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He offers her as a wedding gift three truths. She learns them well over the years.
The fourth he keeps a secret; she learns it all the same.
He hates her.
He hates her.
The morning of the fight her father spoke to her through a silken screen.
‘He will die,’ he said. ‘You will not mourn him. You do not even know him.’
Irulan picked out the shape of her father’s silhouette. She imagined stabbing a needlepoint around the shadow. Leaking light. Stitching him inside a silken shroud.
She wanted to tell her father that he had misspoken. That he had missed a word.
You do not even know him.
Yet.
Even then she knew that there would be days she wished him dead. A crumpled black heap of a thing; some creature tentacled in blood.
Sometimes she thinks of it spreading. She thinks of the sand slowly bleaching in the sun, dark spots burnt white as the sky.
Today she is peeling a fig as she thinks it. She is watching her husband as she thinks it. She is watching Paul and peeling a fig and making a low sound through her teeth as wetness seeps from the flesh onto her fingers.
A flicker at his temple. The vein there, beating.
Beside her plate, a knife. Her eyes trip toward the blade. She lifts a fingertip to her mouth, tastes fig-juice and wonders if it will stain her skin. Her lips. (She thinks of sand as she drinks. She thinks of sand, bones bleaching.)
When she looks away from her knife he catches it: the snag of her gaze between blade and brow.
Behind her metal she blinks.
She takes the knife. She holds down the fig. Clean in two, she cuts it.
Their wedding night was a cold, soulless thing. Shuttered glass, moonlit silk. Cool conversation; his whore run off into the desert. Irulan watched the drapes turn in the small wind, and wished to be somewhere else.
These thoughts are private. These thoughts she keeps even from herself.
She knows her worth. She knows her trade. They have spent her lifetime (their own, and those before them) teaching it. Training and distilling it. She wears it as armour, as another of her chains.
See them catch the sun.
See them turn, ring-lit by the furnace of another day sent spinning into dark.
That is where he often finds her: in the dark.
He orders the lamps extinguished. He watches them gutter, sputter. He licks his thumb as if he will be the one to put out the final flame.
She looks from his thumb to his mouth. She does not look into his eyes. Just his mouth; the tender pink of a tongue she well knows the barb of. Soft as it looks, dormant as a sleeping bear behind his teeth. She looks away as he pulls it free. (Wet, wet—and she wants the salt of it, damn him. She wants the salt of it to leach away the wine she drank at dinner.)
Between them, the air prickles.
Her gown, gossamer-thin, damp with sweat. Translucent where his eyes most linger: her collarbone, the sloping line of her hip. His gaze tracks her body like needlework, chain-links fished together with a small beaten hook.
Stab: a stitch between her third and fourth rib.
The valley where her heart beats. Stab. Stab.
A point pushed in, pulled through.
She was taught to find a thread. To find it with her fingers. To trace from its end toward its beginning. To find it, seek it, unravel it.
Paul is a thread. Paul is more than a thread. He is a reel, a loom: endless, spinning. Her fingers ravelled, red with cuts, thick with bruises.
She will never unspool his end. She will never find his beginning. He is timeless, he is all things. Like her House, her caste, her creed, he deals in centuries.
The room is cold. An orangeskin snake; the fruit spoiled on the sill.
She picks a piece, feels it wilt between her fingers; the day’s heat not yet dead. The hinge of her jaw opening, yearning to click back shut.
Metal charms clink and twist.
The fruit clags against her tongue. She does not bite. She lets it lay there, dormant, before she presses closed her lips.
‘You are smiling.’
He says it like it is an improper thing. Unnatural. (Happiness on your cheeks; how dare you. That too must be a secret thing—to him, to you.)
She masters her face, lifts a fingertip to adjust a single hanging charm. ‘You told me you never look at me. You told me you never think of me.’
‘Were they the truths I offered you, Irulan?’
Her name is a whip-sting in his mouth. Lashing free.
She feels it settle on her skin. ‘No,’ she says. ‘Your truths were three.’
‘Tell me.’
‘You have forgotten them.’
He rankles at the flat tone to her almost-question. His lip curls. ‘Remind me, wife.’
‘You have spoken the first already,’ she says.
‘Repeat it.’
‘I am your wife.’
He inclines his head. ‘Yes.’
‘You are my husband.’
‘Yes.’
Irulan extends a thumb, two fingers; straight and true. ‘You will never love me.’
‘I will never love you.’
‘Say it again.’
His lip curls, falters. ‘I will never love you.’
On their wedding night she said that Chani could come back.
His look told her he would break her neck if she said again his beloved’s name.
She nodded silently. She did not say it. She breathed it: into her pillow, the pale dawn-tides that rose and fell.
She breathed it low as you would a prayer.
Inside her mouth it rang like a curse.
Like a battle-cry. A chant for blood.
They sit like statues in a tomb.
He is annoyed: that she gave him a command, that he followed it. He wears it the same way he wears his arrogance. In the slow, black tar of his bruised eyes. The way they track heavy on the edge of her chair, the smallest chain that rings her throat.
She puts her hand there. His gaze leaps back as if she has burned him.
‘You will never love me.’
His gaze: blueish, brutal. He stabs her with it.
‘Never,’ he says.
She nods. She fights another smile. She says, ‘Never.’
He did not die. She did not mourn him. Her father knelt and kissed the ring.
In front of her time and space unfolded. It found its legs, its wings. Bore itself onto the breeze like dust off the spice fields. She breathed it in.
Before his truths she knew her own. She knew it was not a choice: the shape her life would take. She knew it never was a choice. She knew her life was beaten metal, constrained and channelled by another’s hands.
Its edges, at least.
The flame at its centre, she learned long ago she’d have to tend. The flame that feeds and smokes, that softens metal till it melds a way she might yet try to bend.
So—she would marry the duke. He would plant a seed and she would bear the fruit. Hold it in her hands and offer it to him: steaming, breathing.
A while after the wedding he told her there would be no seed, no fruit.
This was not a choice. This was her fate: an empty womb, his loveless hate.
The same night, drift-asleep, he called her by a different name. He whispered it into the dark like he had treasure caught in his teeth: Chani, Chani. Cradled there, a new-born’s head held soft in a mother’s palm.
Irulan opened her hand.
She opened her hand across his cheek.
If only her hand were bigger; she’d have crushed his skull with it.
In the cold room they sit unspeaking.
Her breath fogs inside her throat. Her skin like ice beneath her sleeping gown. She shifts in her chair and blanches hot across her chest to feel the grit of a nipple hard against the silk.
He makes a small, dark sound. It is her turn to seethe.
Her body betrays her, now as always. Her skull might as well be glass for all it hides from him.
‘Say it again.’
He makes another sound, lower now. ‘Irulan.’
‘No,’ she says. ‘Not that.’
‘Irulan.’
Her name he rakes across her ribs. He takes it like the knife of his gaze and cuts her with it. He takes his time. He moves it down. He slides it deep. She is a mess of blood and butchered dream-memories, choice and fate, a womb that aches. He pulls her name away. He taunts her with it.
‘Not that,’ she says. ‘Stop. Not that.’
Against the chairback her spine extends, pulls taut; a thread about to snap. She closes her eyes. She does not need them open to see the thread around his fingers. Its beginning spooled around its end. Like puppet-strings, shadows thrown against a flame-struck wall. His thumb, her wrist; the point of her chin, the blunt top of his first knuckle as he says her name again.
He never used to say it. He called her princess. He called her lady. The eldest daughter; an empty vessel, a useful key. He did not look at her, but through her. As if she were air, or water. Something to be sifted through, poured into pots. Kept somewhere dark and cool.
She let him keep his Chani. (She told herself she let him; at night, when the dark was deep and she wanted to drown the girl inside it.)
She wondered if one day a woman might find her own: whore, that is. A man kept in a gilded cage, brought out on hands and knees. Kept there, motionless. Head up, mouth open. (She sold herself this dream; at night, when the dark was deep and she wanted to drown the girl inside it. The girl—his whore, herself.)
Let her be air then.
Water.
‘Like that, Irulan?’
She shakes her head. She says, ‘No. No.’
Her gown is gone, rent at the shoulder by a hand (her own, and one that moved dreamlike without her bidding). Moonlight frosts her skin, the ripped silk gathered at her feet. Inside her chair she flows like something half-wild, caught, waiting to be freed.
Water, air.
She blinks.
Opposite, an empty throne.
He is halfway toward her, shoeless feet silent on the stone floor. He stops in front of her chair. Her eyes light on a slip of skin bared by his tunic. The loose, dusty folds pushed away from his throat by his own hungry hand. He is hunting hers with his eyes. He is hunting it in the slippery light.
‘Let me see it.’
She turns her head away. She ducks her chin. She says, ‘No. No.’
‘Let me,’ he says—and the voice is thicker in his naked throat, tempered in its hollow, snapping at its leash. ‘Let me see it.’
He made the mark in the early days. The glory days. Reliving the blood he had spilt, the bride he had won.
Black tattoos and drumbeat trouncing through her skull. His fingers on it in the after: fight, win, fuck, flee. Spinning it as a prism, of light, of matter, all of her housed in bone thin enough to chip and break.
The ruin of her in his hands. The promise of it.
She saw Harkonnen in his eyes for a moment. She saw a lick of bloodlust that he blunted with a bite low on her throat.
She kept the bruise alive for days. Weeks. She mapped it with a fingertip and gouged it deeper with her nail when it began to fade.
When she woke it was livid. Red against her skin, a ragged oval she carried like a charm.
It never faded.
It never went.
He pretended that he didn’t like it—her throat bare, the mouth-shaped bruise. Proof of him on her. But when he saw it water crept across his tongue. Pooled and flooded. He never told her so; she just saw him swallow. Hasty, thick.
In the cold room she fights him. Stands up from her chair and flees the hot hunger of his hands.
Paul is a thread. Paul is a reel, a loom. He is timeless, he is all things. He is a man too. Flared lip and lust-flat eyes burning to see something branded with his mark. Anything. Arid waste, spice-flecked sky; the freckle of his teeth burrowed into her throat.
His fingers find her hair. She grips his knuckles, makes a crushing grip. He pulls roughly and she falls against him, strands of gold pulled taut around his fist as he rasps, ‘Let me see. Let me look.’
He drinks her with his eyes and she tells herself he is a liar. A liar who looks at her. Who thinks of her. A liar who sells false truths. Then his lips touch the red mark, the ragged charm. The proof of him on her. His lips, the damp wash of his breath, and she folds like a cut flower carried off from shade into sun.
‘Say it.’
Her voice is pillow-soft, small and secret. ‘I am your wife.’
‘Yes.’
‘You are my husband.’
He exhales: a hard, messy smear against her skin. His nose crooked, bunched into her flesh. He bares his teeth but does not bite. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Yes.’
‘You will never—’
She swallows her words. She swallows her words around the thumb he has pushed into her mouth. His thumb, citrus-sticky on her tongue. Sucked clean till she gets to salt. His salt, his skin. Her eyes roll, and she buries the small part of herself that recoils at her own want.
The small part she buried long ago.
The part she buries and reburies till she’s unsure it was ever a part of her body to begin with. Perhaps it never was; some stray, alien cog that should have been burned with the last of the thinking machines long before she was ever born.
He takes her to bed. She is lax already. Draped to his liking. For his taking. Loose-limbed on sheets that stick to her skin.
She knows her worth. She knows her trade. She wears it as armour, as another of her chains. Watch: how he strikes them loose. How she sheds scales and leaves them haphazard across the stone floor. (Watch, too, how she will find them in the pale dawn-tides when he still is sleeping; watch how she never lost them in the first place.)
But, now—she is naked. Her leg bent; his body framed by it. She is air. She is water. Let her be it, then. Let him drink it.
He does. He drinks.
He opens his mouth and finds wet heat. She rolls her hips inside his hands and he lets his face be moved by it. By her. His tongue roving, ravelling; the spool of her guts tightening to a fist as he scopes her cunt with his mouth, his fingers. She sinks a hand into his hair. When she pulls he whimpers, and she thinks: you are a man, Paul Atreides, you are just a man, oh, a god, a man, a god, oh—because as she pulls now he is pushing. Her, the universe, pushing, pushing, till they are teetering on an edge that falls into blackness, into star-picked nothingness.
She starts to fall. She wants to fall so much she aches for it. For her body to warp itself to ruin. Let water dash against the rocks. Wind itself to nothing.
He pulls her back, then. He pulls her back and she hates him. She remembers that she hates him. That he never looks at her. That he never thinks of her. False god, keeper of her empty womb even as she flows free across his fingers.
She finds his cheek. Her nails gouge in, deep. Drag down and back as he catches her wrist and forces it down onto the bed. She sinks back, surges up; lean and lithe, he bundles her till she’s facedown on her belly. Her thigh painted with him already; spit and seed, salt and honey. Let her gnaw it. Let it plummet into her body, take root. Let it swell and rot. He grinds his hand across the wet agony of her open mouth instead, then swathes his cock with his palm. He pauses then. He puts his mouth against her ear and whispers, ‘I will never love you.’
‘Never,’ she spits, even as she arches her back and waits for him. Aches.
He pushes inside. He stills and shivers and says soft as a prayer, a curse: ‘Never, Irulan. Never.’
He will die, her father said. You will not mourn him.
For a time even she believed it.
When he staggered. When he stood with blood on his head and a blade buried in his belly. The gilded rattle of his mother’s chains; a collective breath. Lungs wringing as it held, as he beckoned.
So—he did not die. She did not mourn him. Her father knelt and kissed the ring.
On the ground another creature curled and died.
She watched it: the ruined armour, the blood-spread on the sand. Dark spots, bones bleaching.
When she looked up she saw the duke that she would marry. The duke, her husband, a hundred things and hatred haloed in his eyes. Planetary, spinning. The gilded fringe of her cowl moved with her breath.
He did not die. She did not mourn him. She did not even know him.
Yet.
She knelt and kissed the ring.
He gave the gift. She guarded it. She made for it a different kind of gilded fringe. Of bone and blood; the wingbeat that nests between her ribs.
At the heart of all things there is truth.
Truth lies at the heart of all things.
Around this heart, a body. Bent and bruised to fit the shape of fate and will.
Three truths make them. The fourth a secret. The fifth the same.
See how hate is housed the same as love. See how it makes for a home the shadows of the heart.
Her own heart, beating.
After she opened her hand across his cheek he did not wake. He stayed sleeping. She leant on an elbow to watch him. Learn him.
His mouth moving.
The treasure in his teeth.
She put her lips to his ear and she said her name again and again. Her own name: Irulan, Irulan. A small beaten hook pushed in, pulled through.
In the morning he looked at her, a bitter orange turning in his hand. Housed between his fingers like something small, feathered. Slippery skin, brittle bones; a twist and he would sever it with a thumb.
She watched to see if it he would eat it. Or let it rot.
He held her gaze; cool, indifferent. Somehow less a stranger.
He turned the fruit again.
The room is cold. His skin is hot. It glides across her own like the desert; dry, listless as a dying breath.
Against her breast, his cheek. The heavy dome of his head, and her hand a pale crown ringing his dark hair. She feathers her fingers. She thinks of the bitter orange, the pulp of flesh, the threat of his thumb. The easy way it could all be torn to pieces.
‘Paul,’ she says.
He does not move his head. ‘Wife?’
‘Say it again.’
Her heart a keyless drum beneath his head, an echo in his ear. ‘I will never—’
Liar, she wants to say. Liar.
Instead—
‘No,’ she says. ‘Not that.’
He shifts into her palm. He leans into the soothing wash of it. He lets his lips go lax against her skin. He says, ‘Irulan. Irulan.’