Without Rhythm

Heinali dragged herself free from the tumble of stones that had crushed her Fremen sietch-mates. She blinked her blue in blue eyes against the burning glare of the sun, then swept them over the expanse of baking sand before her.

The basin below appeared the same as it had before the Harkonnen attack. Their explosives had left the oval ring of rock around the basin largely intact, with dark smoke belching from several craters along its length. Perhaps ten kilometers of smooth sand filled the basin’s interior.

The water from her stillsuit’s catchtube was brackish and scarcely enough to whet her tongue. No surprise that the suit wasn’t functional after a cavern collapsed on her. The Fremen with her, two of them her husbands, hadn’t been lucky enough to dig their way out at all.

She recalled where she was in the deep desert and calculated her chances of survival, alone and with a damaged stillsuit. Bleak. She lifted her hand to shield her eyes, felt a sharp pain stab her left side, and cut that already dismal assessment in half.

“Stupid naib,” she muttered. The raid had ended in disaster despite their planning and initial success, and that failure rested on her shoulders. Stedding was certain to challenge her if she somehow managed to survive; he had been the sand in her boot since she took leadership of sietch Duaman. This time she had no excuse. The raid had cost them ten of their finest warriors, including her husbands Arak and the thoughtful, quiet Cueshma.

The corners of her eyes trembled, and she blinked away the emotion. Now was no time to wallow in her failures, much less give water to the dead.

She made one final check of her remaining supplies. Only the maker hooks had survived from her fremkit. Her maula pistol and crysknife were still intact. She found no other injuries beyond a cracked rib, but that was bad enough. Even if she made it out of the basin to summon a worm, she didn’t know if she could mount one. She briefly considered digging to recover more equipment, maybe even replace her stillsuit, but her brothers were beneath more than two meters of rock. She would waste most of her strength and water reaching them.

Injured, no water, only a handful of supplies and hundreds of kilometers to the nearest sietch. Despair threatened to swallow her.

No. She just had to think about the next step to survive. Then the next. And the next and the next until she reached safety, or she died.

So. Step one, get out of the basin and onto the bled. She turned in a slow circle, shoving the brief stab of pain in her side to the back of her mind, and searched for the best route over the walls of rock enclosing the basin. Then her eyes caught the glint of metal nearby.

She climbed the slope until she reached a small metal cylinder the size of her fist. An unexploded Harkonnen bomb. It had no writing on it, and she couldn’t guess the type of explosive. If such a small device had caused the cave-in and the other craters around the basin, it might even be an atomic. She reached down to pick it up when a sheet of static electricity sparkled across the basin below her.

Worm sign. In here? She watched the ground ripple as the creature burrowed through the sand and was gone. It was not a large worm. If it was trapped in this small bowl of rock, then it was stunted, no more than three or four meters at most. No use for transportation.

She stopped, hefted the maker hooks at her belt, glanced over at the unexploded bomb. An idea began to coalesce in her mind.

An utterly insane idea. How could it hope to work?

Her sietch had named her Heinali, the manpusher wind, for her inspired, sometimes reckless, often crazy plans. Fremen walked without rhythm, but she lived without it. She would need to be the heinali if she was to survive.

*****

“Bring me the Beast!” Arak screamed into the hissing sandstorm outside the cavern mouth. “I pray Rabban himself comes at us. My crysknife will taste his blood!”

Cueshma appeared next to him, fluid and silent as a firelit shadow, and put a hand on Arak’s arm. His voice barely rose over the rumble of the wind. “While you waste water distracting him with your bladeplay, I’ll slit his throat from behind.”

Arak roared with laughter and clasped the shorter man by the shoulders. “As long as the Beast dies, it matters not who wields the blade.” He turned back to the storm. Grasping the necklace of water rings at his neck, he jingled them at the unseen enemy. “Harkonnens! Come to us! My naib thirsts for your water!”

Heinali smiled behind her stillsuit hood as she listened to her brother-husbands banter. Arak continued to scream taunts, wasting water with each shout, but his small lack of water discipline was forgivable after their destruction of three harvesters this morning. The Harkonnens would be beyond enraged.

“Lucky even a little wind like this scares them from their ornithopters,” Jakus, one of the oldest in the raid party, said in a voice like gravel. The gray-haired Fremen shot a shaded look at Cueshma as he spoke. The corner of Cueshma’s mouth curled in a smirk and he crouched beside the cavern wall, but he gave no other reaction.

Heilani chuckled. The tribe didn’t dare offend her after she’d bested three challengers in one day to lead the sietch, and none would cross Arak, who wore her water-rings as a wife would to silence those that begged him to challenge her. But they had named her other husband “little wind” as a blatant insult. Cueshma took the barb with pride, becoming even more stealthy and invisible like his namesake. Heinali loved him for that, and more. The sietch assumed the boisterous and powerful Arak was her favored husband, but for every night he lay with her, Cueshma spent five.

The storm subsided for a moment, and a rhythmic thrumming whispered in the brief quiet. Heinali stood and stepped past Arak to the cavern mouth. The wind-blown sand scraped over her stillsuit, whipped her cape around her. “When you last spotted the Harkonnens, how far behind us were they?”

“Ten kilometers, my love,” Cueshma said, sketching a rough map of the basin they were in with his finger in the dust.

Ten kilometers. Even the water-fat Harkonnens could have crossed that distance by now. The wind picked up, but the steady beat was still audible, and growing louder.

“Ornithopters,” Heinali whispered, just as the first flashes and rumbles of explosions filled the cave. The Harkonnens, though it took ages, would eventually change tactics. She had underestimated them.

Heinali spun to face the Fremen deeper in the cave. “Get back!” She shouted as the explosions rushed closer. “Ornithopters! Get….”

*****

The soft sand whispered under her boots. Waves of heat twisted the stretch of desert and rock hills in front of her. Her broken heel pumps whined and sputtered with every step. Her calves ached from the unfamiliar rhythmic stride as she marched deeper into the open basin.

The final moments with her husbands, with her Fremen brothers, haunted her now that she had finished her preparations. Now that she tried to call the stunted sandworm by walking rhythmically across open sand, which railed against everything she had learned since birth. If it was her time to die, she could think of nothing more appropriate than by defying her Fremen training.

She smelled the sharp odor of flint and cinnamon, with a sour, almost sickly undertone, before she saw the wormsign and felt the ground tremble with its approach. The stunted worm even smelled immature and unnatural, stoking renewed concerns about her plan.

There was no time to back down now. She stood still for a handful of heartbeats, then dropped to her stomach and rolled a few meters to the side. She pulled herself into a crouch, held the maker hooks ready and waited.

The sandworm broke the surface ten meters in front of her. She’d seen every sort of worm in her years, ridden behemoths that could swallow a carryall whole. She couldn’t defile Shai-Hulud by calling this thing by the name of the One God. It was four meters long at most, its body several shades lighter than the darkened plates protecting the Old Men of the Desert. Crooked and haphazard rows of teeth the size of her pinky studded its maw.

But its undulating body drove it forward with incredible speed, as swift as any worm she’d seen in the bled.

She held her body taut. The worm was short but fast. She didn’t just have to hook it as it passed, she had to aim for one of the last few segments. The worm might dive immediately and return underneath her, or not at all.

The worm passed two meters to her right. Heinali leapt forward. The maker hooks caught the leading edge of one of its last segments and held. It yanked her off her feet, and her entire side erupted in agony.

She tasted blood in her mouth. Her body bounced against the sand as the worm thrashed. It was energetic, powerful despite its size. Each twist wrenched her side and ground her broken bones together. The world narrowed, darkened, and she clung to consciousness against the increasing pain in her side. Her sense of time faded. The agony and violence of the worm dragging her seemed to go on for an eternity.

The maker hooks dug deeper, and she twisted to widen the opening between the plates. Pale pink flesh pulsed underneath. She grabbed the makeshift contraption at her side, the Harkonnen bomb with her maula pistol tied crudely to it. Her rib was a spear of constant pain now. She tried and failed to stop a scream as she crammed the bomb into the exposed flesh between ring segments. Then she let go of the hook.

She tumbled to a stop, jarring her whole body. She couldn’t breathe without pain. But she kept hold of the rope in her fingers as the worm sped away from her. At the last moment she remembered to avert her gaze in case the device was a stone burner – the cursed Harkonnens were not above even the worst atrocities – and the line snapped tight. The pistol made a small popping sound.

The shockwave from the explosion washed over her. Grit and chips of rock bounced against her suit. A hideous screech replaced the explosion, followed by the sound of the worm plunging beneath the sand.

She waited a few more seconds, then looked up. The last two segments of the worm thrashed weakly on the sand, the exposed flesh of the stump charred and black. As she drew herself to her feet, its movements slowed, then stopped. The cauterized flesh fell away, and the worm’s body began to fall apart. Its interior melted away into sandtrout that squirmed their way out of the discarded worm carapace.

By Shai-Hulud, it worked. She stumbled to the remains of the tail and collapsed to her knees. Scooping up the nearest sandtrout, she rolled it into a tube and lifted it to her mouth. The sweet, pungent mélange syrup it secreted filled her mouth. It was almost like being a child again. Every cell in her body screamed for the liquid and the spice essence from the little maker. Her very blood boiled with power inside her as she gulped. Her thirst faded, even the pain in her side receded. She took her cloak off and used it as a bag, grabbing several more sandtrout before they escaped.

She felt reinvigorated. The sandtrout would buy her two, maybe even three days without water. She would still have to tend to her injuries as soon as possible before she made her way to the bled, but now her fight to survive had become a small measure easier.

The sky cracked with lightning.

Worm sign. She dropped the sandtrout and looked up. Flashes of lightning climbed the still-clear but darkening sky, and the sands trembled beneath her. Her confusion lasted only a moment as her instincts took hold. The stunted worm had dragged her the entire length of the basin, nearly ten kilometers. The Harkonnen attack had leveled part of the rock wall that had been hidden from the other end of the basin. The shattered expanse of rock opened to the broad, pristine bled.

A wave of sand crested the horizon as a sandworm barreled toward her. The massive tremor caused by her explosion was irresistible. Static arcs climbed the sky from its passage, and the desert wind surged before it.

She stood, surprising herself with her renewed vigor. The head of the sandworm split through the surface and her breath stopped. A maw as big as she had ever seen, bigger than she’d ever seen. Row upon row of teeth ready to consume the world. Its exhalation of cinnamon spice and heat filled the wind that roared around her. Truly a God monster.

This was Shai-Hulud.

The small, pale worm, even shorter than before with its tail sheared off, rose out of the sand and charged at the behemoth. It bobbed several times in the seething sands, then disappeared into the yawning maw of Shai-Hulud. As if the Old Man of the Desert wished to destroy this blasphemy before it escaped its prison.

The sight of the sandworm, rushing toward her with mouth open wide, filled Heinali with an awe she had never experienced in her life. She wept, the tears previously unshed for her husbands and sietch-mates now loosed by the God of the Desert before her. A creature of legend that songs could be sung of, that she had called. That she would have been proud to ride. That was the only fitting way for her story to end.

She strode toward it, her boots falling into the familiar slide-drag-step without rhythm that was her life. Sand surrounded her, the open mouth of Shai-Hulud blotted out the sky, and she let its mélange breath and the roar of its fires within blanket her.

Arak and Cueshma stood beside her. Heinali opened her arms, taking both by the hands, and together as one they walked without rhythm into their God.