Tales of Dune Page 11

  The gunner was right, Elto thought. Atreides soldiers were tough, but like fish out of water in this hostile environment.

  “I was never comfortable here,” Deegan wailed.

  “So who asked you to be comfortable?” Fultz snapped, setting aside his apparatus. “You’re a soldier, not a pampered prince.”

  Deegan’s raw emotions turned his words into a rant. “I wish the Duke had never accepted Shaddam’s offer to come here. He must have known it was a trap! We can never live in a place like this!” He stood up, making exaggerated, scarecrowish gestures.

  “We need water, the ocean,” Elto said, overcoming pain to lift his voice. “Does anybody else remember rain?”

  “I do,” Deegan said, his voice a pitiful whine.

  Elto thought of his first view of the sweeping wastelands of open desert beyond the Shield Wall. His initial impression had been nostalgic, already homesick. The undulating panorama of sand dunes had been so similar to the even patterns of waves on the sea … but without any drop of water.

  Issuing a strange cry, Deegan rushed to the nearest wall and clawed at the stone, kicking and trying to dig his way out with bare hands. He tore his nails and pounded with his fists, leaving bloody patterns on the unforgiving rock, until two of the other soldiers dragged him away and wrestled him to the ground. One man, a hand-to-hand combat specialist who had trained at the famous Swordmaster school on Ginaz, ripped open one of their remaining medpaks and dosed Deegan with a strong sedative.

  The pounding artillery continued. Won’t they ever stop? He felt an odd, pain-wracked sensation that he might be sealed in this hell-hole for eternity, trapped in a blip of time from which there was no escape. Then he heard his uncle’s voice.…

  Kneeling beside the claustrophobic gunner, Uncle Hoh leaned close, whispering, “Listen. Let me tell you a story.” It was a private tale intended only for Deegan’s ears, though the intensity in the Jongleur’s voice seemed to shimmer in the thick air. Elto caught a few words about a sleeping princess, a hidden and magical city, a lost hero from the Butlerian Jihad who would slumber in oblivion until he rose again to save the Imperium. By the time Hoh Vitt completed his tale, Deegan had fallen into a stupor.

  Elto suspected what his uncle had done, that he had disregarded the ancient prohibition against using the forbidden powers of planet Jongleur, ancestral home of the Vitt family. In the low light their gazes met, and Uncle Hoh’s eyes were bright and fearful. As he’d been conditioned to do since childhood, Elto tried not to think about it, for he too was a Vitt.

  Instead, he visualized the events that had occurred only hours before.…

  O O O

  On the streets of Arrakeen, some of the Harkonnen soldiers had been fighting in an odd manner. The Atreides elite corps had shouldered lasguns to lay down suppressing fire. The buzzing weapons had filled the air with crackling power, contrasted with much more primal noises of screams and the percussive explosions of old-fashioned artillery fire.

  The battle-scarred weapon’s master ran at the vanguard, bellowing in a strong voice that was rich and accustomed to command. “Watch yourselves—and don’t underestimate them.” Halleck lowered his voice, growling; Elto wouldn’t have heard the words if he hadn’t been running close to the commander. “They’re in formations like Sardaukar.”

  Elto shuddered at the thought of the Emperor’s crack terror troops, said to be invincible. Have the Harkonnens learned Sardaukar methods? It was confusing.

  Sergeant Hoh Vitt grabbed his nephew’s shoulder and turned him to join another running detachment. Everyone seemed more astonished by the unexpected and primitive mortar bombardment than by the strafing attacks of the assault ’thopters.

  “Why would they use artillery, Uncle?” Elto shouted. He still hadn’t fired a single shot from his lasgun. “Those weapons haven’t been used effectively for centuries.” Though the young recruit might not be well-practiced in battle maneuvers, he had at least read his military history.

  “Harkonnen devils,” Hoh Vitt said. “Always scheming, always coming up with some trick. Damn them!”

  One entire wing of the Arrakeen palace glowed orange, consumed by inner flames. Elto hoped the Atreides family had gotten away.… Duke Leto, Lady Jessica, young Paul. He could still see their faces, their proud but not unkind manners; he could still hear their voices.

  As the street battle continued, blue-uniformed Harkonnen invaders ran across an intersection, and Halleck’s men roared in challenge. Impulsively, Elto fired his own weapon at the massed enemies, and the air shimmered with a crisscross web of blue-white lines. He fumbled, firing the lasgun again.

  Scovich snapped at him. “Point that damn thing away from me! You’re supposed to hit Harkonnens!” Without a word, Uncle Hoh grasped Elto’s rifle, placed the young man’s hands in proper positions, reset the calibration, then slapped him on the back. Elto fired again, and hit a blue-uniformed invader.

  Agonized cries of injured men throbbed around him, mingled with frantic calls of medics and squad leaders. Above it all, the weapons master yelled orders and curses through twisted lips. Gurney Halleck already looked defeated, as if he had personally betrayed his Duke. He had escaped from a Harkonnen slave pit years before, had lived with smugglers on Salusa Secundus, and had sworn revenge on his enemies. Now, though, the troubadour warrior could not salvage the situation.

  Under attack, Halleck waved his hands to command the entire detachment. “Sergeant Vitt, take men into the Shield Wall tunnels and guard our supply storehouses. Secure defensive positions and lay down a suppressing fire to take out those artillery weapons.”

  Never doubting that his orders would be obeyed, Halleck turned to the remainder of his elite corps, reassessing the strategic situation. Elto saw that the weapons master had picked his best fighters to remain with him. In his heart, Elto had known at that moment, as he did now thinking back on it, that if this were ever to be told as one of his uncle’s vivid stories, the tale would be cast as a tragedy.

  In the heat of battle Sergeant Hoh Vitt had shouted for them to trot doubletime up the cliffside road. His detachment had taken their weapons and left the walls of Arrakeen. Glowlamps and portable illuminators showed firefly chains of other civilian evacuees trying to find safety in the mountainous barrier.

  Panting, refusing to slacken their pace, they had gained altitude, and Elto looked down on the burning garrison city. The Harkonnens wanted the desert planet back, and they wanted to eradicate House Atreides. The blood-feud between the two noble families dated all the way back to the Butlerian Jihad.

  Sergeant Vitt reached a camouflaged opening and entered his code to allow them access. Down below, the gunfire continued. An assault ’thopter swooped along the side of the mountain, sketching black streaks of slagged rock; Scovich, Fultz, and Deegan opened fire, but the ’thopter retreated—after marking their position.

  As the rest of the detachment raced inside the caves, Elto took a moment at the threshold to note the nearest artillery weapons. He saw five of the huge, old-style guns pounding indiscriminately at Arrakeen—the Harkonnens didn’t care how much damage they caused. Then two of the mighty barrels rotated to face the Shield Wall. Flames belched out, followed by far-off thunder, and explosive shells rained down upon the cave openings.

  “Get inside!” Sergeant Vitt shouted. The others moved to obey, but Elto remained fixated. In a single stroke, a long line of fleeing civilians vanished from the cliffside paths, as if a cosmic artist with a giant paintbrush had decided to erase his work. The artillery guns continued to fire and fire, and soon centered on the position of the soldiers.

  The range of Elto’s full-power lasgun was at least as far as the conventional shells. He aimed and fired, pulsing out an unbroken stream but expecting little in the way of results. But the dissipating heat struck the old-fashioned explosives in the loaded artillery shells, and the ragged detonation ripped out the breech of the mammoth cannon.

  He turned around, grinning, trying to sho
ut his triumph to his uncle—then a shell from the second massive gun struck squarely above the entrance to the cave. The explosion knocked Elto farther into the tunnel as tons of rock showered down, striking him. The avalanche sent shockwaves through an entire section of the Shield Wall. The entire contingent was sealed inside.…

  O O O

  After days in the tomblike cave, one of the glowglobes gave out and could not be recharged; the remaining two managed only a flickering light in the main room. Elto lay wounded, tended by the junior medic and his dwindling supplies of medicinals. Elto’s pain had dulled from the broken glass to a cold, cold blackness that seemed easier to endure … but how he longed for a sip of water!

  Uncle Hoh shared his concern, but was unable to do anything else.

  Squatting on the stone floor off to his left, two sullen soldiers had used their fingertips to trace a grid in the dust; with light and dark stones they played a makeshift game of Go, a carryover from ancient Terra.

  Everyone waited and waited—not for rescue, but for the serenity of death, for escape.

  The shelling outside had finally stopped. Elto knew with a sick certainty that the Atreides had lost. Gurney Halleck and his elite corps would be dead by now, the Duke and his family either killed or captured; none of the loyal Atreides soldiers dared to hope that Leto or Paul or Jessica had escaped.

  The signalman Scovich paced the perimeter, peering into darkened cracks and crumbling walls. Finally, after carefully imprinting a distress message into the voice patterns of his captive distrans bats, he released them. The small creatures circled the dusty enclosure, seeking a way out. Their high-pitched cries echoed from the porous stone as they searched for any tiny niche. After frantic flapping and swooping, at last the pair disappeared through a fissure in the ceiling.

  “We’ll see if this works,” Scovich said. His voice held little optimism.

  In a weak but valiant voice, Elto called his uncle nearer. Using most of his remaining strength, he propped himself on an elbow. “Tell me a story, about the good times we had on our fishing trips.”

  Hoh Vitt’s eyes brightened, but for only a second before fear set in. He spoke slowly. “On Caladan … Yes, the old days.”

  “Not so long ago, Uncle.”

  “Oh, but it seems like it.”

  “You’re right,” Elto said. He and Hoh Vitt had taken a coracle along the shore, past the lush pundi rice paddies and out into open water, beyond the seaweed colonies. They had spent days anchored in the foamy breakwaters of dark coral reefs, where they dove for shells, using small knives to pry free the flammable nodules called coral gems. In those magical waters they caught fan-fish—one of the great delicacies of the Imperium—and ate them raw.

  “Caladan …” the gunner Deegan said groggily, as he emerged from his stupor. “Remember how vast the ocean was? It seemed to cover the whole world.”

  Hoh Vitt had always been so good at telling stories, supernaturally good. He could make the most outrageous things real for his listeners. Friends or family made a game of throwing an idea at Hoh, and he would make up a story using it. Blood mixed with melange … a great Heighliner race across uncharted foldspace … the wrist-wrestling championship of the universe, between two dwarf sisters who were the finalists … a talking slig.

  “No, no stories now, Elto,” the sergeant said in a fearful voice. “Rest now.”

  “You’re a Master Jongleur, aren’t you? You always said so.”

  “I don’t talk about that much.” Hoh Vitt turned away.

  His ancestral family had once been proud members of an ancient school of storytelling on the planet Jongleur. Men and women from that world used to be the primary troubadours of the Imperium; they traveled between royal houses, telling stories and singing songs to entertain the great families. But House Jongleur fell into disgrace when a number of the itinerant storytellers were proven to be double-agents in inter-House feuds, and no one trusted them any longer. When the nobles dropped their services, House Jongleur forfeited its status in the Landsraad, losing its fortunes. Guild Heighliners stopped going to their planet; the buildings and infrastructure, once highly advanced, fell into disrepair. Largely due to the Jongleur’s demise, many entertainment innovations were developed, including holo projections, filmbooks and shigawire recorders.

  “Now is the time, Uncle. Take me back to Caladan. I don’t want to be here.”

  “I can’t do that, boy,” he responded in a sad voice. “We’re all stuck here.”

  “Make me think I’m there, like only you can do. I don’t want to die in this hellish place.”

  With a piercing squeak, the two distrans bats returned. Confused and frustrated, they fluttered around the chamber while Scovich tried to recapture them. Even they had been unable to escape.…

  Though the trapped men had held out little hope, the failure of the bats still made them groan in dismay. Uncle Hoh looked at them, then down at Elto as his expression hardened into grim determination.

  “Quiet! All of you.” He knelt beside his injured nephew. Hoh’s eyes became glazed with tears … or something more. “The boy needs to hear what I have to say.”

  O O O

  Elto lay back, letting his eyes fall half-closed as he readied himself for the words that would paint memory pictures on the insides of his eyelids. Sergeant Vitt sat rigid, taking deep breaths to compose himself, to center his uncanny skill and stoke the fires of imagination. To tell the type of story these men needed, a Master Jongleur must calm himself; he moved his hands and fingers in the ancient way, going through the motions he’d been taught by generations of storytellers, ritualistic preparations to make the story good and pure.

  Fultz and Scovich shifted uneasily, and then moved closer, anxious to listen as well. Hoh Vitt looked at them with glazed eyes, barely seeing them, but his voice carried a gruff warning. “There is danger.”

  “Danger?” Fultz laughed and raised his grimy hands to the dim ceiling and surrounding rock walls. “Tell us something we don’t know.”

  “Very well.” Hoh was deeply saddened, wishing he hadn’t pulled strings to get Elto assigned to the prestigious corps. The young man still thought of himself as an outsider, but ironically—by staying in the line of fire and destroying one of the artillery weapons—he had shown more courage than any of the proven soldiers.

  Now Hoh Vitt felt a tremendous sense of impending loss. This wonderful young man, filled not only with his own hopes and dreams but also with those of his parents and uncle, was going to die without ever achieving his bright promise. He looked around, at the faces of the other soldiers, and seeing how they looked at him with such anticipation and admiration, he felt a moment of pride.

  O O O

  In the hinterlands of Jongleur, a hilly rural region where Hoh Vitt had grown up, dwelled a special type of storyteller. Even the natives suspected these “Master Jongleurs” of sorcery and dangerous ways. They could spin stories like deadly spiderwebs, and in order to protect their secrets, they allowed themselves to be shunned, hiding behind a cloak of mystique.

  “Hurry, Uncle,” Elto said, his voice quiet and thready.

  With intensity in his words, Sergeant Vitt leaned closer. “You remember how my stories always start, don’t you?” He touched the young man’s pulse.

  “You warn us not to believe too deeply, to always remember that it’s only a story … or it could be dangerous. We could lose our minds.”

  “I’m saying that again to you, boy.” He scanned the close-pressed faces around him. “And to everyone listening.”

  Scovich made a scoffing noise, but the others remained silent and intent. Perhaps they thought his warning was only part of the storytelling process, part of an illusion a Master Jongleur needed to create.

  After a moment’s hush, Hoh employed the enhanced memorization techniques of the Jongleurs, a method of transferring large amounts of information and retaining it for future generations. In this manner he brought to mind the planet Caladan, summoning i
t in every intricate detail.

  “I used to have a wingboat,” he said with a gentle smile, and then he began to describe sailing on the seas of Caladan. He used his voice like a paintbrush, selecting words carefully, like pigments precisely mixed by an artist. He spoke to Elto, but his story spread hypnotically, wrapping around the circle of listeners like the wispy smoke of a fire.

  “You and your father went with me on week-long fishing trips. Oh, those days! Up at sunrise and casting nets until sunset, with the golden tone of the sun framing each day. I must say we enjoyed our time alone on the water even more than the fish we caught. The companionship, the adventures and hilarious mishaps.”

  And hidden in his words were subliminal signals: Smell the salt water, the iodine of drying seaweed … Hear the whisper of waves, the splash of a distant fish too large to bring aboard whole.

  “At night, when we sat at anchor alone in the middle of the seaweed islands, we’d stay up late, the three of us, playing a fast game of tri-chess on a board made of flatpearls and abalone shells. The pieces themselves were carved from the translucent ivory tusks of South Caladan walruses. Do you remember?”

  “Yes, Uncle. I remember.”

  All the men murmured their agreement; the Jongleur’s haunting words were as real to them as to the young man who had actually experienced the memories.

  Listen to the hypnotic, throbbing songs of unseen murmons hiding in a fog bank that ripples across the calm waters.

  The shroud of pain grew fuzzy around Elto, and he could feel himself going to that other place and time, being carried away from this hellish place. The parched, dusty air at first smelled dank, then cool and moist. As he closed his eyes, he could sense the loving touch of Caladan breezes on his cheek. He smelled the mists of his native world, spring rain on his face, sea waves lapping at his feet as he stood on the rocky beach below the Atreides castle.