into the planetary crust itself? An astronomical impact? Volcanic explosions? None of the options seemed viable.
The complex marriage dance finished, and the one-eyed Naib came forward with the old Sayyadina. The holy woman looked at the wedding couple and fixed Kynes with the gaze of her eyes, so dark in the moonlight that they resembled the predatory orbs of a raven: the total blue-within-blue of spice addiction.
After eating Fremen food for months, each taste laced with the richness of melange, Kynes had looked in a reflecting glass one morning and noticed that the whites of his own eyes had begun to take on a sky-blue tinge. The change startled him.
Still, he did feel more alive, his mind sharper and his body suffused with energy. Some of this could be a consequence of the enthusiasm for his research activities, but he knew the spice must also have something to