Water soft.
Being titled 'water soft' was one of the highest insults, so Stilgar had told her after she'd heard it often enough whispered harshly after her when she'd pass among the gathered tribe members to wonder about its translation.
Or worse even than that….
Water softened, Ghanima.
She can never get the fremen tribe leader to translate the other hissed word "Ghanima" a fremen phrase that not even Lady Jessica would explain to her in the days following the power-changing marriage between royal houses, making Irulan wonder even more about just what it could mean to these gathered desert dwellers to use it so fiercely.
And there are other whispers. Ones of possible conspiracy….
"She is as wild as the desert she comes from. Unfit for our needs in any capacity."
"Alia, you know as well as I do that as long as his desert woman breathes, your brother will never think to seek another to carry his….." She'd catch this not so quietly murmured between mother and daughter as she'd join Lady Jessica in the afternoons for lessons, keeping close with her Bene Gesserit teachings.
Irulan dismissed those quickly, no matter how often she caught the same disagreement.
Of course, the desert woman was unfit. It was well known how hard the Bene Gesserit sisters had worked to place one of their own in command of the known worlds.
"You are our key, Irulan. Never. Never forget that." Jessica would calm, always picking up the unease in the adjusting royal. "My son will come around eventually. He knew from the start his Sihaya could never be more than a concubine."
Irulan already hated her role as a pawn in Maud'Dib's plots within plots for spreading his holy war over countless planets and star systems. Bringing them all to heel beneath his rule as his mother and all Irulan's other Bene Gesserit teachers long cultivated manipulations intended.
But then there are the far softer whispers.
Those spoken by her husband as he slept while Irulan kept watch at his bedside during the growing evenings when she couldn't stand the isolation of her own bed chamber. Despite the bonding of being husband and wife, she was always relatively respectful in her nightly visits of the distance he set between them, even in the daylight hours.
Sometimes the call to touch his unclothed back would become too much even for her deepest of Weirding training could lessen that Irulan would edge her way onto Paul's bed to curl up along what little space he allowed in the sprawled-out way her husband chose to sleep that she could let her fingers innocently wonder along those teasing flex of muscles ripping under his skin without much fear of waking him fully from sleep.
As the nights stretched on, it became something of a game to her—something to pass the time in her adjustment to this sand-caked wasteland, something to see which tone she could draw from him.
Tonight, his hushed sleep-hazed words held a touch of arousal in them as he lay resting yet trembling under her massaging hands as she worked, losing a particularly tight knot of tensed muscles. She'd heard from Gurney how he'd trained himself to exhaustion before retiring to his bed for the night.
A one-sided game that, once it was over, left a bitter taste in her mouth when, like it always did in these nightly visits, the name coming from his lips was a husky sigh of "Chani" like some kind of murmured prayer.
Never once would Paul whisper Sihaya as Irulan heard him referring to the absent desert warrior during the day side.
She thinks the worst nights are when the embers of the flickering Atreides boy he'd once been returned in the broken calls to one already lost to him. Whispers of Chani…..Beloved." Chani…. Forgive m…."
Those nights become even worse days for her and anyone foolish enough to step into her husband's path come sunrise. When a bitter Mahdi becomes, if possible, even more ruthless in his orders. More bloodthirsty in his plans and more heartless in his demands of his conquered enemies.
And with each day, without a word of where she'd ended up, his pain at her absence grew even more achingly apparent to the witnessing bride he'd taken to seal his victory in his revenge of his lost father.
Twisting the phantom knife in deeper, Irulan caught that delicate strip of blue cloth held tight in her husband's fisted hand as he tossed and turned in the low candle-like flickering of a hand glob, throwing its outlining light onto the sleeper in the bed.
She knows, without needing to catch it hidden about his person, that her husband carries the cloth with him in his waking hours as well.
The same one Irulan had seen a sympathetic seeming Gurney Hallick passing over to her pained-looking betrothed with only a few whispered words passing between them as the drummed sounds of a thumper drift to them over the readying sounds of already battle-tired but fire-driven fremen rally yet again for attacks all in the name of their prophet turned emperor.
An emperor who gave them that fateful bloodied order under the soft words of "Lead them to paradise."
"Irulan."
Her unchanged 'off-world' eyes fall back to the deep blue spice-changed ones of Lady Jessica's as her husband's mother steps into the small view the royal princess had of the shirtless duke she'd spotted sitting panic-filled among the watchers gathered in the hall.
"Yes, my mother?" she answers in a daze, mostly when she catches the way her husband had eyes only for her soon-to-be opponent as the two women stand separated in readying anticipation.
"Don't let your mind cloud girl." The royal mother scolds as she reaches out to smooth out a wrinkle in Irulan's loose-fitting fighter shirt, smoothing the lower waves of the thing against the top edge of the soft pants of the practice floor. "A clouded mind means far more bloodshed than a single scratch to end this scuffling you've called us for, and we don't want such a waste on our watch now, would we?" Jessica questions.
"Of course not." Irulan mumbles in reply, faltering a fraction under the warning look of displeasure burning in the woman's blue rich eyes. If you think this meeting is so childish why allow it to happen? Irulan wonders
Catching a few more whispered words, Jessica moves to fetch her blade.
"See now, mother?" the low whispering voice of the growing Alia asks, "Now our hands will be clean in this."
Paul was sure the biting nails of his clenched fist had drawn blood with how tightly he was closing his hand against the knee of his pants.
Not even the remembered pain from the small black box he'd encountered on Calidan nor the soul-ripping pain of holding the water of life in his mouth could compare to what he was witnessing now.
If this were a simple exchange of skills as the idea had been offered, then he would have no grounds to interfere. Who was he to stand in the way of passing on the knowledge of fighting styles to those eager enough to learn them?
If this turned out to be some plot against the woman he loved, then he had no grounds of just who was pulling the strings.
In short, he could do nothing but watch as Chani stripped down to her fighter's clothes.
The knife twists even deeper into his still beating heart when, instead of taking a refreshing drink from her own stillsuit catch pocket, as was customary before even the smallest of fremen battle training, Chani's head dips to the water tube offered by Otheym's stillsuit.
This was an open reminder to the watching duke and to the rest of the gathered fremen that the two were a tightly bonded match, as he'd once been to her.
Aside from the gifting and accepting of water rings, the mingling of water strengths was the most honored of courting and pair bonding rights he'd remembered Chani explaining after she'd first made the offering of her own water tube in refreshment as they'd sat wrapped in each other's arms upon a dune to watch the sun disappear into the cover of night.
It was almost as honored as when one in the bonded match would wear a band of blue in an open display of romantic interest to one among the tribe.
He'd seen no blue strips of fabric wrapped around Chani's hair or her arms during the council meets as she'd displayed so proudly when they'd begun sharing tent space before the crossing South.
But this….
"Why do you look so anxious, Usul?" Stilgar's rough voice as between his whispered prayers under his breath sitting now on Paul's right. "This is nothing more than a female squabbling that will be put to rest as soon as a knife draws a scratching of blood."
"Even a scratching can carry its own dangers." Paul reminds "and what endangers the mother also endangers her child." He adds in an even lower murmur, his eyes never leaving Chani's turned-away figure in quiet admiration of the battle and sand-toughened muscles flexing beneath her skin, now outlined a little clearer in the pull of her shirt as she allows Gurney to fix the shield belt's power settings for her.
Paul took this extra precaution to ensure both his women would be as safe as possible as they faced each other in open combat.
Again, Stilgar's hand grips Paul's shoulder and offers reassurance: "Your off-world woman will not dare attempt anything against your Sihaya. At least she meets the wrath of the sands on the end of one of our knives on your behalf."
"I wish to fight with you, Sihaya."
Chani hadn't expected the challenge to fall so smoothly from the royal's lips before Irulan spoke again. "a mock fight, nothing more." Irulan hurries on in a covered explanation "It is said that no one fights harder than a fremen fedaykin, and words of your blade skills are most impressive." The princess royal goes on saying "so much so that I wish to see how my own fair against such a formidable warrior as yourself."
Chani feels her jaw flex at the intended praise, her eyes narrowing in suspicion as Otheym shifts out of the corner of her eye. His hand was now actively closing around the handle of his sheathed crysknife. Gurney Hallick is across from them, mirroring the movement as Chani's own hand presses closer to the stillsuit-covered rounding of her stomach as nervous fear races through her mind.
" Does she wish to murder my Usul's child so her Emperor husband would have no other alternative but to sire another heir with her?"
" Does she really consider me such a threat to her she'd dare also to threaten my child in open combat against me?"
" Why has she waited this long to challenge me if she feels such a threat to my being here?"
" Does she think I will cower at the challenge for fear of harm to my child?" "is she counting on it so I lose face in the eyes of her husband, making her the more worthy choice of his mate?"
All these thoughts swirl like a vortex in Chani's mind in a single breath as she considers each in turn.
"I'm not so cruel-hearted as to endanger the life of your child," Irulan says, catching the curled motion of Chani's hand. "We will use maximum tuned body shields, and our match will end after the draw of first blood and only first blood." She promises.
"If you wish to fight a fedaykin, then fight with me." Otheym cuts in "as you've said, you know full well that Chani is with child. How does she- do we- know you won't use some kind of off-world poisons on your blade to weaken her in this fight?" he presses "or is your aim to threaten the child she carries rather than Chani herself?"
"Because your own Maud 'Dib has already ordered safety for both of you while you're here," Irulan tells him. "I heard him myself saying he won't allow even the shadow of harm to befall either of you."
Otheym opens his mouth to speak again, but Irulan is already cutting in. "I know that what is issued for the mother also applies to the child or children she carries, so by extension also, so too do Maud 'Dib's protections pass to the child during your stay here."
"During our stay," Otheym echoes. You truth-seeking witches have ways of prolonging your torments to counter such a command."
"True enough." Irulan agrees with a shy smile at the protection the desert man showed for his companion. "but hurting her would mean hurting my husband, and I'll not allow that to happen either."
"Then I accept your challenge, Irulan," Chani answers, her hand still cupped against her growing belly.
"You're blade. Irulan." Jessica says again, stepping into the glazed-eyed royal's sightline as she passes the thing over. The knife is still safely tucked away in its sheath.
At once, Irulan wants to cast the thing aside and call for a new untainted weapon, but she holds her tongue, simply looking down at the thing in her hand.
Surely, Alia wouldn't dare threaten her brother's mate. Jessica possibly, but not Alia.
"Use it." The whip snapping of the voice rumbles in Jessica's throat in the order.
At once Irulan feels herself obeying the order. Now holding the knife balanced against her palm, hefting it a few times to test the slashing weight of it as her eyes drift back towards a readying Chani.
The fremen fighter standing with a loyal clustering of her desert people. A marked contrasting of Irulan waiting more or less alone on her own side of the opened space.
Two easily recognizable to the watching royal being that of Otheym, the man's mother and undisputed naib of Sietch Gara Kulon.
A rarity so Stilgar had told her. Normally the desert tribes were led by men, yet this woman had proven herself so deeply to her people she was honored with such a respected title among them.
A cunning, wise fighter in her own right the desert woman known as Kodetová was now leaning in to whisper some parting words or possibly a sand honored prayer into Chani's ear. Then the two warriors nudged foreheads with a soft tenderness and easily traded giggled smiles between the two a kind of respected warmth Irulan jealously ached to find with Jessica or even her own mother before Chani was turning away at the approaching of Otheym's sister.
A sheathed crysknife held gingerly in offering as these women too paused to whisper low to one another.
"Are you alright, my Lady?" Gurney Halleck's grunted voice asks as the man himself steps up to check the power settings on Irulan's shield belt.
"Yes and no." Irulan sighed turning her gaze away from the other side of the soon to be fighting field. Her voice lowered for his ears alone the readying royal whispers urgent. "I wish a new blade, Gurney. Be sure Jessica doesn't see you fetching it, but this one must be tested for poisons."
The old weapons man hides most of his shock at the words, but he dips his head just enough to show he'd understood her orders as his hands never waver from fidgeting with the shield controls. "trade yours for the one at my hip. I'll be sure the other is delt with should your worry prove correct." He answers turning to his left to show the weapon's hilt.
The switching is done with a raising then lowering of Irulan's arm in tested movement of the shield covering.
"Thank you, Gurney." Irulan sighed raising her voice now as the two separated.
"Not at all my Lady."
"Are you ready, Sihaya?" Irulan asks hefting the borrowed blade against her palm still getting a feel for the weapon even as she shifted it in the traditional salute for the start of a fight.
Chani notices this but doesn't react to it as she lowers into a watchful crouching. The chill of the tiled floor sending tiny bits of cold against her bare feet, but she also remembered Usul's words to her and a few others of their fighting men once about the advantages of this on an unfamiliar fighting round.
Then the quieter given lessons with her warrior come back to her as she watches how the princess witch moves. As flowing and graceful and unpredictable as water splashing into one of the collection pools kept hidden away for the day of the true changing of the face of the desert ruled planet.
"Where I came from, we always fought with shields protecting us." Usul had said guiding her hands in knife positions as they'd stood together in one of the more private practice rooms of a carved-out cliff side. The troop had been pausing for a few hours, resting in escape of the glaring height of the father sun.
Paul's eyes had not yet gained the color of fully spiced blue but no longer the off-world coloring as when he'd bested Jamis as she'd allowed his closeness at her back.
Even with the coverings of their respective stillsuits the heat of him distracted her.
"Slow timing on attacks to penetrate them if not caught with a knife edge or the twisting of a sheering guard fixed to the weapon handle."
"Cowards." Chani remembered earning a low chuckle from the off-world duke at her back. "real fighters don't need shields to fight. Its skills forged in battles that win fights, not tricks or faints."
"Maybe." He'd agreed his breath warm against her skin as he'd moved with the whisper of the witch's quickness.
She'd been just as quick to block the action (an attempting mock slashing towards a blink of her eyes) with the point of her own knife. Slow like she was breaking a body shield just as he'd intended if his smile was an indicator as she'd pushed him back onto the cavern sand-covered floor, her knife now poised over his unprotected neck.
Oddly he'd answered her threat by reaching up to draw her mouth down to his, ending the truly battleworthy portion of their stolen time together as that first kiss grew into a second one. Then a third as the covering of stillsuit became a distant memory to the entangled pair.
A shift in the air ahead of her draws Chani back to the fight before her, just as it had in that not-so-long-ago practice fight.
Irulan moved with blinding speed towards her. Behind her, Jessica was scowling, and Chani caught a scolding 'To soon, girl' on her lips before the fremen woman, too, moved. She was always mindful of the life she carried as she dodged the princess royal's attack. Only the brushing of the body shields signaled the attempt.
"Fear is the mind-killer, Irulan." Chani scolds, raising her own blade in salute. Irulan straightens and starts circling to the left, while Chani moves more to her right.
Now the real fight could begin.
"Chani, please." Paul sighs when, once again, he is faced with the moment his heart will walk away from him and be lost to the sands of his chosen home world.
She pauses in her movements but keeps her back to him. If she'd turn around now, she knew she'd break as definitely as the voice behind her had broken on the whisper of her name. If she turned around now, she'd fall into his arms and cling to him as he'd once cuddled to her as the worst of his nightmares plagued him, and he'd begged her to help him find a way to stop it all.
The rustling of fabrics answers her stony refusal to once again bow to the emperor's will, making her turn curious about the cause.
What she sees knocks all available breath from her lungs in awed surprise.
The emperor of the known universe, the terrifying one known as "Kwisatz Haderach" as "Mahdi" or "Lisan al Gaib" was on his knees to her, his head bowed in equal submission with his ducal signet ring and crysknife laying useless to him on the ground with the knife hilt facing away from him towards Chani as he waited for her reaction to all of this.
"What is this?" Chani asks, her hand dropping to the hilt of her own knife at her belt just in case this was somehow a trick. She had just bested his wife in open combat. The point of her knife carrying that flicked line of drawn blood from Chani's shallow slicing cut to Irulan's collarbone.
The attack was just enough to draw that deciding stain of first blood on the edge of her knife.
"An offering." Was the answer as the speaker kept his head lowered to her.
Chani gave a sharp intake of breath at the whisper, yet her hand stayed resting against the knife hilt at her side as she stepped a few paces closer. The royal harshness had bled from that voice almost fooling her into believing she was listening to words from the boy she'd once known and helped train among the sands of the deep desert. "For what?"
Usul's head lifts then. Slow but deliberate as he meets her eyes.
Almost in the same way he'd looked at her after slaying Jamis. "You told your lost warrior once you wish him to die with honor," Paul says. "you didn't want him to suffer in his last moments, but when he died it wasn't honorable or painless at all."
Chani felt wetness stinging her eyes then, but Usul wasn't finished talking. "he died in a pain so horrible it can't be put into words. He writhed like an animal caught in the deadliest trap of them all. One of his own making."
Again, Chani takes a raged breath, yet she can't find the will to ask him to stop talking.
"He traded that honor you wanted for him for a sip of water, giving rise to me and a war he was too weak even to attempt to stop."
"You did try." Chani argues.
"Not hard enough," Paul says, his voice painfully low as he admits this. Yet despite all their faults, Paul Atreides, Usul, they were worthy of you, Chani. Equals in ways I can never be." He confesses, and she can hear in his voice how each word pains him deeply to speak. Yet you hold my heart, my soul, my water. All of it is yours and only yours, as it had been with either of those other men."
"They are all you." Chani reminds
"Not fully." Paul continues to deny. "I still feel like them, but I'm not them….I'm something else."
Chani's knife hand twists enough for her to feel the kept water ring braided to the sugar wire cord tied tight to her wrist beneath her stillsuit sleeve. The smallest of the once-gifted collection of markers for the combat won water from Uslu's fight with Jamis that she'd held back from leaving with the others buried alongside the enshrined skull of Uslu's slain father.
She kept with the others she'd carried in remembrance of her mother and father.
Paul lifts his chin higher to expose his throat to her. The same spot she'd been told the Lisan al Gaib had sheathed his blade in the blood of his Harkonnen grandfather with the growled "You die like an animal" as the knife cut deep.
"Take his blade. Kill the animal that killed him. Avenge his death. End this."
"Killing you now won't end this war." Chani snaps her hand, fisting white-knuckled against her sides in quiet fury. He'd even consider asking this of her. "If anything, it will only mean far more senseless slaughter."
Paul lowers his head; his eyes closed now as he searches the blind time patches splintering out from this new point he'd forced into being with his decision to openly leave Irulan kneeling in an offering of yielded surrender at the sight of her own blood on the end of Chani's crysknife to follow her attacker out of the hall.
He had to find some way of proving himself, but only before he could, Chani gave a low sound of unease as her hands moved to rest on her stomach as she turned away from him.
Paul quickly sprang to his feet in worry. "Should I call for Otheym to..." But the wounded emperor pauses in his asking when his hands are suddenly guided to Chani's belly with a quitting "Ssshhh, Usul. Just feel."
The moving pulse of life under his hand drives him back to his knees before her. Not as strong as he feels with Alia, but there and real against his palm.
After a few absorbing moments, Paul finally manages to regain his voice. "I'll make you a paradise world." The awed father promises in a low whisper to the child under his hand.
"Arrakis is already paradise..." Chani argued
"I wasn't talking of Arrakis." Paul corrects.
Chani opened her mouth to answer back, but she quieted at the deep sighing breath from the man on his knees before her.
The fremen woman's eyes lifted then caught movement in the sliver of the opened doorway behind the turned back of the kneeling emperor.
Jessica's rich blue eyes narrowed to near slits in her fury at the sight before her as Chani's hands slid even more into Paul's hair, with his head nuzzling even softer against the growth of their child in her belly.
"I should have married you."
Chani watches as the listening reverend's mother physically staggers back several steps at her son's so softly spoken words.
The awe, the pain, the flashes of remembrance—all of it flickered so clearly over the other woman's expression as she reeled backward, her hand still held tightly around the door handle in support.
"I should have been strong enough to have chosen you," Paul repeats, his eyes wet with tears once more when Chani frees one hand from his hair to draw his chin up to look into his eyes. "I'm so sorry, Chani."
More movement outside the door.
Irulan is now coming down the passageway in search of her husband, no doubt.
"Mother?" the seeking royal asks at Jessica's wavering guarding of the opened doorway.
"Chani." Paul breathes, redirecting the angered fremen woman's gaze as slowly her duke climbs back to his feet. "Chani." He repeats, one hand still cupped to her stomach. The other moved to cup along her jaw, leaning a fraction of an inch closer in quiet, asking as his eyes flick between his desert woman's eyes and her soft lips.
"Mother, have you seen…."
Her question stops when Chani's mouth presses to Paul's over Jessica's shoulder in what, even seen at a distance, was a truly soul-combing kiss.