the shoulder of perseus

“This must be a great relief to you, after the dust of Arrakis.”

The young man’s tone of voice is needlessly slinky, as if to compensate for his prisoner giving no greeting. The stranger youth steps down into the pool of water in a single impatient stride, leaving behind a shed garment of Harkonnen blue.

The whole gesture is meant to dazzle, and it does — a glittering pool of water fit to bathe ten men in or to drown them, perfumed with agarwood and pine. Only the armed attendants in full uniform distinguish it from a pleasure spa. The waters of Giedi Prime are little to envy. The planet’s artificial waterways are so choked with pollutants that they must be heavily processed before they are conveyed to the homes of the rich, while the poor must wash and cook with run-off tainted by centuries of heavy industry. It wouldn’t be an easy thing to remediate such conditions, but it could be done. Just the same, House Harkonnen is content to sit atop a heap of filth so long as it can perfume itself in roses.

Paul raises his head with difficulty. When he’d been manhandled into the bath his captors had held his head under the water to revive him, and his wet hair clings to his forehead. “I was born on Caladan. We bathed in the seas there.”

“Of course you did.”

The youth advances toward him through the water, sending a small tide spilling over his knees. Paul has been stripped to the skin and flung into an unfamiliar element — in truth it has been so long since Caladan, and the lap and tug of scented water against his skin is a sensory intrusion. Stripped and bathed in preparation for an audience with the Baron — the horrors awaiting Paul there still pale to the hazards surrounding him now as he is, stupefied and numbed in this falsely congenial place.

Stupefied, numbed — Paul cannot see what lies head of him now, the way is obscured, and the path is submerged beneath a storm of uncertainty. He has seen himself die a thousand times, expiring from thirst or racked by poison, but he has never seen himself drowned — never limp in a basin of opal-blue marble with a knife in his back.

Where this man might be hiding a knife is another question, but a naked man is not necessarily unarmed. The intruder can be little older than Paul himself is, but he has the soft fullness of muscle earned through the gymnasium and the arena, with well-shaped shoulders and broad unmarked breast. His dark hair snakes over his shoulder in an oiled love-lock, and his nipples are pierced with silver bars. A slave from the pleasure quarter, perhaps, or a pampered gladiator, sent to end Paul’s life in high style.

He crosses to the far wall and takes up the silver dipper there, calling out to Paul gaily: “Come on now, cher cousin, is this any way to greet your intended? If your mother wanted to produce a worthy male heir for her lord’s posterity, she should have tried harder.”

All at once the knowledge strikes Paul like dry lightning. This is Feyd-Rautha, na-Baron Harkonnen — some lesser son lifted up from a lower branch on the present baron’s family tree, and given the Harkonnen name to wear. He does not know who Jessica’s father is, he cannot — he extends him the title of cousin only as a banal courtesy, from one heir to another.

In another life they might have joined together in a mating, united for a few moments in the struggle of coition — they might have conceived some fearful thing in their conjunction, and Paul would have carried it in his body until such a time as the Bene Gesserit sisters brought the child forth into the light and turned it to their purpose.

Paul considers his resources. All the instruments of his youth have prepared his nerves and muscles — the Bene Gesserit way has prepared his hand and eye and his every slightest reflex toward a single end. He is disoriented but not immobilized, he is shaken but not in shock, he can restore equilibrium to his body by steady effort and rally — but to overtake bare-handed an opponent with the advantage of size, only to be met by a squadron’s worth of armed men?

The skin of his chest is pebbled with gooseflesh despite the warmth of the water; Paul lets his arms fall to his sides, pausing for a moment to martial his breathing. He stretches out his legs, as muscle control returns and the pins-and-needles feeling ebbs away — but some numbing agent lingers in his mind, an elacca-resin derivative by the dull ache that lingers behind his eyes.

Unimpressed by Paul’s lack of response to these goads, Feyd-Rautha calls out again. It seems a gadfly has come to buzz in his ear, but gadflies do bite. “I thought Fremen rabble were jealous of their water. Are you not grateful for these riches? Do I need to scrub you myself?”

In demonstration, Feyd-Rautha pours a dipperful of water over his own bare chest; the boast in it is unmistakable. He carries himself as if he is vain of his body, and he might well be in comparison to his brother’s brute strength — that fact has disseminated widely among the Fremen, and they reserve choice words for the coarseness of their outworld oppressor. But they say even the Baron was once fit and handsome, that his suspensors permit him the same grace he had once enjoyed as an unencumbered youth. The na-Baron is beautiful, and his beauty is marked by unmistakable arrogance.

The forest of significant minutiae from which to draw is narrowed somewhat by the state of nakedness in which they find one another. There are signs in how a man dresses and how he carries himself, from the length of his hair to the polish on his boots, all of which combine to form a full biography. But there is no scarcity of detail here either, from the silver nipple-rings to the painted nails on his small well-tended feet. The sum of these things gives an impression of vanity and discontent, and of libidinous cruelty — all that and he talks too much, tossing idle remarks when he could be silent. Paul looks for some trace of shared lineage in that face — feeling along the edges of a familiar thing as if waiting for an old memory to sound out like a chime.

This is the face that has eluded him in his dreams. Feyd-Rautha has hooded, sullen eyes, and there is something vulgar in the fullness of his mouth. Everything that he is has been fed by centuries of Harkonnen plunder — he is soft with water, careless of all the riches he enjoys, and plainly kept for his beauty as much as for his ferocity. His trunk and limbs are beautifully muscled, but they are the smooth carved planes of the sparring room and not the hard-won muscle of the sietch.

Feyd-Rautha knows he is being assessed, and glories in it, rinsing imaginary dust from his shining limbs with deliberate slowness. All the while, his back is toward the door— Paul notes the guardsmen’s uneasy posture, their reluctance to approach, as if they are torn between obligation and avoidance. They don’t know what they’re about to see, and they are not yet sure if they ought to see it.

“Come, cousin, wash the dust from your hair and talk to me. Is it true they call you mouse?”

Paul draws a wet hand over his face, wiping the grit from his cheeks, but he does not close his eyes. His nose is crusted with blood from where the stillsuit rig had been torn away. He thinks of Chani, how the girl had fought for him with tooth and nail — he thinks of Stilgar, dead now and beyond reclaiming. His water will never return to his people, like rain falling on the sea. How long has it been since Paul has seen a rainstorm, or a salt-sea wave? From somewhere far-off comes the eerie sound of strings.

“Have you come to collect me?” Paul says.

“To greet you. You could fight me now, of course — I’d welcome that, I’ve never killed a man in water.”

“You should have introduced yourself sooner. We could have become friends.” Paul responds in a low tone, calling on the Voice to add an edge of suggestiveness that trembles in his throat. In order to succeed it must be modulated to to suit the na-Baron’s character, but what Paul knows of his character is so little that he is unsure in his approach.

Feyd-Rautha blinks at first, then snorts with laughter.

“Did your witch mother teach you that? There’ll be no women’s wiles here, little Atreides mouse, and the guards are all quite deaf, so you shouldn’t try it on them. You and I can speak frankly with each other.” Feyd-Rautha approaches him and drops to one knee. Paul doesn’t startle — the motion is telegraphed well in advance — but the water washes against him as if he is a stone. “It’s a shame you were born a boy, I’d have liked to have bedded you.”

“Will that stop you?” Without the persuasive lacquer of the Voice over top of it, Paul sounds tired even to himself, fatigued and hoarse despite the moisture-rich air. Some things every Bene Gesserit novice is trained to endure; Jessica had been no exception, and now Paul. Fresh horrors.

Paul turns his head. Feyd’s smile is almost benign — compared to the naked brutality of brother and uncle he must think himself merciful, even charming.

“It’s my dear uncle you should be worried about. His tastes are less gentle than mine.”

Feyd-Rautha puts a hand out to Paul’s cheek. His sullen eyes flare with authentic amusement, as if he is letting him in on some giddy secret kept between boys.

“The old monster knows what he wants. You will be searched quite thoroughly, of course, for anything interesting.” Feyd’s finger traces down Paul’s chin, past the ledge of his jaw to follow the sinews of his neck. “But there are many things to amuse you in my uncle’s chamber — poisoned blades and projectiles. He never has the same boy twice, and he prefers to dispatch them himself. I’ve seen these clever devices of his, and I know where they are hidden. Do you understand me?”

Paul takes him by the upper arm, exerting a steady pressure with the very tips of his fingers. He could lever himself upright, forcing past the unsteadiness in his limbs to demonstrate his strength, but he does not.

“And after that?” Paul says.

“Then we are on kanly terms again, cousin.”