Dune_ House Atreides - Brian Herbert [83]
Kynes blinked. “Well, I did just save your life and the lives of your companions. Doesn’t that count for something among your people? It does in most societies.”
The young man seemed startled, then resigned. “You are right. You have forged a water bond between us. I am called Turok. Now we must go.”
Water bond? Kynes suppressed his questions and trailed after his companion.
In his well-worn stillsuit, Turok scrambled over the rocks toward the vertical cliff. Kynes trudged beside fallen boulders, slipping on loose footing. Only as they approached did the Planetologist notice a discontinuity in the strata, a seam that split the old uplifted rock, forming a fissure camouflaged by dust and muted colors.
The Fremen slipped inside, penetrating the shadows with the speed of a desert lizard. Curious and anxious not to become lost, Kynes followed, moving quickly. He hoped he would get a chance to meet more of the Fremen and learn about them. He didn’t waste time considering that Turok might be leading him into a trap. What would be the point? The young man could easily have killed him out in the open.
Turok stopped in the cool shade, giving Kynes a moment to catch up. He pointed toward specific places on the wall near him. “There, there—and there.” Without waiting to see if his charge understood, the youth stepped in each indicated spot, near-invisible handholds and footholds. The young man slithered up the cliff, and Kynes did his best to climb after. Turok seemed to be playing a game with him, testing him somehow.
But the Planetologist surprised him. He was no water-fat bureaucrat, no mere bumbler into places where he didn’t belong. As a wanderer on some of the harshest worlds the Imperium had to offer, he was in good shape.
Kynes kept pace with the youth, climbing up behind him, using the tips of his fingers to haul his body higher. Moments after the Fremen boy stopped and squatted on a narrow ledge, Kynes sat beside him, trying not to pant.
“Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth,” Turok said. “Your filters are more efficient that way.” He nodded in faint admiration. “I think you might make it all the way to the sietch.”
“What’s a sietch?” Kynes asked. He vaguely recognized the ancient Chakobsa language, but had not studied archaeology or phonetics. He had always found it irrelevant to his scientific study.
“A secret place to retreat in safety—it’s where my people live.”
“You mean it’s your home?”
“The desert is our home.”
“I’m eager to talk with your people,” Kynes said, then continued, unable to contain his enthusiasm. “I’ve formed some opinions of this world and have developed a plan that might interest you, that might interest all the inhabitants of Arrakis.”
“Dune,” the Fremen youth said. “Only the Imperials and the Harkonnens call this place Arrakis.”
“All right,” Kynes said. “Dune, then.”
Deep in the rocks ahead of them waited a grizzled old Fremen with only one eye, his useless left socket covered by a puckered prune of leathered eyelid. Naib of Red Wall Sietch, Heinar had also lost two fingers in a crysknife duel in his younger days. But he had survived, and his opponents had not.
Heinar had proven to be a stern but competent leader of his people. Over the years, his sietch had prospered, the population had not decreased, and their hidden stockpiles of water grew with every cycle of the moons.
In the infirmary cave, two old women tended foolish Stilgar, the injured youth who had been brought in by groundcar only moments ago. The old women checked the medical dressing that had been applied by the outsider, and augmented it with some of their own medicinals. The crones conferred with each other, then both nodded at the sietch leader.
“Stilgar will live, Heinar,” one old woman said. “This would have been a mortal wound, had it not been tended immediately. The stranger saved him.”
“The stranger