Dune_ House Atreides - Brian Herbert [82]
Leto scowled. The fight instructor did not want to challenge his students, or risk more than the slightest injury. Thufir Hawat would have laughed out loud.
“Are you trying to show off for the young lady, Master Atreides? Could get you killed.”
Looking at Kailea, he saw her watching him, a bemused, teasing expression on her face. She quickly turned to the ridulian pad and scratched a few more ciphers. He flushed, felt the hotness. Zhaz reached over to grab a soft towel from a rack and tossed it to Leto.
“The session’s over. Distractions of this sort are not good for your training, and can lead to serious injury.” He turned to the Princess. “Lady Kailea, I request that you avoid the training floor whenever Leto Atreides is fighting our meks. Too many hormones in the way.” The guard captain could not cover his amusement. “Your presence could be more dangerous than any enemy.”
We must do a thing on Arrakis never before attempted for an entire planet. We must use man as a constructive ecological force—inserting adapted terraform life: a plant here, an animal there, a man in that place—to transform the water cycle, to build a new kind of landscape.
—Report from Imperial Planetologist PARDOT KYNES,
directed to Padishah EMPEROR ELROOD IX (unsent)
When the blood-spattered Fremen youths asked Pardot Kynes to accompany them, he didn’t know whether he was to be their guest or prisoner. Either way, the prospect intrigued him. Finally, he would have his chance to experience their mysterious culture firsthand.
One of the young men quickly and efficiently carried his injured companion over to Kynes’s small groundcar. The other Fremen reached into the back storage compartments and tossed out Kynes’s painstakingly collected geological samples to make more room. The Planetologist was too astonished to object; besides, he didn’t want to alienate these people—he wanted to learn more about them.
In moments, they had stuffed the bodies of the dead Harkonnen bravos into the bins, no doubt for some Fremen purpose. Perhaps a further ritual desecration of their enemies. He ruled out the unlikely possibility that the youths simply wished to bury the dead. Are they hiding the bodies for fear of reprisals? That, too, seemed wrong somehow, not in keeping with what little he had heard about Fremen. Or will these desert folk render them for resources, reclaiming the water in their tissues?
Then, without asking, without giving thanks or making any comment whatsoever, the first grim Fremen youth took the vehicle, its injured passenger, and the bodies, and drove off rapidly, spewing sand and dust in all directions. Kynes watched it go, along with his desert-survival kit and maps, including many he had prepared himself.
He found himself alone with the third young man—a guard, or a friend? If these Fremen meant to strand him without his supplies, he would be dead before long. Perhaps he could get his bearings and make it back to the village of Windsack on foot, but he had paid little attention to the locations of population centers during his recent wanderings. An inauspicious end for an Imperial Planetologist, he thought.
Or perhaps the young men he’d rescued wanted something else from him. Because of his own newly formed dreams for the future of Arrakis, Kynes desperately wanted to know the Fremen and their unorthodox ways. Clearly, these people were a valuable secret hidden from Imperial eyes. He thought they’d be sure to greet him with enthusiasm once he told them his ideas.
The remaining Fremen youth used a small patch-kit to repair a fabric rip on the leg of his stillsuit, then said, “Come with me.” He turned toward a sheer rock wall a short distance away. “Follow, or you’ll die out here.” He flashed an indigo-eyed glare over his shoulder. His face held a hard humor, an impish smile as he said, “Do you think the Harkonnens will take long to seek vengeance for their dead?”
Kynes hurried to him. “Wait! You haven’t told me your name.”
The young man looked at him strangely; he had the