Chapter Text
There is a last time. It isn’t the last time she holds him, or the last time they speak to each other, or the last time they lie down to sleep side by side. But there is the moment that, later, she will look back on and think of as the last time.
Her heart is in her throat as they speed toward Sietch Tabr on wormback. She is not a praying woman, but she’s praying to Shai-Hulud now, silently begging the worm at the end of her maker hooks to go faster, faster, faster as the first rays of the morning sun slice over the horizon.
She has been able to identify every Harkonnen weapon by sound since she was a child. And the deep crackling booms that had woken her before dawn are a sound she’s never heard before.
The bombs had roused the whole camp, drawing everyone to the top of the dune in frozen horror. They were a terrible drumbeat as everyone scrambled to pack. Only as they set a thumper had there been one final, massive blast she could feel in her chest, and then silence. No one had found the silence comforting.
By the time they’re halfway there, the smoke is visible, a billowing black column on the horizon. Usul is clinging to the worm’s back next to her, and between the scarf and the goggles she can’t see any of his face, but she can read fear in every line of his body.
When they crest the next dune, the second smoke cloud is visible, further in the distance to the southwest. “That’s Sietch Khadra,” Shi yells over the wind from her other side.
Then they round the low line of bluffs and she can see it. The dome of the sietch rock pitted and blackened and scarred, smoke pouring from four massive craters. No. Holes. Holes punched deep into the surface of the rock. They couldn’t have— It isn’t possible—
They had never feared the sietches being bombed. Not because the Harkonnens wouldn’t; of course they would if they could. But because there were no bombs that could penetrate that deep into the rock. Even the lascannons on the big ships had a limit to how far they could reach.
They dismount and scramble up the low rock hills that surround the sietch. From the top of the hills it’s clear that the smoke is coming from fires inside the sietch, pouring out through holes that shouldn’t be there.
“What the hell did that?” Shi says, voicing what they’re all thinking. “Atomics?”
“Not atomics.” It’s the scarfless Atreides warmaster, looking a bit sand-blasted after traveling harnessed to the pack netting like a child on his first worm ride. She doesn’t think he understands much Chakobsa, but they have no word other than the Galach for atomics. “There’d be nothing left,” he says, with a casual certainty that makes her shudder. “It’s something new, though.”
Now that they are this close, she can see that there are bodies. There are bodies outside.
As soon as children learn to walk they get the lesson drilled into them: if the sietch is under attack, you run inward and down. Into the safe, strong heart of the rock, defended by layer after layer of siege doors as thick as a man’s arm is long. Prepared with emergency reserves of food and water, and as a last desperate option, the evacuation tunnel under the grand assembly hall that leads out, all the way to the fallback caves in the mountains. Inside is safety and survival; outside is the enemy, the desert, and death.
If people had fled outward, that means they’d had no other choice. That means the sietch had already been breached.
She looks over at Usul. He’s pulled down his scarf and goggles, and his face is white. He’s clenching his jaw, against rage or nausea or terror, she can’t tell. “We gotta get down there,” he says, and starts scrambling down the rock.
The Cave of Birds is piled too full of nightmares to breathe. Air too full of screaming and wailing, ground too full of the mourning and the wounded and the dead, and more of all of them being brought out of the sietch by the minute. People bloodied and burnt, people pulled out of rubble with dust-covered skin and shock-glazed eyes.
She gathers only snippets of what’s happened. Fire that raced through hallways faster than people could run, setting bedding and cooking oil and humans ablaze in its wake. Explosions powerful enough to shake the deep levels of the sietch and collapse parts of the upper passageways on top of each other. People who weren’t close to the heart of the fire but were killed by the blast wave anyway, corpses that look deceptively normal except for the blood from burst eardrums, the pink foam caked around their mouths as they struggled to breath their last breaths through internal injuries.
Usul is close by her side as they pick their way through the carnage, stepping carefully through horror upon horror. Everywhere they go, people reach for him. “Mahdi, what do we do?” “Muad’Dib, tell me you see our victory…” Mahdi. Muad’Dib. Mahdi. Lisan al-Gaib. Lead us. Help us. Save us. She can see the line of his jaw getting tighter and tighter. She takes his hand and squeezes.
“I have to find my family.” She can hear her own voice come out calm and steady even as fear claws at the back of her throat. (Push that down; focus on the mission. You know how to do that.) Their yalis are in the deep levels of the sietch. They must have gotten out. She cannot consider any other possibility.
“Yeah, let’s do that,” Usul says, looking relieved, maybe, to have a concrete goal.
The first neighbor she finds, Muna from down the hall, doesn’t know anything. “I was two levels up, with my brother’s family. There was no time, we just had to run.” She’s rocking a glassy-eyed little boy that Chani vaguely recognizes as Muna’s nephew, although she can’t remember his name. None of Muna’s own children, or her wife, are around her in the cave, and she can’t bring herself to ask about them. “Some people went to the fallback caves,” Muna offers. “They could be there.”
The second neighbor she finds is sitting with his knees drawn up against his chest and just stares as her blankly when she tries to ask a question.
She finds Yasmin next, who works with Belil in the kitchens and comes over frequently to drink spice coffee and lose to Hala at dice games. Yasmin is sitting with her mother, holding a scarf over a bleeding gash on the older woman’s forehead. “I saw Ifri near the evacuation tunnel,” she says. “I think they got out.”
Ifri would have had the same bone-deep war instincts that she did, right? She would have known something was terribly wrong and made them evacuate as soon as possible. Right?
Usul has barely spoken since they entered the cave. His grip on her hand is bruising and she’s grateful for it. Something to ground her. “They’ll be there,” he says quietly. “They’ll be at the fallback caves.” For one selfish moment, she wishes he really could see the future, so he could at least tell her if her family is still alive.
“You two,” she hears as they’re working their way back to the front of the cave. It’s Riyyah, the pragmatic, gray-haired chief hydrologist. She waves them toward the entrance of the cave. Her right hand is wrapped in burn cloth up to the wrist. “We need anyone with a stillsuit outside.”
Outside the cave, the sun is fully up now. The air is dead still, not a breeze to be found. It will be blazing hot soon.
“Most of the water reserves are compromised, or unreachable,” Riyyah says as she leads them across the flat plain in the direction of the sietch. Her voice is low, and Chani wonders how many people know this. Riyyah nods her head toward the cave. “Hardly anyone in there has a stillsuit. We need the water from the bodies before they get too stiff to move.”
The bodies strewn across the sand outside the sietch, and the dead that people have been bringing out of the wreckage. That is what Riyyah means. She sneaks a glance at Usul, but he’s gone stone-faced and silent. Whatever he’s thinking doesn’t show.
It’s just bodies. She’s dealt with draining bodies plenty. (Enemy soldiers; her own comrades who chose this and knew the risks; fighters who invoked the amtal challenge and accepted death as a possibility. Not civilians. Not children.) It cannot be that different.
“Work in pairs,” Riyyah says. “You’ll need to flip some of them over to get a line in, and that takes two people.”
Under a makeshift shade structure, her operation is already underway. Fedaykin, scouts and guards, anyone who’d had enough time and presence of mind to grab their stillsuit before fleeing the sietch, handing off full water bladders for members of the hydrology team to empty carefully into whatever storage containers they’ve been able to salvage.
Riyyah hands them a water kit, and then she takes a small tin of ginger tablets out of her pocket and holds it out. “Take a couple of these and suck on them. It’ll help with the nausea.”
They get dispatched to the southern entrance. When they round the corner of the rock she hears Usul make a quiet oh of horror.
There are a lot of bodies here, and all of them have been shot. The ground is littered with the heavy slugs the gunbirds fire. All these people had run out of the sietch in desperation and straight into gunfire.
She looks over at Usul and he looks like he’s fighting down the urge to be sick. She hands him a ginger tablet. “Let’s just… Just focus on the water, okay,” she says, as if she is any more prepared for this than he is. “Don’t look at the faces.”
There is nothing to do but begin their grim work, scarves wrapped tight over their faces. It’s easier to take water from someone lying on their back; there are more options for where to put the water line; which means most of the bodies have to be flipped over. She tries her best not to look at faces and exit wounds.
These people haven’t been dead long enough to smell like rot, but there’s a lot of blood, and every time they have to move someone the coppery reek of it hits her. Soon her gloves are scarlet with it, the shins of her stillsuit dark from kneeling in blood-caked sand. It’s harder to take someone’s water once the fluid has started pooling on whatever side of their body is touching the ground, and more than once she has to try multiple times to get the water line in a spot that will pull anything.
The worst are the families. Parents who had thrown themselves on top of their children to shield them, even though it didn’t matter. Those rounds will go straight through a person and out the other side.
When they gently roll a woman onto her back and there’s a kid underneath her body that looks too much like Munir she has to stop. “Fuck, I can’t—” she hisses, turning away on her hands and knees, head bowed as she tries to control the urge to puke.
It’s not Munir. (He’s safe, with the rest of her family at the fallback caves.) She knows it isn’t. (They’ll be at the fallback caves.) But his eyes were open and staring and for a second she had thought—
Usul is there, beside her, peeling his gore-streaked glove off to put a hand on her shoulder. “I can’t,” she breathes, focusing all her energy on keeping the tears from flowing because she can’t waste water now—
“It’s okay,” he says softly. “It’s okay, I’ll do it.” He gives her shoulder a squeeze, but then he puts his glove back on, because they have to keep moving.
She stays there, on her hands and knees, willing herself not to cry or vomit or pass out. Focuses on her breathing, like her father taught her to do when she was scared. In for a count of four, hold for two, out for a count of six. From somewhere behind her, she can hear him whispering the death chant. To the well, our water we return.
She loses track of how long they work. Eventually, someone comes to order them back into the shade of the cave. The sun’s too high. She has no idea what will happen to the rest of the bodies and she can’t make herself think about it.
She’s dizzy when she stands up. She hasn’t been drinking enough. The thought of putting anything in her stomach, even water, makes her want to hurl. She forces herself to take small sips from her stillsuit tube anyway.
In the cave, someone makes her sit. Somewhere, Usul’s voice is telling her to keep drinking. Someone puts food in front of her, a bit of spice bread and a dried yucca cake, but she can’t make herself eat it.
There’s commotion by the cave entrance as the medics bring in more wounded. Shi is with them, her face covered in ash, or dust. Her aunt Durii is leaning heavily on her shoulder, her robe bloody and scorched. “They’re all dead!” Durii wails as Shi helps her down to the ground. “I lost them all in the fire!” Shi isn’t saying anything, but she looks at the medic with barely-contained terror on her face.
“We haven’t been able to reach that hallway yet,” he says. “They could still be alive.”
More yelling near the entrance of the cave. Stilgar has been pulled out of the rubble of the fourth level, bloodied but alive and furious. “Cowards, all of them!” he spits in between coughing up dust and deflecting the medics’ attempts to tend to him. “Didn’t even engage on the ground like honorable fighters!”
He ends up sitting on the ground nearby, a determined medic cleaning his wounds while he barks orders and demands reports. She hears snatches of the updates coming to him without really processing any of it.
“The siege doors—”
“We lowered them. Whatever they had blew right through them.”
“The evacuation tunnel?”
“There’s rubble in the assembly hall, but we think we can clear a path down. Some people got out to the caves.”
“The upper transverse is collapsed at both ends.”
“The top level is ash. No one made it out of there alive.”
“Fires on the second, third and fifth levels. We can’t reach them to put them out.”
“Half the second level’s caved in, but we can hear people calling for help. We’re digging, but it’s boulders the size of Shai-Hulud’s mouth. And the engineers are afraid to blast. The passageways are too unstable.”
At some point, she realized Riyyah is there, squatting next to Stilgar, giving him a report in hushed tones. She runs through a status check of the water reserves. Unreachable. Caved in. Unreachable. Foundation cracked and it’s pouring into the level below. Polluted with wastewater when half the west side filtration chamber collapsed on top of it. Unreachable.
“Lower southwest and lower lower east are still intact. As far as we can tell.”
“Upper east-northeast? That passageway is open.”
“There are, um. Bodies in it.”
Two reservoirs. Out of nine.
“That’s not the worst news,” Riyyah says quietly. “The collection lines are fucked. Some of them melted. In other places they’re cracked, or the ceiling fell in and just snapped them…”
That’s it, then. They have to leave. Because without the sietch’s vast circulatory system of moisture collectors, seals, condensers, greywater recycling and reclamation chambers, they cannot stay here. Even if they could somehow defend themselves against the Harkonnens, they won’t last two days without being able to recapture water—
There’s a scream from somewhere outside the cave. She’s on her feet, stumbling her way across the crowded floor, because she knows that voice and it can only mean one thing.
Shi and Durii are outside (when had they gone outside?) and by the time she gets to the cave entrance the medics are bringing out the first of the bodies.
It’s small, and it’s wrapped in a blanket, and she feels her whole body go cold. Because they don’t have blankets to spare, and only the terribly burned or dismembered bodies are getting wrapped up like that.
They bring ten bodies out of Shi’s family’s yali. Shi’s grandmother and her uncles and her niece and nephews and cousins. Every one of them wrapped up, laid out together in a line. In the sun. Because there is no water left to reclaim.
“Don’t look at them,” one of the medics is telling Shi, as gently as he can. “Trust me, you don’t want to look at them.” Shi pushes past him like he didn’t speak at all.
Chani turns away when Shi pulls back the blanket wrapped over the face of the nearest body, because the medic is right; she doesn’t want to see, and she doesn’t want to see Shi see either. The sun is too bright and she’s suddenly either too hot or too cold and her breath is coming in great whooping gasps like she’s run flat out across a battlefield—
She doesn’t realize she’s shaking until Usul is there, putting a hand on her arm to steady her. “Hey. Hey, you’re okay,” he’s murmuring, but she can’t breathe; she can feel her heartbeat in her face, her hands, her throat, but everything else is distant and numb and it feels like there’s a boulder on her chest, like she’s the one trapped under piles of broken stone—
—they’re in a crevice, in a sliver of shade around the side of the cave, as private as it’s possible to be among the blood and wailing, and she doesn’t remember how they got there, but he’s put his body in between her and the pile of corpses stacking up in the sun and he’s got his gloves off and his bare hands on her face, his forehead resting against hers, whispering, “Hey, you’re okay, you’re okay, I’ve got you,” and she can feel the tears welling up and the choking lump in her throat but she cannot cry, she cannot cry now; there are only two water reserves out of nine not broken or poisoned or filled with the dead—
But she’s failing, and the tears are running down her cheeks anyway, and he’s leaning in so so gently to kiss them off her skin but she is still losing the battle against giving water to the dead (maybe they’re not dead; maybe everyone she loves is safe at the end of a tunnel, or maybe they’re lying crushed under shattered rock or trapped in a passageway collapsed at both ends or burned to ashes in the all-consuming fire)—
She presses her face into his scarf and screams. Draws as deep a breath as her shuddering lungs will allow and screams and screams, burying the sound in the cloth that smells like desert dust and his sweat. He just wraps his arms around her tight, rocking a little from side to side the way you might soothe a child, and lets her howl out her rage and grief and fear against his shoulder for as long as she needs.
Back inside the cave, they have the radio set up, Shi and Mari and Adaner and a few other crouched around it.
(After ten or twelve or maybe twenty screams, she had started to breathe normally again. He had wiped the tears off her face, pressing his thumb to her lips to insist she accept the water, while she focused on keeping her inhales and exhales deep and steady. Eventually, she had been able to go back inside.)
Shi is scanning the radio channels, and her face is composed and her eyes are dry, but there’s the fury of a roaring sandstorm under the surface of her. Chani has only seen her like this a few times, but she recognizes it. Shi cannot be touched when she’s like this; she cannot be comforted or soothed or she’ll explode with rage. She’d learned that firsthand, when she’d tried to hug Shi after her mother got killed and gotten an elbow to the gut for her troubles, before Shi had turned around and tried her best to put a hole in the yali wall with her fist. Shi had been ten, then, and her punch was not strong enough yet to break her own hand. She had sure tried, though.
The snatches of information coming in on the radio are grim. The whole of the north has been hit. Every one of the northern sietches, shattered. Fire and rubble, broken passageways filled with the wounded and the trapped and the dead, still trying to determine whether they’re dealing with casualties in the hundreds or in the thousands.
There’s a call for a war council in the south. Stilgar is telling Usul what she already knows, that to speak in the south he must take Stilgar’s place, and she already knows that he won’t, he can’t, he can’t do it.
Usul looks to the Atreides warmaster (she’d forgotten about him; who knows what he’s been doing, but his gloves are bloody and the knees of his stillsuit are dusty so maybe he hasn’t been completely useless) and she doesn’t like that at all. Doesn’t like the ease with which Usul has fallen into step beside him since he showed up; the focused attention with which he listens to him. He never has anything good to say.
The radio crackles urgently. “Ground troops! Ground troops at Sietch Habbanya!” It’s a voice she half-recognizes from joint missions, one of Habbanya’s fedaykin leaders. She sounds scared. “They just landed a whole transport, we need to—” The channel abruptly goes silent.
“Ground troops at Sietch Habbanya.” Usul is talking to his warmaster in Galach, his voice quiet and urgent. The conversations he’s had with this man are the first Galach she’s heard him speak in months. It sounds strange in his mouth.
“They’re sweeping for survivors,” the warmaster says. (Gurney Halleck; she digs his strange-rhythmed outworlder name out of her memory now that he’s apparently part of their impromptu war council.) He turns to Stilgar. “You need to get people out of here. As fast as you can without panicking them.”
She feels a flash of anger, because how dare he think he can talk to Stilgar like a trusted advisor, when he knows nothing about their lives, about their home— But Stilgar is nodding, forcing himself by sheer stubbornness into sitting up straight. “Everyone who can mount a worm, we move to the Cave of the Winds, and from there to the south. The wounded we’ll take through the tunnel to the fallback caves.”
It’s chaos, trying to move that many people so quickly. There’s no time to gather more than water and the clothes people ran out of the sietch in. There are emergency supplies stashed at the Cave of the Winds; it’s meant as a stopping point for journeys to the south. But it was never meant for this many people, and whatever is there will not be enough.
Stilgar is still in the Cave of Birds, limping around shouting orders while they prepare to move the wounded. So somehow it falls to the fedaykin to herd the people who can walk toward the dunes on the other side of the low hills surrounding the sietch. She moves through the crowd, talking down the people who want to stay and fight (suicide), intercepting the people who want to run back into the sietch for loved ones who haven’t been found yet (also suicide, even if they manage to find who they’re looking for), reassuring the people who are terrified of crossing the open desert under Harkonnen ‘thopters (a fear she shares, but they have no choice).
At some point among the crowds, she realizes Usul is not near her. The panic is more total and immediate than she knows is reasonable—he must be nearby. But her throat is suddenly empty of reassurances. She scrambles to the top of the rock and sees him standing there on the other side, dead still, watching the sietch burn.
They have a bitter argument over whether someone should stay behind, after he’s already gone and told the warmaster that he’s doing it.
“If they’re planning to come after us we need to know. It makes sense to leave a lookout here—”
“You’re drinking sand if you think I’m leaving you here alone—”
Then Shi is there, stepping right into Usul’s space like she’s ready to fight him. “I’ll stay,” she says. “Let me do it.”
“No one stays but me.”
“Usul! None of these people will leave without you,” she snaps. “But they’ll go if you tell them to. Go south with them. Let me stay.”
For a minute they’re staring each other down and she thinks they really might come to blows. Then they seem to reach some kind of silent draw and stalk off in opposite directions—Usul onto the flat shelf of rock just below them, Shi in the direction of the sietch.
She chases after Shi first. “Hey. Hey!” she hisses until Shi can’t ignore her anymore. Shi stops and turns around, defiance at the ready.
“I know what you’re doing and don’t you dare.” Shi still looks full of molten fury, but she’ll take the risk of getting punched. She steps close, tangles a hand in Shi’s sweaty hair and pulls her in, forehead to forehead. “Don’t you dare leave me now.”
She can feel Shi’s rough breathing against her face, all the rage and grief barely held back from exploding into violence, and she doesn’t pull away, because she knows, she knows what it feels like to want to kill more than you want to live. “You promise me,” she grinds out. “You are gonna stay quiet, stay hidden and get out of there alive.”
“I will.” Shi nods a little against her forehead. “I will.” And they both kind of know that she is lying, but she has to try.
She moves quick, pulling Shi into a hug before she can fight her off. After a moment of stiffness, she feels Shi’s arms wrap tight around her, fingers digging into her back. It is not a goodbye hug, because she is not saying goodbye. “I’ll see you in the south.”
The last thing Shi says to her is the other chant, the old one from their fathers’ time, when hope was in much shorter supply. “Long live the martyrs.”
Usul hasn’t gone far, just down onto the slab of rock below the peak of the hill. He’s crouched down, one hand on the bare stone. When she kneels down next to him she can see his face is streaked with tears.
He’s held it together this whole time, through the death and blood and terror, but now he’s weeping, water falling silently onto the rock.
“Hey.” She reaches out and puts a gentle hand on his cheek, turning his face toward her. He looks shattered.
“I should have seen it coming,” he says, and his voice cracks. “If I’d seen it, if I’d understood, maybe we could have—”
“Hey, hey. No.” She cups his face in both hands. “You couldn’t have known—”
“But maybe I could have—”
“Don’t.” You’ll drive yourself crazy with could-haves and if-onlys; she’d learned that a long time ago. “Don’t do that.”
He squeezes his eyes shut, one more disobedient tear still slipping out. And she wants nothing more than to stop and hold him and wipe the tears from his face like he did for her. But they don’t have time.
“Usul.” She has to say it, because she’s a fighter and she knows when you have to keep moving. “We have to go south. And you have to come with us.”
Because there is no time to patiently convince people that retreat is their only option and reassure them that they’ll be safe on the journey and promise them that their loved ones will be found. But if he speaks they will listen.
He takes a deep shuddering breath, eyes still closed. “I tried so hard not to.”
“I know. I know.” He is terrified of the messianic fervor that lies in the south, terrified of how his mother could have stoked it into an inferno in the time she’s been there. And he is right to fear it. But the war council is in the south. All the survivors from the northern sietches are fleeing south. Any chance they have of survival—let alone victory—is in the south.
“The world has made choices for us,” she says, as gently as she can.
“If I go south, I might lose you,” he says. As if anything but death could part them now.
“You will never lose me.” She cannot imagine a future in which she would walk away from him willingly, or he from her. “Not as long as you stay who you are.”
He wipes the tears from his face and climbs to the top of the hill.
On the other side, people are milling about, uncertain and afraid. No one willing to set the first thumper and say yes, we are leaving, there is no choice left but to flee. People call out when they see him, scattered cries of Mahdi and Muad’Dib and Lisan al-Gaib rising from the crowd. He walks toward them.
“Muad’Dib!” an old man cries out. “Show us the way.”
“South,” he says, in answer to the man. He has made his way down the steep side of the hill to a little outcropping that juts out over where the crowd is gathered like a stage.
“The way is south.” He’s done something to his voice; it’s deeper now, confident and clear even if it’s just an act, effortlessly reaching the edges of the crowd.
“You’d have us abandon our home?” a woman yells from within the crowd.
“Not abandon. Retreat.” He’s leaning toward the woman, like he could just be having a conversation with her, but his voice still reaches the edges of the crowd, and he’s got their attention now.
“No one wants to leave their home,” he says. “I don’t either.” His voice cracks a little on the last word, and he has to pause to take a steadying breath. “But this is how we fight, isn’t it? When our enemy outmatches us, we retreat and we stay alive to fight another day. We let them think that they’ve defeated us and then we regroup and strike again. Right?”
“They have to pay for what they did!” a voice hoarse with wailing calls out.
“They will. Oh, they will.” She can’t see who the voice came from, but he must be able to, because he turns toward someone in the crowd, and she can see the dead cold fury in his eyes.
“All of the northern sietches have been attacked. All of us have martyrs. Our brothers and sisters at Sietch Khadra, Sietch Habbanya, Sietch Garig, Sietch Atmara, Sietch Qira—do you think they want blood any less than we do?”
He is getting the crowd fired up now, doing the same thing she does, channeling fear into anger, because what else can you do? How else can you keep the weight of grief and terror from crushing you alive?
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees the Atreides warmaster Gurney Halleck. She doesn’t think he can understand more than a few words of what Usul is saying, but he’s watching him with naked pride and admiration. The look on his face is not so different from the true believers who drop to their knees at Usul’s feet. She doesn’t like it at all.
“Go south with the fedaykin,” Usul is saying. “I’ll be there with you. Stay alive. Be ready to fight. And I promise you. Today we go south, and tomorrow we’ll be in the streets of Arrakeen!”
There’s a roar from the crowd. “Long live the fighters!” someone yells.
He draws his knife and raises it without missing a beat. “Victory to the people,” he says, and the crowd erupts. They are chanting his names, all of his names, but “Long live the fighters!” is drowning them out.
And just for a second, she sees it. The future where he is not a prophet or a messiah but just a fighter. A good one, trusted to lead people into battle, but just one of them. A fedaykin of Sietch Tabr. Like her.
When he gets down from the rock his gaze finds her immediately. The fedaykin are setting thumpers, dividing people into groups to mount the first worms they summon and begin the journey south.
She has to tell him now. “I can’t go straight to the Cave of the Winds with you. I have to go to the fallback caves first.” If her family is there, or if they’re not, she has to know.
“I know,” he says, unsurprised. “I’m coming with you.”
She knows Stilgar is right; taking the wounded through the evacuation tunnel is the safest option. Making the trek across the plain surrounding the sietch and into the mountains in the cool, hidden dark instead of exposed to Harkonnen attack under the blazing sun, in the tunnel designed for exactly this purpose, which can be blasted closed from any one of ten points along the route to keep their enemies from following them.
She just hadn’t fully processed that going through the tunnel meant going into the sietch until it’s happening. A small group of the most able-bodied among them go first, to assess what obstacles must be cleared by the people carrying the wounded on stretchers and blankets, in their arms and on their backs. They follow the winding path the engineers have laid out, stepping over piles of rubble and detouring around collapsed passageways, down through the lower levels to the grand assembly hall in the sietch’s center, the cavern that makes a natural amphitheater big enough to hold the sietch’s entire population, the heart that all passages lead to.
The full extent of the damage isn’t apparent until they step out into the assembly hall and look up.
On the upper levels, fires are still burning, glowing from the maws of broken passageways, turning the ceiling above them black. On one side, the top three levels have collapsed completely, flattening on top of each other and sending an avalanche of rubble into the center of the sietch.
Those on the upper levels never had a chance. But people on the lower levels could have gotten out if they moved quickly. (Surely an old fighter like Ifri would know to move quickly; they could have gotten out; they could all be waiting for her at the fallback caves—)
The pressure wave that had crushed people’s lungs and eardrums had blown great chunks of debris out into the center of the cavern. Dust and rock but also the contents of people’s homes. She climbs over chunks of wall and floor the size of rooms, the burnt remains of carpets and wall hangings and clothing, a half-melted coffee service, pillows and stillsuits and shoes. (And bodies, she is sure there are bodies under all this rock, but she tries not to think about that.)
There’s a smell. A cooking smell. Nobody wants to say that the smell is people but everyone is smelling it. She pulls her scarf up over her nose and tries to still the roiling in her stomach. Tries not to think about how many burnt and broken bodies must lie strewn in hallways, under the rubble, dead in the beds they slept in; how even if they can clear the debris and stabilize the passageways and get the water system functioning again, there will be bodies and bodies and bodies to deal with; the place she’s lived her whole life, the home of a hundred generations of her ancestors, turned into a mass grave—
“Hey.” Usul is there, a steadying hand on her shoulder, and it’s only then that she notices her breath has become quick and rough and panicky. She forces herself breath slow and even again, through her mouth so she smells as little of the burnt-people smell as possible.
Maybe Usul should have gone with the crowd of people he’d exhorted to go to the south. Helped keep people calm and organized at the Cave of the Winds as they prepared to cross the storms. But she is profoundly, selfishly grateful he’s here with her.
They both end up with a kid for the long journey through the evacuation tunnel. A brother and sister. Usul is carrying the girl, about five or six, both her calves splinted and wrapped in bandages from where a chunk of the ceiling fell on them. Chani has the boy, who is maybe two. He seems unharmed other than a few scrapes and bruises, but he hasn’t made a sound since his grandmother got them both out of the sietch. He had stared silently at nothing, his thumb in his mouth, while she lifted him into the makeshift carrier she had made out of a scarf.
The grandmother shuffles between them, leaning heavily on her walking stick, a water reservoir sloshing on the strap across her back with every step. They have nothing else with them.
Ahead of them, the Atreides warmaster Gurney Halleck is carrying one end of a blanket stretcher, the man it holds staring up at the tunnel ceiling with pain-glazed eyes. The bottom half of his body is covered by someone’s coat, but she’s seen what it looks like and it’s not good. There are few options for someone who can’t stand or walk on their own, and won’t be able to again without surgeries they have nowhere to perform. If any of his family are at the fallback caves, they’ll have to decide with him whether to take his water now.
Usul is carrying the girl with his hands laced together under her butt, the girl’s arms wrapped around his neck and her head resting on his shoulder. She remembers her dad carrying her that way through the halls of the sietch, when she was small and fell asleep while the grownups talked politics late into the night at one comrade’s place or another.
“Are we going to Mama?” the girl asks for the third time. The medics had warned them that what they gave her for the pain would make her sleepy and forgetful, but it still lodges a barb under her ribs to hear her ask it each time.
Mama had been working the night shift in the west side filtration chamber when it collapsed onto the level below it. “I haven’t told them yet,” the grandmother had murmured in a moment when the kids were out of earshot. “Just lie if they ask. Please.”
“Mama’s in the south,” Usul says, for the third time, “and we’re all going there soon.”
The fallback caves are crowded, almost too crowded to walk through, and she should be relieved that so many people made it out, but all she can think is that it will make it harder to find them.
But then there’s a cry of raw emotion from a voice she recognizes, and Hala is picking her way through the obstacle course of the crowd, and someone is taking the silent child out of her arms, and people are making way for Hala to rush forward and wrap her in a crushing hug, and in the next breath she grabs Usul with one arm and pulls him in too, and then she’s hugging both of them and wailing with relief.
Her family is there. They are all alive.
Hala leads them over to the little corner of the cave they’ve claimed as their space, and everyone is hugging her and hugging Usul, and she has to keep swallowing past the lump in her throat, because she keeps seeing ten wrapped bodies in a line on the sand, while she’s embracing her own family members who are alive and safe and not burned to death in their beds.
“Thank the Maker, Ekkeri was awake with the baby,” Ruqayya is saying. “She heard the sentries shouting and woke us all up before the first alarm went off. Ifri made us go right away.”
“Never heard anything like that before.” Ifri shakes her head in horror. She has a bloody scarf tied over a cut on the back of her head, a bit of rock that got her when she was trying to wake the neighbors, but she seems as alert and sharp-witted as usual. Thanks to her quick thinking, they all have their stillsuits, and the traveling wrap for the baby and the riding harnesses for the little kids, and the water reservoirs from all the rooms in the family yalis. And it sounds like they are the reason almost everyone on their hallway is still alive too.
She is ordered to sit down and rest, and as soon as she takes off her pack and unwraps her scarf, exhaustion hits her like a hammer. She slides down with her knees drawn up and her back against the wall.
A few of the elders have taken over handing out rations from the cave’s emergency stash. Hala passes her a food bar of the kind she’s eaten after many a battle, fat and grains and bits of dried fruit and meat and salt all pressed together. They’re better when sliced up and toasted a little over a warming plate, but edible enough straight out of the moisture-seal wrapper.
Usul is still trying to be helpful, until Ifri tells him to sit down in a tone that does not permit argument. She hands him a food bar, which he immediately tries to refuse. “I’m all right. Give it to someone who needs it more.”
She presses it back into his hands. “Eat it. You’re fedaykin. Your duty is to be ready to fight.” There’s a reason the queue for rations goes children first, then fighters, then everybody else.
This time he has sense enough not to argue. He takes the food with a quiet word of thanks.
There are people planning, up near the front of the cave, but now that she’s sat down she is weary down to her bones. Usul comes to sit next to her and at some point her head lists against his shoulder. At some point, he wraps an arm around her waist, as they both sit dutifully eating their greasy, salty-sweet food bars, too numb with exhaustion and horror to do anything else.
At some point, it’s decided that those who can walk will wait until nightfall to travel by worm to meet the others at the Cave of the Winds. She doesn’t know what’s happening to those too wounded to move and she’s too tired to try to find out.
She’s lost track of what time it is but it must be afternoon. Hala tosses them a couple of the family’s desert coats and lovingly orders them to get some sleep.
There is no privacy, and barely enough room to lie down. They wiggle their way into lying on the floor facing each other, and she pulls one of the coats over their heads like a little tent, so at least they can pretend to have a moment alone.
In the dim light of the glowglobe filtering through the fabric, his face is etched with exhaustion and grief. She reaches out to cup his jaw, stroke her thumb across his cheek. She can still feel the salt of dried tears there.
“You know, I think you’re Fremen for real now,” she says. He gives a sad twitch of a smile in response.
You suffer with us and you fight beside with us. What does blood or title matter when compared to that?
“Do you regret it now, staying here with us?”
“No.” He shakes his head. “Never. I’m with you.”
He’s looking at her so intently, like he’s trying to memorize her face, and she feels a sudden stab of fear she can’t explain.
“No matter what happens…you know I love you, right?” he says.
“I know. I love you too.” The words had seemed unnecessary before now, when they’d already said it so many times in other ways. But suddenly they feel important.
He leans in to kiss her, and both of their lips are chapped and dry, but it’s sweet, and soft, and it only lasts a moment.
There will be time for more later, she thinks. When we’re somewhere safe.
In such a tight space, it’s easiest to get close together if they’re spooning, so she turns her back and lets him pull her close, body to body, his nose pressed into her hair. He drapes an arm around her and threads their fingers together, his hand over hers. She squeezes his hand and he squeezes back.
She’s exhausted and heartsick and she doesn’t know what’s waiting for them in the south. Just please, stay with me, she thinks. I can do it if you’re with me. They are lying together in a cave full of refugees, in the middle of a war, and she doesn’t know if she will ever see her home again, but she can feel his breath against her back, steady even if nothing else is. As long as you’re with me, I’ll know the way.
That is the last time.